Just like in sales, closing is part science and part art. The science is your conversion rates, iterating on your process, all the way down to your close rate. The art is personalizing how you close each candidate.

There are many things candidates have in common when picking a job, but then there are many things that are highly personal. The art is understanding when to apply general best practices vs. when to tailor to each candidate.

This section will cover high-level best practices, a framework for how candidates make decisions, and specific tactics/best practices for closing at every step of the recruiting funnel.

Every candidate has different motivations. Understanding their psychology is key to knowing how to best position your opportunity. There are a couple of frameworks out there, ranging from theoretical to practical (e.g., Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs McClelland’s Needs Theory 5F’s from Who).

I like the 5 F’s (fit, family, freedom, fortune, fun) because it’s practical:

Most candidates will consider at least these five categories and sometimes more. The art and personalization is in figuring out how the stack ranking works.

A lot of selling is understanding someone’s primary motivations and getting to know the candidate; this will allow you to frame your opportunity along the dimensions that actually matter to them. The best way to do this is to ask discovery questions and listen, starting with your very first conversation.

The close starts with your very first conversation with a candidate. In fact, at Gem, we call our first touchpoint with every candidate the “initial sell conversation” because it’s mostly about closing.

In the initial sell conversation, you need to get great at:

Your main goal with your first conversation is to get the candidate excited about your startup, so they want to take the next step. If they’re a passive candidate (e.g., they agreed to meet you for coffee from a cold email or text), your most important job is to sell them. 90% of your time should be spent closing (10% can be you evaluating them). If you don’t spend enough time closing and spend too much time evaluating, the majority of your candidates will fall out of the funnel here.

And closing doesn’t mean “pitching” your company straight out of the gate. Get to know them first. Once you’ve given them a chance to tell you what’s important to them, share a bit about your company and tailor “your pitch” to what’s important. Only after you’ve done these things should you ask a few questions to evaluate them.

If someone is actively interviewing or applying to your company, you can spend a bit more time evaluating them upfront, but I’d still recommend spending half your time getting them excited once you’ve qualified that they may be a good fit. And if it’s clear they aren’t the right fit, you should still carve out a few minutes for their questions.

So how do you get to know what’s important to someone? In sales, there’s a concept of “discovery,” and it’s how we understand what’s important to our buyer. Before a pitch or demo, we ask questions to get our prospect talking to learn what’s important. Recruiting is the same.

Here are some questions I like to ask to get to know my candidate:

Just like in sales discovery, you can have a set of questions you generally like to ask going in, but you should tweak them to each situation. If you master discovery, it should feel natural and conversational.

In some cases, you uncover hard blockers where no amount of convincing will win a candidate over. In these cases, be straightforward, verify it’s a blocker, and then try to be helpful. For example, in the early days of Gem, I would sometimes discover that an engineer needed to make a minimum cash comp that was too far from what we could offer. My talk track would go something like, “look, it sounds like you need to make $180k, and we probably won’t be able to bridge that gap – is that going to be a blocker? I totally understand; how can I be helpful? We work with some of the best recruiting teams. Can I introduce you to a later-stage startup, like Segment or Plaid?”

Closing continues throughout the interview loop. This means running a tight process with clear next steps, continuing to do discovery, and giving them a sense of what it would be like to work with you.

If you grab a coffee with a candidate, follow up the same day. If you bring someone onsite, target a 48-hour turnaround. Speed is one of your advantages as a small startup.

Just like in sales, you can’t move someone forward if you don’t have a next step. It’s easy to move someone from phone screen to onsite once they’ve entered your interview process, but knowing the right next step may require more nuance at the beginning and the end of a hiring process:

I always aim to learn at least one new thing in every single touchpoint. The more you know about a candidate’s motivations, the better you can sell to them. It will feel genuine and like you’re on their team.

Invite them to optional events. This may pique their interest or help them better understand your company and feel connected. At the bare minimum, we time our interviews so they can grab lunch with the team, but if they’re interviewing on a day when we have All Hands, we time it so they can attend. We’ve done this for team standups, interesting customer meetings, etc.

One fun trick is to use preemptive language. If they notice something quirky about your office (e.g., in Gem’s case, all our hot sauces or dogs) or your culture, say, “you’ll see a lot more of this when you join.” This gets your candidate to start imagining themselves at your company. Don’t say this all the time. Feel it out if you have momentum with the candidate. If you do this well, your candidate may find themselves saying “we” a lot.

As you get closer to making an offer, mistakes get costlier, and the stakes get higher. Also, the dynamic shifts after you make an offer, so it’s critical to understand whether the candidate is ready to receive one. Once you’ve made an offer, get creative, and involve the entire team.

Before making an offer, it’s important to understand whether the candidate is ready for one. If there are big question marks in the candidate’s mind, address those first before making an offer. This is the single biggest mistake I see founders make with closing. We agonize so much over whether someone’s the right fit for our startup and forget candidates are agonizing over our opportunity just as much, if not more.

