You call them ‘clients’ and you think they see you as a business partner. Take this quick test and maybe… think again! Tick each statement that applies to you.

1. They won’t meet you to provide a new job brief. It’s emailed, or given over the phone, or maybe its just a few lines in an email.
2. They give you jobs in competition. And you are not even first.
3. When you do eventually arrange a meeting, they keep you waiting for ages, or even stand you up altogether.
4. They don’t return your calls.
5. They routinely don’t interview the candidates you present.
6. They won’t give you sound reasons for rejecting candidates that they have declined to interview.
7. They demand urgency from you every step of the way, but are slow to come back in a timely fashion themselves.
8. They don’t give you feedback on the candidates they interview from you.
9. They arrange second interviews with preferred candidates directly.
10. They ignore your advice on salary and conditions and… pretty much everything actually!
11. They raise issues and information, critical to the hire (that they have never told you) with the candidate.
12. They make an offer direct to your candidate without going through you or even telling you.
13. They haggle your fee, after the deal is done.
14. They offer perm jobs to your temps without telling you.
15. They flirt inappropriately or ask you out on a date.

Score yourself here. Tick each statement that applies to you.

0-5 – Nice job, your clients are treating you as a ‘partner’
6-10 – More work needed to elevate your status to ‘trusted advisor’
11-15 – You don’t have clients. You have tyre-kickers and ‘bikers’

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Everyone says recruiting is changing. The evidence is overwhelming that we are on the cusp of a seismic shift in the way our industry needs to work. It is all changing. Client expectations, candidate behavior, social media, technology.

But how do we sort out the reality from the hype? And what should the ordinary recruiter do to prepare for the future?

Well, a great place to start is to make sure you understand what is different about the way our clients are thinking now. Have they changed their outlook from prior to the GFC? What are their pain points? And how is all this going to affect recruiting, and indeed our industry as a whole?

Over the past six months I have personally been on about 50 face-to-face client visits. In Australia, the UK, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia and France. Typically I have met with the CEO, the CMO, or the VP responsible for Talent and Recruiting.

And I have taken these wonderful opportunities to ask those senior executives exactly these key questions, and more. What are they thinking? What is their attitude to hiring? What is working in terms of recruitment? What is not? What do they plan to invest in? Are they going to use third-party recruiters more, or less?

And I learned a lot. Too much to share completely in this blog, so I chose one compelling theme. And it is this.

The critical thing you need to know, if you did not already, is this. In boardrooms across the world, CEOs, CFOs and HR Directors, have a fierce desire, backed up by real strategies, to drive as much cost from recruitment as possible.

Hiring, its cost, its effectiveness, is under an intense spotlight. Everywhere.

This is driven by good old-fashioned cost-control as you might expect. CEOs are under intense pressure to deliver growing profits as the economies recover. But also something new has emerged.

Increasingly, I now see a very deep cynicism of the value of third-party recruiters. Business leaders are now changing their whole recruitment strategy accordingly. Internal recruiting teams, RPO, talent technology, and a range of direct sourcing tactics.

And for many companies around the world, social media has come as a godsend, because they see it as a great channel to connect with talent directly and cut you (and me) out!

And that is what many intend to do.

Our challenge is going to be to woo those ex and prospective clients back. And to do that we are going to have to prove we can give them something they can’t get themselves, at a cost that they perceive to constitute value.

This is the massive issue for us all in recruiting that I learned from speaking to your clients.

Differentiation and proof of value

And it will send many recruiters who get it wrong out of business… soon

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If you have plans to be a great recruiter, please, remember this and never forget it.

Filling a job does not start with finding good candidates for a particular job order. It starts with the quality with which you take the job order in the first place. It does not matter if you take the brief face to face (and you should, if at all possible), or over the phone. Filling the order starts with how well you qualify that order.

You have to make sure, at the very get-go, that the order you are so excited about, is in fact, fillable! Sound crazy? I don’t think so. My assessment is that most contingent recruitment firms fill somewhere around 25% of the permanent jobs they take. And they only achieve a 25% success rate if they are both very good and very lucky! Everyone denies that of course, but usually that’s because we don’t measure it, or because we are in big-time denial about the reality of our fill ratios.

What this means is that we end up spinning our wheels on 75 % of the permanent orders we take on. It is madness, and I have written extensively on selling exclusivity in the past and more recently too.

Now it is true that you will be hard-pressed to fill 100% of your job orders in a contingent market. However, you will increase your hit rate exponentially if you learn to qualify your job orders. The key to this is to take charge of the order-taking phase and to act and believe as though you are the expert.

Another day, another blog, maybe, I will lay out how to quality a job order from beginning to end. But here let me share two golden question you must ask every single time you take a job order. It’s non-negotiable. Without asking these questions you are taking on the order ‘blind’. It is in fact inconceivable to me how any recruiter would expend one second of time on filling an order for a client, if they had not asked these two questions, and drilled down on the answers too.

