Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership

Being late to make an offer guarantees you an ugly prom date! And the only way to ensure that you have a chance to get the most attractive date is to be the first one to make an offer.

And the recruiting world is no different. In our function, it’s also true that being among the earliest to make an offer may be the only way to successfully hire the best candidates away from your talent competitors. Being the first company to offer is essential because the best candidates are extremely decisive.

So rather than waiting for a “better offer” that may never come, your top candidates are far more likely to accept one of their early “bird in the hand” offers. So, I remind smart recruiting leaders that the ultimate goal is not just to hire fast. But instead, to develop a hiring process that allows you to make preemptive early offers, before your talent competitors act.

So, rather than naming this streamlined hiring strategy “fast hiring,” I call it “first offer” hiring. It focuses on being the first company to make an offer to your top candidates.

Unfortunately, because developing a streamlined “first-to-offer” hiring process is no easy task, I have learned that most hiring managers and recruiters won’t fully commit to this strategy until they are thoroughly reminded of the millions of dollars in business impact that this corporate recruiting practice can generate.

As a result, the remainder of this article highlights the many positive business impacts that hiring managers and recruiters can expect after implementing this strategy.

Educate Everyone On The Many Business Impacts From This First Offer Strategy

Back in 1999, I became the chief advocate for faster hiring. However, since that time, I have unfortunately found that many corporate leaders have lost sight of the fact that you need to accelerate your current time-to-offer.

Primarily because making your offer before your talent competitors produces multiple high-dollar value business impacts. And more recently, we have learned that this practice has an even higher business impact when it is applied to the currently critical business areas of AI, data centers, quantum computing, robotics, and nursing.

In the section below, you will find my “reminder list.” Designed to refresh everyone’s memory about the top 10 business impacts that support the application of “first-offer” hiring in mission-critical jobs. Note: The most powerful business impacts appear early on this list.

1) This process results in better-performing hires – the primary goal of all hiring should be to land those candidates who will become the best on-the-job performers. Well, corporate data has revealed that these best on-the-job performers receive multiple offers (some are received within days of their initial contact). And with so many immediate choices, these top-performing candidates will have a measurably earlier and shorter job acceptance decision window. This means that if you’re not among the first companies to make them a reasonable offer, your corporation’s ability to become a talent powerhouse will be permanently restricted.

2) You’ll have higher offer acceptance rates – obviously, making an early offer won’t have its desired business impacts if your top candidate rejects that offer. So it’s important to realize that just having a first-offer hiring process will immediately impress your top candidates. Corporate data has also shown that top candidates often conclude that the recruiting process they have just experienced is fast, objective, and decisive. Then, most top candidates will assume that this streamlined process mirrors the effective processes that can be found throughout the rest of your corporation. And because your top candidates are themselves decisive. They are more likely to accept an offer that comes from what they consider to be a decisive hiring manager. 

3) Fewer of your top candidates will drop out – when your hiring process is streamlined, your top candidates won’t experience as many lulls and significant delays. Continuous, nonstop engagement, coupled with the obvious shortness of your process, will dramatically increase the percentage of top applicants who will remain candidates until the completion of the offer stage. And because an extended hiring process provides many more opportunities for top candidates to lose their job-search momentum (as a result of unexpected changes in their work or family situations). Having an expedited first-offer process will dramatically reduce the likelihood that your top candidates drop out. 

4) Fast hiring will allow your managers to maintain team productivity – because the first offer strategy allows managers to fill their team’s vacant positions much faster. After adopting this process, your team will experience many fewer unnecessary and expensive “position vacancy days.” And it’s important to realize that these unnecessary position vacancy days will be expensive because they will likely cause team deadlines to slip and team productivity to drop. And in revenue-generating positions, having markedly fewer position vacancy days will result in a significant increase in the amount of revenue that these positions will generate.

5) Your TA results will improve because your hiring managers will remain engaged – a major cause of lower-than-expected recruiting results occurs when your hiring managers lose their interest in hiring. A primary frustrater that causes many managers to lose interest is having a top candidate apply and show interest, only to lose them because they accepted a competitor’s early offer. Another reason a manager’s interest often wanes is the painfully long time between when a manager needs the talent and when the new hire actually starts. Finally, because your streamlined first-offer hiring process is designed to have few gaps and no long delays, there will be fewer process obstacles that could lower the engagement levels of your hiring managers.

6) Shifting to a first offer strategy may even hurt your talent competitors – when your talent competitors are the only ones in your industry that are practicing the first offer strategy. They will be able to build up a significant talent surplus continuously. However, when your company counters by proactively initiating its own superior first offer hiring process, that additional competition will inevitably increase your company’s share of top talent in the industry. As an added benefit, your executives will be pleased when they learn that this single shift will directly hurt your talent competitors by eliminating their historical competitive advantage in recruiting top talent.

7) Your image as a candidate-friendly company will attract many additional top recruits – because today it’s easy for top candidates to learn about your company’s hiring processes and its employee experience on sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. When past candidates praise your hiring process because it respects their time, it will definitely improve the flow of top candidates in the future.

8) Realize that the first offer strategy will allow you to increase your hiring volume – obviously, a streamlined hiring process will allow you to complete your hiring in a shorter number of days. And that means that if your recruiting function also wants to increase its overall hiring volume. It can do so by assigning any freed-up recruiter and hiring manager time to these additional requisitions.

9) The first offer strategy will help you build your internal brand – a well-designed first offer hiring process will help your recruiting function build its internal brand image and funding. Obviously, the strategy will generate so many powerful business impacts. But also because the leaders in other business functions will gain more respect for their own recruiting leaders. Because those other business leaders will already know how difficult it was for them to develop and maintain their own streamlined process.

10) Educate everyone until they realize that the traditional extended hiring process won’t improve your decision-making – in the past, some recruiting leaders have speculated that taking more time to consider a candidate would result in more accurate candidate assessment and hiring decisions. Unfortunately, there is no data to back up this contention. Extended hiring processes don’t usually improve candidate assessment or finalist selection. Most of the lull periods in the traditional hiring process are due to administrative and scheduling delays. So hiring managers seldom use that extra time to further assess their candidates. And finally, if your traditional hiring process delivers late job offers. It’s time to admit that this shortcoming alone may have the largest overall negative impact on your recruiting results.

You can improve your hiring results with these speed of hire tips.

Final Thoughts

It’s time for those who design today’s modern hiring processes to realize that, at least for the ultra-competitive mission-critical jobs, the traditional “time-to-offer” metric now provides only limited value.

It only measures the number of days before your job offer is made. However, recruiting has become an intense, industry-wide competition. The time to offer a target can no longer be set in isolation. Today, in order to land top talent. The targeted number of days for your offer should instead be the number of days before one of your talent competitors makes an offer to your top candidate.

And that, unfortunately, means that even if you succeed in shortening your time-to-offer every year. You won’t see a significant improvement in your overall hiring results. Until your time-to-offer metric forces your hiring process to produce each of your top candidates’ offers on or before the date that one of your talent competitors makes their offer. 

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Note for the reader

This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company. Please help spread his ideas by sharing this with your team/network and posting it on your favorite social media. By Dr John Sullivan – This article first appeared in the 7/21/26 issue of Aggressive Talent Management.