The savage truth is that most recruiters have no idea how to build relationships with their clients, nor how to develop business opportunities through their day-to-day interaction with customers.

It’s an ironic tragedy, but the more technology we have available, the less recruiters actually use that technology to connect with clients and candidates in a meaningful way.

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Walk into most recruitment consulting offices now days, and its like walking into a typing pool. Everyone bashing away at emails, texts, and social networking updates.

Now here is the point. About 70% of the e-mails we send are unnecessary, or at least the message could have been better delivered verbally. Sending email is a missed opportunity much of the time. It’s also supremely unproductive.

Recruiting is about relationships. Selling is about hunting, persuading, seducing and consummating. Email is bland, annoying and often not read by our clients.

Please do not misunderstand my message here. Email and the newer technologies and communications platforms have incredible application and I use them all the time. I am after all engaging with you via a blog and via a video too, right now.  But I keep asking myself “what outcome am I trying to achieve, and am I more likely to achieve it by phone or face-to-face?”

Our job as recruiters is about compelling people to action. What we do, or should do, is create outcomes and facilitate decisions. Email does not do that. Your job is about selling, understanding and building trust. Email does not do that.

Success in recruitment is about connecting. Technology is an enabler. If you want to compete, make sure you and your team talk to clients and candidates on every possible occasion. Ask questions, listen actively, and solve problems.

Challenge people in your office. Why send an email?  Why not pick up the phone or even go and see the person?

Less email, less typing, less laptop, less desktop. More talking, more listening, more asking, more necktop!

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Most of us are told that recruitment is a sales job. And it is.

But the truth of selling is badly misunderstood. Selling in old-style recruitment means volume of calls, pleading for client visits, and pushing people into jobs where maybe the fit is dubious, at best.

But in fact the real selling in staffing is based on an ability to uncover and understand. Uncover and understand our customers needs and motives, that is. So being a great recruiter is going to require many so called ’soft skills’, like listening, probing, uncovering and questioning.

Successful recruiters will have the interpersonal skills to really get to know their client hiring managers on a person to person level, including their leadership style and knowing the type of employee that responds to that style.

And so as the staffing market recovers, it’s important we start talking about things we never considered before. Like the client mindset.

Let’s think for a moment about the mindset of clients as the market recovers. We need to remember that clients will be bruised from layoffs and cutbacks. They will be under pressure to deliver. They may be confused themselves about the strength of the market and whether it’s time to hire. Their own corporate strategies will have changed, culture will have evolved, management style will have changed, corporate needs will have changed, and indeed there is a good chance that their own manager may have changed under a restructure or a downsizing. So initial hiring will be tentative. There may be some tyre-kicking by clients. Clients will want to get an “exact fit” because they will be terrified of making mistakes.

So that brings us to the importance of asking questions to truly understand client needs. I have been on thousands of visits to clients with recruiters. Most recruiters ‘talk at’ the client. Few really seek to understand. Bear in mind the client may not know themselves what they really need. It may be a journey of joint discovery. We need to take great job orders, be consultative and question clients briefs carefully.

The biggest cause of placements falling through is people making assumptions. Recruiters taking what they are told at face value. You need to develop a relationship with your client and talent where questioning is actually welcome. It’s like a doctor asking questions while  working towards a diagnosis. Why is a candidate really wanting to move jobs? What are her true motivators? What is a client’s real ceiling when it comes to salary they will pay? Why does the job require the candidate to have 10 years experience in a certain environment?

Traditionally recruiters are the best of talkers. But now we have to learn active listening as a core skill, and we have to question everything.

I am writing this on a plane on my way back from a week visiting the Aquent offices in Japan. It was a great week, and the business is tracking well, but as I had not been to Japan for a while, I spent my time meeting with virtually every recruiter, looking at activities and shining the light on efficiency and productivity shortfalls.

