Question:
We’ve found our ideal candidate, but they’ll need to relocate. How can relocation help us get them to say yes?
MoveCenter Expert:
While you’re deciding whether to make an offer, your candidate may already be deciding whether they want to live in your city.
Before you’ve discussed an offer—or perhaps before you’ve even had the first interview—they may already be Googling what it would mean to live there.
What do homes cost? What could I afford? What are the schools like? How long would my commute be? Which communities should I consider? What are property taxes? Is the cost of living higher? What employment opportunities are available for my spouse or partner? Could my family be happy there?
And they may already be forming opinions based on what they find.
From the company’s perspective, relocation may start when a candidate accepts an offer and the move is authorized. From the candidate’s perspective, the relocation decision can start much earlier. Recognizing that gives HR an opportunity to use relocation as part of the recruiting strategy rather than treating it as something that happens after the candidate says yes.
Your Candidate Is Researching the Destination Without You
Candidates have access to an extraordinary amount of information about virtually any destination. The problem is that information and insight aren’t the same thing.
Home prices, school ratings, crime statistics, commute estimates, cost-of-living calculators, neighborhood reviews, social media, and online forums can all be useful. They can also create an incomplete picture without local context.
A candidate may conclude that housing is unaffordable based on the communities that appear first in a search without knowing there are other options that fit their needs and budget. A commute that looks reasonable on a map may be very different during rush hour. A highly rated community may not offer the housing, schools, amenities, transportation, or lifestyle that matters most to that particular family.
Candidates also don’t necessarily know which questions to ask. Why would they? They don’t live there yet.
For an employer pursuing an ideal candidate, leaving such an important part of the employment decision entirely to internet research can be a missed opportunity.
Candidate Services Extend Your Recruiting Effort
MoveCenter’s candidate services are designed to become an extension of your recruiting effort when the person you want to hire needs to relocate.
Before an offer is finalized, we can help identify relocation issues that could influence the candidate’s decision, evaluate the feasibility of the move, and prepare a relocation cost estimate so HR understands the potential investment before making a commitment.
That information also allows HR to be more strategic with the offer.
If your ideal candidate is a homeowner moving to a significantly more expensive housing market, has a home to sell, or has other relocation considerations that could stand between accepting and declining the position, those are important things to understand before deciding what relocation assistance to offer.
Rather than starting with a standard package and waiting to see whether it works, HR can make informed decisions about how best to structure the relocation support for both the candidate and the business.
MoveCenter can also share relevant feasibility and destination information with the candidate, helping answer questions and address concerns while the recruiting process is still underway.
For HR, that means better information when structuring the offer and evaluating the company’s investment. For the candidate, it means a clearer understanding of what the relocation will involve and the support available to make it happen.
Don’t Wait Until the Offer to Discover the Obstacle
Your ideal candidate can love the position and still have very practical reasons for hesitating to move.
Maybe housing costs are considerably higher than where they live today. A spouse or partner has a career to consider. The family has questions about schools. They own a home that needs to be sold. They have aging parents nearby. Or perhaps they simply can’t picture what their day-to-day life would look like in an unfamiliar city.
Those concerns don’t suddenly appear when the offer is made. The candidate may have been thinking about them throughout the recruiting process.
Identifying them earlier gives HR an opportunity to understand what could affect the candidate’s decision and determine whether relocation support can help address it. It can also reveal that a particular relocation may be significantly more—or less—expensive than anticipated.
That information is much more valuable before the offer is structured than after it has been accepted.
Relocation Is Part of the Offer
Salary, incentive compensation, benefits, title, responsibilities, and career opportunity all influence whether someone accepts a position. When accepting that position also requires moving a household hundreds or thousands of miles, relocation support becomes part of that decision.
And not every candidate needs exactly the same thing.
A homeowner may be concerned about selling a home. Someone moving into a higher-cost market may be focused on housing affordability. A family may be thinking about schools and communities. A dual-career household may have questions about employment opportunities for a spouse or partner.
Understanding those considerations gives HR an opportunity to think strategically about the relocation component of the offer rather than treating it as an administrative step that follows acceptance.
The objective isn’t necessarily to spend more. It’s to understand what matters to the candidate, what the relocation is likely to cost, and where relocation support can make a meaningful difference in securing the person you want.
Your Ideal Candidate Is Already Thinking About the Move
By the time you’re ready to make an offer, your candidate may already have formed strong opinions about housing, commute, schools, cost of living, and whether they can picture themselves and their family living in the destination.
MoveCenter’s candidate services allow you to bring relocation expertise into the recruiting process earlier. We can help evaluate feasibility, estimate relocation costs, provide relevant information to the candidate, identify potential concerns, and give HR better information to strategically structure the relocation component of the offer.
Your recruiting team has invested considerable time finding the right person. Candidate services help you be just as strategic about what it may take to get that person to say yes.
