Candidate Motivation: Unlocking Key Drivers for Recruitment Success
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<h2>Key Takeaways</h2>
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<li>Motivation is multifaceted. It includes push factors (reasons for leaving a current job) and pull factors (reasons for joining a new job).</li>
<li>Identify both professional and personal motivators to ensure a good fit.</li>
<li>Ask targeted questions and observe a candidate’s reactions to gain better insights.</li>
<li>Understanding a candidate's motivations enables you to sell the job opportunity effectively. Ensure your approach is ethical, transparent, and consultative, aiming for a mutual fit rather than pushing candidates into a role that may not be right for them.</li>
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Understanding what motivates candidates is a key element in successful recruitment and retention. Motivation acts as a multiplier, enhancing and sustaining an employee’s performance. Without motivation, even a technically skilled employee might become a mis-hire. This guide will delve into the factors influencing motivation and how to correctly identify them to ensure a better fit for your organisation.
Types of Motivators
Simply put, there are two main types of motivators:
- Push motivators: Reasons for leaving a painful situation or employer.
- Pull motivators: Reasons for joining a new employer.
There are two further sub-categories to each motivator.
- Professional motivators: What is pushing them away from their current job (eg. a lack of promotion), and what is pulling them to a new job (eg. skill development)?
- Personal motivators: What is pushing them away from their current job (eg. working long hours), and what is pulling them to a new job (eg. hybrid working)?
How to Identify Candidate Motivations
Review applications
Analyse CVs, looking for hints about what drives the candidate’s career choices, such as frequent job changes for promotions or roles that offered significant learning opportunities.
Interview questions
- Ask questions that encourage candidates to discuss their career goals, preferred work environment, and reasons for leaving previous jobs.some text
- “What’s most important for you about your next job?
- “What would you not like to do again?”
- “What are your long-term career goals, and do you feel like you’re on target to reach them at the moment?”
- “What would you like to learn in the next few years to develop your career?”
- “What interesting or challenging work do you love?”... “Why?”... “What percentage of your time are you currently spending on that kind of work?”
- “What were/are your reasons for leaving?”
- Pay attention to the candidate’s enthusiasm when discussing various aspects of the job. Genuine motivation often shows through increased engagement and positive body language.
- While identifying a candidate’s professional motivators is generally easy, proactively uncovering their personal motivators can be challenging. This is because most candidates won’t want to discuss their personal lives (furthermore it is legally risky to ask).
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Common Issues & Solutions
Common issues
- Candidates primarily motivated by push factors may only be seeking a temporary escape from their current situation. Ensure they have substantial pull factors aligning with your role.
- Be careful about long-term unemployed candidates. Once the desperation/motivation to find a job has been met, their interest may wane. This is why you must dig deeper into what motivates an unemployed candidate beyond an income.
- Candidates solely money motivated are more likely to accept competing offers or become a flight risk and leave the organisation when they find a higher-paying job elsewhere.
Solutions
- Look for a good balance of professional and personal motivation. Taken to extremes, candidates purely motivated by personal matters are often less reliable and productive.
- Be honest about what the job entails and what the company can realistically offer. Misleading candidates can lead to dissatisfaction and high turnover.
- To maintain and increase motivation during the recruitment process you should regularly check in on a candidate’s motivations, especially after significant interactions like interviews or Job Simulations. Ensure candidates have opportunities to interact with their potential managers, as this relationship is crucial for their ongoing motivation and satisfaction.
Keep in touch with successful candidates after they accept the offer but before they start, to maintain motivation. This can prevent them from accepting counteroffers or losing interest. We have lots of suggestions for how to do this in our guide, Don’t Lose Your New Hire: Ensure They Are Ready & Excited to Start and chapter 17 of my recruitment book.
Additional Resources
- Recruitment book; The Secrets of Great Recruitment: How to Recruit Great Employees.
- Downloadable PDFguide; Uncover What Motivates Your Candidates for Long-Term Success.
- Article; The Importance of Understanding Candidate Motivation.
The secrets of great recruitment
The Secrets of Great Recruitment is a top-seller. It is easy to read and wastes no time in giving powerful actionable strategies you can use straight away.