People often ask me about staffing in Japan, and how “different “ it must be to the rest of the recruiting world. Well of course Japan can be a perplexing place to an outsider, but 10 years of running a staffing business there has tought me that, at the very core, success in staffing in Japan depends on exactly the same skills, metrics and activities that drive success anywhere else.

As you would expect, across a team of 30 or so recruiters we have a blend of exceptionally high performers, some solid fee generators, and a handful who are struggling to meet targets and objectives. Just before I left Osaka, I debriefed with the local Regional Director, and it became clear that once again we had been reminded that a few very clear basics are what drive success in this business, and we agreed to refocus everyone back on to these priorities.

I have blogged previously on my core belief in what drives recruiting success

Activity X Quality X Target Market

And certainly that formula holds true in Japan as much as anywhere else. However I found that underperformers in Japan were falling short in one or more of three specific key areas. As I jotted up my notes from the weeks work, I reflected that these ‘Three Commandments’ could well serve as a blueprint for staffing success, anywhere, anytime

. • Specialisation

Recruiters are easily seduced. A client wants help with a hire that’s outside our area of expertise and we jump right in. And then we find we don’t have the skills, knowledge, or connections to do a good job. We waste time, we get frustrated and we actually risk damaging our client relationship when actually we were trying to go “above and beyond”. And think of the opportunity cost working in areas we are unlikely to ever revisit. Successful recruiters are specialists. They know a niche and they work that niche. Specialisation is critical because it creates a perception that the recruiter is a recognised industry expert. This status appeals to both prospective clients and candidates. Furthermore, it gives recruiters instant credibility with passive candidates, which will be increasingly crucial. Don’t dabble. Don’t allow distractions. Go deep.

• Order qualification

This is just so critical. Most of us work a contingent business model. We only get paid if we fill the job. Yet so many recruiters try to fill every order that hits their desk. This is patently a mistake because all orders are not equal and nor are all clients. The most successful recruiters in our Japan business, as everywhere else, are brutal order qualifiers. Is the client serious about hiring? Is the order fillable? Are the hiring criteria reasonable? Salary appropriate? In fact Aquent has move to an “exclusive only” business model for our permanent business. It’s a work in progress, but in markets where we are doing this well, we have seen numbers of job orders fall (because we will only work with a client if the order is exclusive with Aquent) but the ratio of orders filled skyrocket, with recruiters productivity (revenue generated as a multiple of salary) at the highest levels we have ever achieved.

• Talent selection

In financial markets they talk about canny investors being “stock-pickers” which refers to an ability to select ‘diamonds in rough’, investments that will outperform over time. Great recruiters are “talent-pickers”. We would love to place every person who approaches us or who we interview. But that’s not going to happen. In fact spreading your talent activity too thin will dilute your ability to find people work. Candidate selection is key. Selecting the best ones will be an art, developing relationship with them will be a skill that many of today’s transactional recruiters will find hard to adapt to. We have to be nimble enough to understand the trends in clients needs and adjust our candidate activities to meet that need

There are many, many things that make for a successful recruiter, but the “Three Commandments” (which may as be almost as old as the original ten!) still hold true, and I am finding it’s those recruiters who are applying age old, proven strategies to their work, who are flourishing most in the recovery

Last week I blogged on why so many recruiters have a shallow understanding of what ‘competitive’ in our business actually means.

And so how do we thrive in a competitive world? What is the way to differentiate in 2010 and beyond?

Well it’s not cool to say it out loud, but as far as I am concerned it’s what technology cannot do that our clients will continue to pay for.

It’s a source of constant amazement to me how many of us in this industry have been completely seduced by the technology spin doctors. We are terrified that the Internet will wipe out our business. We agonise over social networking and how it will change the talent-sourcing model. We quake at the power of LinkedIn, and we are hypnotised by the thought our competitors will develop a piece of technology that somehow will make our service redundant.
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Don’t get me wrong. Technology is reshaping our business and having leading-edge technology is crucial, in as much as it allows your consultants to compete on an even playing field, and gives them the tools to give clients and talent what they really want.

