The Tech Recruiter's Kryptonite Date:   Monday , April 01, 2013 Today, one of the biggest challenges that technology recruiters face is when candidates' decline an offer that they had already accepted. This is the norm for any and every company, be it the large ones like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle or the smaller startups. Earlier the "offer decline" ratio used to be as low as ten percent. Unfortunately the trend is that even the best IT companies are looking at a horrifying decline ratio of around 50 percent. As a recruiter, this is one of the toughest situations to be in. The delivery guys also would have done some resource planning for projects and all of that will have to be redone from scratch. This is the irony of the whole conundrum. Neither the candidate nor the employer wants such a situation to occur. Unfortunately, the recruiter feels completely helpless as he feels these factors were not in his direct control. Could the recruiter have done something to avoid this situation? Let's rewind back to the day when the candidate was offered and he accepted the offer. Until this time the recruiter was in touch with the candidate on a regular basis and tried to accommodate all the requests from the candidate. As soon as the candidate accepts the offer the recruiter kind of gets relaxed and slowly reduces the frequency of the interaction (taking the offer acceptance for granted). This is the time when a competitor probably approaches the candidate. The candidate clears their interview as well and gets a second offer. He tries to reach out to the first recruiter. Unfortunately the first recruiter is busy in converting other offers and cannot respond. This could be a trigger for the candidate to take up the second offer. There could also be a scenario that the candidate has multiple offers and he has to decide which one to choose. He is in a dilemma and wants to make the right choice. If a recruiter does better handholding of the candidate there is a 80 better chance that the candidate will go with the offer by the recruiter. The third scenario is where the current company has retained the candidate. Even in such a case as a recruiter you should still keep in touch with the candidate as he is bound (90 cases) to get bored in 2-3 months and realize that he made a wrong decision of sticking with the organization. Again this is possible only through some friendly handholding. Irrespective of the size of the company you work at, do remember that offer declines are here to stay. This is a part and parcel of the challenges that a recruiter faces on a day-to-day basis. Building a solid relationship with candidates will help to overcome this and reduce the number of declines in your company.