Harish Navuluru

We have to keep the legal aspects in mind. When we make an offer of intent to a candidate, he resigns from his job and gets ready to join us. Making multiple offers just like a candidate does with multiple offers is just not possible for any organization.

Legally speaking, the organization would HAVE to take him on rolls irrespective of whether the other candidate joined or not. Consider this example, where there is an offered candidates and there is a back up candidate. If the organization makes an offer to both of them, and the first choice candidate joins, the organization would be forced to absorb the back up candidate too. Certainly not a good problem to have, as far as organization dynamics, resource utilization and financial aspects of the project(s) are concerned.

Organizations deal with this scenario in various ways. A good way is to study the hiring metrics and the hiring funnel very carefully and have adequate number of candidates at various stages, so that in the eventuality of an offer decline or a no-show, the recruitment team does not have to go back to the drawing rooms. This stage is called RTMO-Ready To Make Offer stage, where all levels of interviews are done with and candidates are kept ready at the Offer stage. As and when there is a decline, the back up candidate is given a formal offer stage called RTMO stage. This reduces the gestation time for on-boarding compared to the regular hiring time needed to get a resource on-board.

Having said that, it is not possible for organizations to do much in these scenario except to take steps like the above to minimize the impact of a no-show or an offer decline. This is because, irrespective of how robust an organization we are or how strongly process-oriented we are, there is a human element in the process which is beyond the scope of all these external factors.