But technology will not destroy our industry. At least not all of it – and definitely not the part we want!

And here is why.  Finding a job or recruiting a new staff member is not a commodity purchase. We are not dealing with the same psychology which drives i-Tunes, e-trade or amazon.com.

This is important because it means that the real value provided by quality recruiters will still have a market.  That is, screening, evaluating, persuading, assessing, negotiating, advising, consulting and acting, as an advocate for employers will still have tremendous value.

It is on these competencies that we need to compete.

But it’s also more than interpersonal recruiting skills (which by the way were largely lost during the decade-long hiring boom that preceded the GFC). Talent management is where the real battle for recruitment dominance will be fought. Building talent communities and managing effective communications channels with those communities is where the holy grail lies.

And we will need to compete in other ways too. Customers will increasingly call the tune. And by customers I mean talent as well as clients. The customer experience will build or tarnish your brand like never before. This is where social media will be able to destroy your business. Get it wrong and your brand will be brought down at viral speed. That’s where we have to compete. How we deal with customers and manage their expectations and experience with us.

Lack of personal interaction is doing our industry no favours. In fact I consider it one of our deepest flaws. Many recruiters use technology to avoid connecting personally with talent, when in fact the real advantage of technology is to get much closer to many more quality candidates.

So social media and technology generally is a threat to you only if you fail to recognise this fact…

… there will continue to be a market for tailored, personalised, high quality business solutions based on an advisory, consultative model, where access to talent is the differentiator.

Don’t be sucked in to competing on the basis of who can commoditise what we do the best. Don’t play the low margin, process game.

As your competitors claim, “we are bigger, have cooler technology and therefore we can do it faster and cheaper” or technology-driven platforms push to cut out recruiters altogether, your premise for doing business is…

“I can solve your problem because I understand your need and I know where the talent live”

There is one word you will always find in any analysis or even casual discussion about the recruitment industry.

Competition

Get two recruiters or more together, in any setting, and I bet that 90 % of the conversation will be about how competitive its all become and how to beat the competition.

A few years ago my office was at 275 George Street in Sydney. That building has 12 floors, and at that time it housed 14 recruitment companies! Seriously. We used to loose candidates on the way up in the elevator!

But what does competitive really mean?  And if we competed effectively in the past, will the same tactics work for us going forward?

Well I first started to compete as a recruiter in Australia in January 1980. Since then I have been able to get first hand experience of what the very best our industry has had to offer in terms of competition here and all over the world. And many of those recruiters have built superior businesses through quality service, innovation and exceeding customer expectations

…but the vast majority have not!

For almost all my recruitment life in Australia in New Zealand, as well as my exposure to the industry in the UK, Europe and Asia, “competition” for most recruiters has meant one or more of these things…

Speed: Urgency is good. It’s what clients want. But for many recruiters what “speed’ means is how quickly we can respond to requests for help from clients. And that usually leads to competition based on how fast we can work – not on the quality of what we do. So “competition” in that case leads to shortcuts, sloppy process and often results in unseemly resume races and squabbles over who represented candidates first. Ugly, unproductive and damaging to our reputations

Volume: This is the form of “competition “ where recruiters are being exhorted by desperate managers, totally bereft of new ideas, to do more sales calls, send out more spam, make more unwelcome visits. And yes, activity is crucial to recruiting success, but it needs to be quality, targeted activities, not volume of intrusive approaches which means we actually end up competing on who can annoy our clients the most!

Price:  The final competitive weapon of he or she who has nothing else to offer, resulting in the very essence of what we do as an industry being devalued in the eyes of our clients. And of course selling on price alone means our own margins are relentlessly squeezed to the point where we are all working harder and harder for less and less return – and how smart is that when you really think about it? Competitive pricing is key, sure. But value is the issue we should be competing on.  No matter what you charge you will always find someone who will charge less. And that is a slippery slope none of us want to risk.