These questions are designed to assist you ‘triage’ your job taking. Is this brief urgent?  How sincere is your client about actually making a hire? In other words, if you put a suitably qualified candidate in front of your client, would they offer them a job? Indeed, will they actually ever even interview them?

Basic you say? Hilarious, I say! Or maybe tragic is more accurate.

Every day I see even experienced recruiters taking on orders they will never fill. Unqualified orders.

If you want to put the title ‘Recruitment Consultant’, or anything vaguely similar on your business card, ask this;

Question #1: “Ms Client, how long have you been trying to fill this particular role and what steps have you taken so far to fill the position?”

Question #2: “Ms Client, if I found the perfect candidate this afternoon, could we get an offer by tomorrow morning?”

The answers to these questions will unlock a treasure trove of information for you. Yes they will provoke more questions and more answers, but once it’s been worked through you will know whether this job is real, whether this client is able to hire and committed to hire, and you will know the urgency of the need.

There are a myriad of variations in the answers you will get, but largely it plays out as follows:

In answer to Question #1, how long has the role been open and what has been done to fill it, you will hear that it’s been open 6 months, that it’s been offered 3 times, that it’s never been offered, that it’s with six other recruiters, that it has been advertised on 12 job boards, that no one has ever been interviewed for the role, that the search criteria have changed 4 times because the hiring manager can’t make up his mind on what he is looking for.  You will dig, you will ask more questions, but you will slowly uncover if the job is real and if it is, what has to change to make sure it will be filled.

Or, in answer to Question #1 you might just get the dream response, which is “the current incumbent resigned last night and I am desperate to get a replacement, and so I called you”. That is a beautiful sound. It is the sound of a client in pain, and a client in pain is a very good thing. Because we can ease that pain

When it comes to Question # 2 you are not really looking to have the job filled by tomorrow. You are assessing the clients’ seriousness. A typical response to this could be “Oh no we can’t give an answer by tomorrow because we are still assessing internal candidates”, or “Oh, we can’t move that fast because the CEO has not signed off on this hire as yet” or any number of other responses that tell you quite clearly: Do not work on this brief – because it is not real.

Remember, you are not a lackey to you clients’ whim. You are not in servitude, required to supply candidates on demand for your client to peruse eventually, if he feels like it, one day, maybe…

You are a professional recruiter and your time has value. If you are not working on a retainer (and your clients will not jerk you around if you are), you need to drill down on these 2 questions in depth, every time. Even then, that is only stage one of qualifying the order.

But please, at the very least, do that.

I have written before on the farcical chaos that results when recruiting clients engage multiple recruiters to work on the same job order. And I have offered advice on how a recruiter should sell exclusivity to clients to ensure this does not happen.

But as the market improves, maybe we need to focus on a key component of selling exclusivity. And that is a clear understanding of why working with one, quality recruiter on a specific brief is actually in the clients’ best interests. Well here are 15 very good reasons for starters.

• The Client is getting the Recruiter’s full commitment to filling their vacant role. Let’s not beat around the bush here. A client may think they get more effort from a recruiter when the role is in competition, but what really happens is a short burst of activity from the recruiter, and then our interest wanes as we realise the client is not committed, and we go and put our energy into clients who will work with us as partners.
• The responsibility for success is now shifted to the Recruiter. If the job is given to one recruiter, retained or exclusive, we own the problem. The client can focus on whatever it is they do for a living.
• The client is taking the focus off speed and back on quality. Why would you want your crucial hiring decision based on who can get candidates to you first? Would you hire a brain surgeon because they could do the job fastest? A house painter? A hairdresser?  ‘Exclusivity’ means the recruiter has time to do thorough work.
• Exclusivity allows the Recruiter to bring all their resources to bear in the talent search. Not just a quick data-base search. But a thorough, detailed talent search including networks, communities and social media.
• Working exclusively usually means there is time for the Recruiter to take a detailed job order. The better the order, the better the match.
• There is time for the Recruiter to do a full and comprehensive database search. The Client gets the best, not the best we saw that week.
• The Recruiter has time to comb networks, online resources, social media networks and tap in to the passive talent market.
• If the Recruiter is a global business like Firebrand, exclusivity allows time to access Talent through our global reach.
• Exclusivity means more time to do thorough screening, saving the clients time and frustration.
• Time allows thorough Talent interviews, including full assessment of skills, experience and attitude.
• The Recruiter will be able to fully qualify the Talent in terms of start date and salary, once again saving the client much time and frustration.
• The Client will save time by dealing with one competent recruiter. No multiple agency briefings and multiple contacts to deal with.
• The Clients’ confidentiality is preserved as the role is not being touted around town by  five or six recruiters, each speaking to 9 or 10 candidates about the role.
• Clients brand and image is improved by using one recruiter, because their job is not devalued in the eyes of talent, who will be suspicious if the job is represented by multiple recruiters.
• Exclusivity means you will not have the issue of recruiters referring the same Talent to the same client – which can be very sordid indeed.