In sales, this would be like negotiating terms before our prospect said they want to buy. Why is this bad? Just like in sales, as soon as you start to talk about dollars, it completely changes the conversation. Suddenly, it becomes tough to have an open conversation about other important dimensions.

Before making an offer, make sure you understand a few key things:

Know these things. If you don’t, you’re flying blind.

As a litmus test of how ready a candidate may be, I like to use the 1-10 method. I’ll ask, “assuming we can iron out comp, on a scale of 1-10, how ready are you to accept an offer?”. The first few times, I heard many encouraging six and sevens and moved straight to offer. Literally, none of them accepted. Now, when I hear six or sevens, I know I have some ground to cover.

Once you’re ready to make an offer, follow a basic pre-offer checklist:

Check out our dedicated guide to structuring an offer and negotiating compensation:

When presenting an offer, you’ll want to present a verbal offer before sending a written offer. Talking through your offer verbally gives your candidate a chance to ask questions and gives you a chance to offer additional context and read their reactions — in-person or over video is always best. Just like in sales, we always present pricing proposals in person or over video because watching body language is key. Are they smiling? Are they leaning forward? Are they excited?

Lead with transparency, especially when it comes to equity. Try to figure out how much they understand about equity.

We recommend taking a transparent approach to all of closing though. Startups are risky, and you are asking someone to put a lot of trust in you by joining your small startup. If you’re not willing to share “here are our biggest challenges,” “here are the milestones we need to hit to raise our next round,” “here’s our runway,” or if you’re dodgy about your revenue, you’ll lose credibility big time. The best people you want to work with will see right through it.

After presenting the offer, ask this simple question — “We’re all SUPER excited to work with you. Is there anything else we can do to get you onboard?” — sometimes, you get a simple answer and may even be able to close them on the spot (e.g., bumping their base by $5k or paying for an online course they want to take). If you don’t ask, you’ll never know.

It’s all hands on deck, so involve the whole team:

Lean on people outside of your team for external validation. Investors, board members, advisors, and even mutual friends can be a great way to offer an “outsider” perspective. I’m surprised at how few companies leverage their investors in this way. We offered a chat with our lead investor from Accel, Dan Levine, for everyone on our founding team. Dan still hops on calls with a ton of candidates (especially leadership hires). Good advisors and investors will be excited about this because helping you close your early team is one of the highest-impact things anyone can do.

You could even consider involving your customers. We had customers hop on calls with most of our early customer-facing roles and every leadership hire. Hearing their enthusiasm for your product and team will be contagious!

At Gem, we always look for ways to get creative at the offer stage and move mountains to close. We’ve bought refundable plane/EDC tickets, introduced a candidate to the Silicon Valley producers, and even recorded an original Justin Beiber music video parody for a candidate when we discovered she enjoyed playing guitar and recording cover songs.

For example, we learned early on that one of our early engineering candidates really liked to travel hack, where you use points to fly first class around the world. We found out there was a certain airline he wanted to fly for a while, but could never use points, so we booked him a refundable first-class ticket to Paris to give him along with his offer letter.

He was blown away by the personal touch and came onboard. Guess what? He told all his smart engineering friends about this baller trip he took as part of signing with Gem and now have several more travel hacker friends that have joined since. This may sound extravagant, but we thought of it as a much more thoughtful version of a ~$5k signing bonus.

Closing does not stop after your candidate signs. I’ve seen so many people reneg and fall out of the process after signing over the years — I’m never 100% confident until they start on day one.

Keep the momentum going:

Naturally, curveballs will come up in the close, such as competition, counteroffers, and exploding deadlines from other companies. It’s critical to know these things so that you can respond quickly.

Be sure to ask who they’re interviewing with. Ask early on and continue to check in throughout the process. Sometimes candidates aren’t comfortable sharing at first, so you can ask what types of opportunities they’re exploring.

If you don’t know who they’re interviewing with or who they have offers from, you’re going to have a tough time knowing how to close.

Sometimes a candidate’s current company will counteroffer, which throws a big wrench in everything. The good news is you can follow a few simple steps to position yourself well before a counteroffer is made:

Still, counteroffers may happen. When they do, you need a playbook:

We typically avoid deadlines at Gem. Deadlines work in some cases, but not always. Senior candidates aren’t going to take the job because you give them an exploding offer. They know their worth, and they can find another job. We use deadlines when we have two front-runner candidates in the pipeline for a specialized role.

If you feel strongly you need to drive urgency, you can consider starting a clock with the candidate, but let them choose when to receive their offer. For example, “once we make an offer, you have X days to decide. We can make the offer whenever you’re ready, but we want to make sure that you’re in the right headspace to think about it beforehand.” This can also come back to the 1-10 scale.

What if the candidate has an exploding offer from another company?

That was a lot to cover, but selling and closing are super important. In summary, here are a few of the most important do's and don'ts of closing:

This selling and closing guide is based on a talk I give at YCombinator to startup founders to close candidates. I also incorporated some great tactics that I learned from Jose Guardado, who used to talk at YC before me.

Feedback? Suggestions? Ideas? Comment directly or email steve@gem.com