Aggression: Truthfully, I like the word “aggression” when it comes to business, just as I encourage my sons to be aggressive on the rugby field. But my type of aggression is the healthy type. Passionate, committed, loving to win more than loose.  Always within the rules and never malicious. But too often recruiters think aggression means rubbishing your competition to clients and candidates, and bullying customers into decisions they don’t really want or need to make, all for the sake of closing the deal at all costs. And that is exactly the type of behavior that perpetuates the poor image our industry currently suffers with many of our customers using us begrudgingly  – and in some cases with undisguised resentment.

Dishonesty: And here I am using the softest word I can think of for competition based on lying, manipulation, and withholding of information. And it’s rife in our industry and I have commented on it more than once before (Integrity. It’s a bit like virginity. Either you have it…or you don’t!)

I can write fifty blogs highlighting outrageously deceitful behavior I have encountered from recruiters over the years, and maybe one day I will tell those tales.

But for now I guess the point is that it’s this kind of activity, that plenty of people in our industry believe “competitive” means.

Many of us in recruitment today are like pin-balls in a pin-ball machine. We bounce around without pattern desperately trying to hit the jackpot.

We are not sure we have the tools to compete, so we live in fear of every new development and then we try to copy it or do it faster or do it cheaper. But those old tactics are no longer working. In fact they are sending many of us out of business. Please note, “competing” does not mean copying.

So how do we thrive in a competitive world?

Well, stay tuned to next week’s blog entry where I will try and pin some of that down.

Over the past week I have committed to presenting at two RCSA conferences in Australia, which by the sound of the program and the quality of the other speakers, will be well worth attending.

Below are details of the two presentations I will be giving, in Sydney and in Hobart, as well as links to the Conference programs

RCSA Sydney Consultant Forum 2010

Tuesday 1st June 2010

“Recruiting Skills for the New Era”

Greg Savage MRCSA (Life) AQUENT
“Restocking the Skills Briefcase”

The fact is that the skills and tactics that got you where you are today, will NOT be good enough to take you where you
want to go! The market has shifted,technology has evolved and client and candidate expectations have risen. This session will uncover the key skills many recruiters lost during the boom years, which now need to be relearned,and will also highlight brand new approaches to client and candidate interaction. Full of practical takeaways and immediately useable tips and tactics, this is session for all would-be top performers

For details Click here to download the event brochure for more information.

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RCSA Conference  – Hobart, Tasmania

25-27th August 2010

“Bridging Connections”

Featured Key Note Speaker

Greg Savage-CEO Aquent International

“New engagement for a new world – A case study in changing the recruitment conversation”

Apart from his reputation as a business leader, Greg Savage is known throughout our industry as a recruiting trainer and coach. His management and consultant skills session sell out all over the Australia and New Zealand. But this session is different. Designed for recruiting leadership, and presented exclusively at the RCSA leadership conference, Greg will share exactly what he is doing at Aquent to change the way his business engages with clients, relates to talent and builds loyalty from their own staff. It’s happening to Greg right now so you will hear the strategy as well as how some of the plans are working out..or not! Few recruitment leaders would share such strategic imperatives, and fewer still will divulge the results, but Greg will outline the Aquent social media strategy, the new customer service charter and a brave new way Aquent are dealing with client commitment — amongst much else.

for details  visit the website  bridgingconnections

I have nothing against bikers. I had a motorbike myself, until I drove it into a hedge at 60 mph on the way back from the rugby club.

Bikers are only an analogy in my tale today so Rev Heads… take no offense please.

But to the business at hand. Consider this and then run the figures for your own business if you need convincing. In most of the recruitment businesses I have run, 70% of your business will come from the top 20% of your clients. In fact, often over 50% of your Gross Profit (NDR) will be generated from less than 10 client companies. Even on an individual consultant desk you will find that a high proportion of fees will come from between 3 and 5 clients.

Maybe we know this already. Why then do we spread both our marketing dollars, and our personal business development efforts, across all our clients and prospects equally?

It’s crazy!

You will no longer survive by spreading yourself so thin. The superficial phone call and the multi-listed, non-exclusive job order – and then we move on, is not a strategy that will work any more.