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Great recruiters need to understand their industry, their company, the competition, and the business environment for the types of people they place. You need to be a mile deep and an inch wide!

I find that recruiters are easily seduced. In fact, truthfully we can be a bit tarty. 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 of working in areas we are unlikely to ever revisit. Interviewing candidates we are never going to place. 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. That is absolutely key if you are serious about this business. This expert status appeals to both prospective clients and candidates. We all want to deal with an “expert” right?

Furthermore, it gives recruiters instant credibility with passive candidates, which will be increasingly crucial. Clients are already seriously questioning the value of our fees. We have to elevate ourselves to a trusted advisor relationship.

And for that to happen we must not dabble.

Don’t allow distractions.

Go deep.

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Regular readers of my blog will know that I have predicted for some time that clients will expect more from recruiters as the market recovers. I have said that we can expect pressure on our fees, particularly as employers invest in other ways to access talent.

But it’s also true that market forces will prevail. At Firebrand Talent Search we have seen a marked easing in pressure on our fees and in fact in some countries, fee levels are on the rise.

In Singapore for example, where Firebrand has a strong business in the marketing, media, advertising and creative sectors, we are finding that many clients have taken the focus off fee percentages, and are now concerned entirely with accessing the best talent.

In 2009 our fees dropped to between 20% and 25% in Singapore, while now 25% and beyond is routine, and in many cases we secure retainers too, which makes for a much better business partnership.

In Australia we have not seen fees rise in our Firebrand offices, but we have seen the downward pressure on fees ease significantly and we now secure all our work at our term sheet rates. Clients are aware the fight for talent is hotting up.

Japan too has seen fees rising back to 30% and beyond. In one particular case, a client of Firebrand is offering “bounty” fee levels to ensure they capture the best talent. This gaming software business routinely offers Firebrand 40% and 45% fees for specific roles, for a defined time period – usually three months.

This month this client offered us a 60% fee (on a USD $60,000 job!) and our Tokyo team promptly filled the order, securing a fee in the vicinity of $40,000.

This trend is fascinating to me. I have never really seen a situation where the client is driving fees upwards. We would NEVER suggest a 60% fee. Yet this clients’ rationale is “Top talent is hard to find. We want the best. We are competing with other employers. We want the recruiter to be motivated to find us the best.”

And it’s working. The candidate we placed into this role had very rare user interface skills and the Firebrand team found him, a Japanese speaker, in Melbourne!

Once again the true value of our business is laid bare.

Access to talent.

That’s where it’s at.

Last week I blogged about how you need to move the focus away from dollars and percentages when clients negotiate fees, and on to your value and your differentiators.

One of the comments on my blog from Matthew Lancey raised the point that sometimes clients keep pushing, and they say something like “but your competitors charge less”.

And it’s this use of the “C” word that often scares recruiters.

The “C’ word? Competitors. I love it when clients use that word. If they do start to talk about competitor’s low fees, your response is to ask…

“Can you tell me about a situation, Ms Client, where you were charged less than the fee I am suggesting today, where you got the level of service and the calibre of talent you want – on a regular basis?”

True, this is a gamble, but the fact that you are there, in the client’s office, taking the order, or even on the phone taking the order, means that it is most unlikely the client is happy with their current supplier. In fact it amazes me when a client spends 20 minutes bagging another recruiter, and then when I quote my fee – he says, but the other recruiter only charges 15%!

That’s is the time to remind the client that a low fee, quoted by a supplier who does not deliver, is not a benchmark you will measure your fees against. And nor should the client.

Sometimes the client pushes hard for a reduced fee. When that happens, don’t feel pressurised. It’s a purely commercial decision – and it’s your decision to make. Is this client and this order so attractive it is worth taking a lower fee for?

Remember this before you discount next time. Don’t think of the fee only as dollars gained or lost – think of the fee as what your service is worth. A discounted fee means a discounted you – never forget that.

But sometimes you feel it is worth a compromise to secure a particular opportunity. In these cases I emphasise one golden rule.

Never reduce your originally quoted fee without extracting a concession from the client.

In other words if you say, “My fee is 20%”.  And the client asks for a discount. And you quickly respond with “OK how does 15% sound?”. You have just signaled to the client that you never believed in your value proposition and your service in the first place. You will struggle with getting his respect ever again – and you will never get your fees back up.

So if you reduce your fee, always ask for something in return – exclusivity maybe, client paid advertising maybe, client gives you multiple orders maybe, or maybe you waive the guarantee.