It’s transactional. It’s superficial. It’s dangerous for your financial health. What we want to focus on now is “share of wallet” not market share.

What is important as the market recovers is targeting long-term clients with fee-generation growth potential. We want to work with companies that will use our services regularly. We want to partner with companies that themselves are growing. The best client is a client that has a need for all or most of your service offer.

But it’s much, much more than that.

We need to understand that the best business is often the hardest to win, but the most profitable once you have it. The future requires us to invest time, resources and brainpower on developing, nurturing and retaining these key clients.

But it’s much more than that too.

We need to build different relationships with our clients. Engage in fresh conversations. This means providing value-added activities for your clients (webinars, blogs, salary surveys, skills testing of candidates). The goal is ensuring a regular pattern of meaningful contact and it also means developing proactive recruitment strategies specifically for them.

But it’s more than that too. Do not try to be all things to all people. Very few recruiters I know, have managed to survive as generalists and it will not get easier.

And the bikers? Well bikers are those hairy, ugly, anti-social clients. Clients who jerk you around with sketchy job specs. Clients who demand the world from you and give nothing in return. Clients who pull jobs half way through assignments. Clients who fail to return your calls and who use three other agencies in competition with you. Clients who unfailingly try to negotiate fees – especially after you have gone to the ends of the earth to fill their job. Clients who show no respect for what you do or say, who abuse your guarantee and who in the end, refuse to pay the bill.

You are smiling as you read this! And yet we still work with these guys. Why? They absorb your time and they torpedo your self-esteem. They take your focus off where it should be – your targeted clients and prospects who can offer you long term, sustainable, profitable business.

Why do we keep on giving these pseudo-clients another chance? Why do we defend them within our companies? Why do we say “they are not so bad –they will get better – next time we will earn a fee”?

Frankly, trying to pretty up these bikers is a bit like putting lipstick on a pig. A pig is still a pig with or without makeup!

Kill off these bikers – fire these so called clients –these renegades and buccaneers – and put your effort into those key prospects and clients who you have identified as the sorts of employers you want to do business with.

Business is like dating – you do have choice who you go with.

Regular readers of ‘The Savage Truth’ will remember that in January 2010, Aquent launched a new strategy for engaging with clients on permanent hiring assignments. Realising that multi-listed, contingent arrangements with clients are to the detriment of all parties concerned, Aquent now only accepts permanent assignments in Design, Digital, and Marketing on a retained or exclusive basis.

When this was announced to the wider recruiting community it was widely reported and commented on, and since then I have been asked many times to report on how the strategy is working.

This week I provided Short List with some feedback on our “Exclusive Selection” offering. The article is only available to Short List subscribers normally, but with the kind permission of Short List, I have re-published the article here:

Aquent taking fewer jobs under exclusivity program but fill rates up

Aquent is turning away up to five permanent job orders a week as a result of its new push to take only exclusive work, but fill rates have more than doubled, says CEO Greg Savage.

Savage told Shortlist in Aquent’s Australian business, where it had taken “a very hard line” on only accepting permanent recruitment work if it was on an exclusive basis for an agreed period, the three-month-old strategy had so far had a positive response from approximately 60% of clients.

“With about 60% of the jobs we take, the client has said – ‘Fine, no problem’.

“The remainder had already given the job to somebody else, in which case we do not take it. Others haven’t given the job away but aren’t convinced that they want to be monogamous with us.

“We’re turning away between three and five job orders a week right now, and that’s frustrating because we think we could fill them, but we want to build on the momentum we’re getting.”

Although Aquent was doing about 40% fewer permanent assignments in Australia, he added, its fill rate for these jobs had gone from around 30% up to between 60% and 70%.

Savage said all of the permanent recruitment staff still had enough work to keep them busy and reach their targets, but also had the capacity to increase their workload.

“There are plenty who can handle more work, but they’re not idle because they’re doing a much more thorough job on the work that they are doing now.