Make sure the negotiation involves both sides giving. This way the equal partnership is in tact.

So is your self-esteem by the way. And in our business, that’s crucial.

It’s a fact of recruiting life that clients will push you to negotiate your fees. And with so many recruiters quick to drop fee percentages to secure briefs, that can be a hard discussion to deal with.

The starting point for successful fee negotiations is, strangely enough, to get the conversation off the fee percentage, and on to the question of what it is your fee is actually for.

And of course, bundled up in that conversation, is your ability to sell your differentiator. What have you got and what do you do that gives your client special value? That’s where you want to focus. At Firebrand Talent Search we emphasize our niche focus, our unmatched access to creative, marketing and digital talent, our multiple branches in Asia Pacific and Europe, our specialist knowledge and understanding of clients needs, our proprietary testing software which means we know candidates have the design skills we say they do, and then we wrap all this up in 110% money back guarantee.

But all recruiters will have differentiators, and it’s important you know how to articulate them.

So when a client does ask you to drop your fee, go through your entire recruitment process explaining all the things you do to secure the right person. Take your time. Start at the beginning and don’t miss anything out. Talk about your screening, your interviewing, your talent generation strategies such as social media and networking. Talk about your database and the fact you have several offices tapping into talent. Explain how you act as an advocate for the client, and how you will qualify each candidate in terms of fit, salary and skills. When you drill down on this, you find we do a lot!

That’s the point. Tell your client.

Then, and only then, ask the client why she feels a reduced fee is appropriate. This is important. Get the ball firmly into the client’s court. The client is asking for a discount. She should be squirming – not you. When it comes to fee discounts you don’t have to justify why not – she has to justify why!  It’s a shift in the dynamic and it’s very powerful indeed.

Its not as simple as this of course, many clients will continue to push for a fee discount regardless, and then you have to make a commercial decision. But the starting point is not to haggle over a number. Get the attention of the service you provide.

Talk about what you do, explain your process and your insights and your connections and your value adds.

That’s a far better place to start a discussion on discounts!

A great recruiter will be totally articulate in positioning why a client is doing themselves tremendous harm by getting recruiters to compete.

By all means, let recruiters compete for a client. No problems there. That’s capitalism at its finest. But we should not compete on the same job. That is just dumb business by all parties.

View video on YouTube

Let’s examine what is happening when a client gives a brief to say, four recruiters.

The client thinks they get better commitment from each recruiter. In fact we know that quite the reverse is true. We might put a burst of energy into finding candidates for a job ‘in competition’. But if we don’t fill it fast, we lose interest, and put our energy into clients who treat us as partners and are committed to finding the best person through us. That is the reality. But for some reason we don’t tell our clients this.

Are you prepared to look a client in the eye and say “Mr Client, when you give an order to four recruiters, you are effectively giving each recruiter 25% of your commitment. What makes you think that any one of those recruiters will give you more than 25% of their commitment in return? In fact what you are doing Mr Client, is inviting us to approach your crucial hiring decision on the basis of speed — instead on the basis of who can do the best quality job”.

Then go on to ask the client for a “window of opportunity” to handle the role exclusively, so that you can give the role 100% of your commitment and bring all your resources to bear to ensure the best quality outcome.

“Give the job to me exclusively, Ms Client, so I can have the time to put appropriate strategies in place to find the right person – which will of course include researching my database, working my talent communities, advertising, using my networks and searching the passive talent pool.”

Working multi-listed, contingent perm orders is bad business. It is better to work on six exclusive job orders – of which you will fill five, than to work on 20 in competition, of which you may fill three.

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Do you accept the fact that your client can reject candidates you present on your shortlist?

Yes? Then you lack ‘Recruiter Equity’.

View video on YouTube

Recruiter equity is the trust, the buy-in, the belief that your clients have in your ability and your judgment. It is the combination of your experience and your knowledge, and it gives you the power to advise clients and truly impact the outcomes of your interaction with them.

Most recruiters lack equity all together. The presenting of a shortlist for a permanent brief is a classic example.

The fact is, that if a client rejects or will not interview any of your shortlisted candidates, it can mean only one of two things — both bad.

1. You misunderstood the brief. You got it wrong.
2. The client does not trust your judgment.

It can mean nothing else.

Both of those outcomes is a disaster. And it means you did not get equity into the relationship with this client. Equity means ownership or a share of ownership. In this case joint ownership of the problem and the solution.  Recruiter equity is the key difference between winners and losers in this business. Do your clients trust your judgment? Do they interview every candidate you refer?

No? Then your recruiter equity is low – maybe non-existent. It takes hard work to build up your equity. It takes determination, study and practice. But it all stems from our attitude. Think about the best recruiters you know. The relationships they have with clients amount to shared equity. Sharing the problem. Sharing the solution. Sharing the rewards.

View the video for more on presenting the shortlist.