“A consultant may have been handling 16 jobs and they’re now handling seven, so it allows them to give more attention to both the client and candidates.”

Savage said the strategy remained a work in progress, and the company still had “a lot of clients to convert to our way of thinking”.

“There’s some clients who won’t work that way and that’s okay, and there are others who can be convinced.”

UK recruiters, clients resistant to exclusive concept
In China, Savage said, where retained recruitment was already a widely accepted method, some 99% of all permanent job orders were taken on either an exclusive or retained basis.

In Europe, the rate was 95%.

However only about three quarters of the permanent recruitment work Aquent was doing in the UK was exclusive, he said.

The main obstacle, he said, was in fact internal – consultants were struggling to come to grips with the idea of asking clients for exclusive work.

“The whole UK recruitment model is very transactional, very competitive, very fee-driven and results-driven, and that market is proving harder for us to shift.”

This year, in my capacity of International CEO of Aquent, (the only global staffing company dedicated to marketing and design) I was very excited to help launch our new website, which specifically promotes the ability of our talent and clients to connect with our Agents, via social networks, if preferred.

You might think then, that I am a social networking evangalist, a true believer that is convinced “old recruiting” is dead and a new world of connecting via web-enabled networks awaits. A world where recruiters will manage armies of “friends and contacts” and slot them neatly into web-generated clients, themselves sourced via a gigantic pool of “Linked-In” connections.

Well, you would be wrong on both counts. No, I am not a social networking fanatic, and nor do I believe a new recruiting world will unfold, based on social networking per se.

Don’t get me wrong, I am fully aware of the potential power of social media. I have my “Linked-In” page, and I find it fantastic for information and idea sharing and locating lost colleagues and also accessing talent. I am “Face-booked ” up to the max, although in truth its primarily a way to see what my daughter is up to, and share photos with my sisters overseas. And I fully “get” how Twitter, and the rest, are going to revolutionise how we communicate with people on a broad scale. We are in a dynamic, fast-changing world, and technology is impacting many aspects of human interaction — no doubt.

But remember this! Faxes were going to revolutionise recruitment. Remember? The Internet was going to wipe traditional recruiters from the landscape. Have we forgotten already? Email was going to mean the end of consultative recruiters. Web-testing and screening would mean selling skills and closing skills and candidate management skills were going to be redundant for poor old recruiters like me, living in yesteryear.

And none of it came true. None of it.

Sure we are in a recession now and recruitment as an industry is suffering, but that’s pure economic cycles. The truth is that for the five years up to 2008, the staffing industry was growing like it never had before. Record revenues, record profits, record take-up of our services by both clients and candidates, right across the world.

The Internet and email and job boards didn’t kill off recruiters! New technologies helped them to new heights and new riches! And the truth is that the recruiters who are doing the best now are those who are able to integrate the traditionally required skills with new technologies, and make one plus one equal three.

As I commented in our press release announcing our new website “’Job boards don’t find people jobs. People finds people jobs!”

(See the full release here )

Just before the market tanked about 18 months ago, an exiting employee of my firm, commented “Aquent is great place and Greg a good enough guy, just too old-fashioned”. Apparently most of that opinion was based on my refusal to pander to spoilt Generation Y’ers in our business who wanted everything, gave little in return, and had tantrums along the way to boot. The departing employee who made that remark was going to a new staffing world of in-house café lattes, flexible work hours, torn-jeans dress code — and a talent management strategy based entirely on scanning Facebook all day.

Sadly that business is gone, along with many of its ilk. And of course it’s the “old fashioned” recruiters, people who actually look to connect, personally, with talent and clients, recruiters who consult and add value, staffing professionals who can read between the lines, influence, persuade and truly match beyond a bland job description — who will survive this downturn and thrive in the inevitable upswing.

Social networking is a communications channel recruiters must embrace. No question. But lets be smart about this. It’s NOT the Holy Grail. It’s just a tool. An enabler, and it needs to be harnessed like all the other mechanisms we use to manage our relationships with clients and candidates.

Social networking devotees talk lovingly of “friends” and “contacts,” when in most cases, they are nothing of the sort. Who are we fooling when we call someone we have never met (quite possibly never heard of), “a friend”. Clicking “I accept” does not buy you love baby! How strong are your “friendships” when your “friend” can rid themselves of you by clicking a mouse (and hey, you don’t even get notified your “friendship” has bitten the dust). And your “contacts and connections” on Linked-In can be kept real if you are vigilant and disciplined, and there is huge value there. But accept everyone who wants to connect to you, and you build someone else’s mailing list, little more.

Every day web-advertising spruikers spout scare tactics suggesting recruitment companies who don’t pour money into social networking recruiting will be left behind, and be unable to attract talent. Total nonsense of course.

The real value of social media for the recruitment industry is building communities of like-minded people. Communities where you can showcase your credibility and build up networks that will allow you to source in the future. In fact I think the real value of social media is as an “influencer’,'more than a way to tap into talent . Those recruiters who use social media as a de facto job board, listing endless links to job descriptions juts don’t get the main game at play

Eventually a more structured and fruitful way to mine networking sites will be developed, and then it will behoove recruiters to get serious. But by then the social networking phenomena itself would have evolved into something different!

In the meantime, posting a job vacancy via a Tweet is even less targeted than the least targeted job board. You may get a valid response, you may not. But the fact remains, the real work of a skilled recruiter happens once the talent has applied, not before.

Social networking “gurus” and evangelists pontificate about how its web 2.0 that will make or break the next generation of recruiters, when in most cases these experts have never placed a person in a job and would have zero idea of the dynamic that has to occur for placements to be consistently made.

And that’s what we are talking about here, fellow recruiters. Don’t be seduced by the bright lights! Don’t be hooked into the promise of untold riches based on browsing your Facebook page. Sure, use Twitter, but don’t be a Twit. Play around with Facebook but face up to the reality that the hard work of building an offline reputation and real-world skills is still required. Link-In for all you are worth, but don’t allow the missing link of people interactions skills to be your downfall.

Of course, candidates and even clients, will originate from your social networking activities. I have had success that way myself. And that’s cool and its very welcome. But I also pick up candidates and clients from amongst the parents on the sidelines of my sons rugby matches! No one is really suggesting that as a targeted, sustainable way to re-invent recruiting are they?

Here is the nuts of it. The hard work of developing a sustainable relationship, building trust, proving you can add value, must be done in the “old fashioned” way. The way that has kept me in the staffing industry for thirty years, making money and having fun during every single one of them!

So as Aquent enters a brave new world of a totally transparent website which connects our customers to our people, note that social networking is intrinsic to our plan, but note too that the real theme behind our website is kinda “old fashioned”.

Connecting people and building real relationships.

Because its people who find people jobs.

As the talk of a recovery in the hiring market gains momentum, recruiters are gearing up for how they might take advantage. But before we think about us, let’s talk first about the mindset of clients as the market recovers. We need to remember that clients will be bruised from layoffs and cutbacks too. They will be under pressure to deliver. They may be confused themselves about the strength of the market and whether it’s time to hire. Their own corporate strategies will have changed, culture will have evolved, management style will have shifted, corporate needs will have changed, and indeed there is a good chance that their own manager may have changed under a restructure or a downsizing.

So initial hiring will be tentative. There may be some tyre – kicking by clients. Clients will want to get an “exact fit” because they will be terrified of making mistakes.

So that brings us to a key recruiter skill. One that has been blunted by lack of use during the boom, “burn and churn” years. That is the importance of asking drill-down questions so as to truly understand client needs. Bear in mind the client may not know themselves what they really need. Taking a job order may well be a journey of joint discovery. We need to take great job orders, be consultative and question clients’ briefs carefully.

Think about your clients’ mind set when things pick up. What do they want? And what do they need from you at this time?

It could be the start of a beautiful relationship!