Almost all recruiters are told they must cold-call to build a client-base.

Sadly, that is mostly bad advice.

Certainly it is true that all recruiters need to develop clients, identify prospects and find ways to build sustainable relationships. And often that means connecting with people you have never dealt with before. So yes, we are business developers, and in a tight market that becomes even more critical.

But, if at all possible, don’t cold call.

However don’t misunderstand me on this one. You do have to make those calls and initiate that contact. The point is, you should do everything you can to make sure that the call is not stone… freezing… cold. That is the key.

Move your cold call to a warm call.

Instead of hundreds of random calls to people who don’t want to hear from you, and where your pitch is little more than “Got any job orders I can fill?”, do the research work to find a point of common ground which turns the call from ‘cold’ to ‘warm’. There are many ways to do this, but here are a seven good ones.

1. Approach ex-candidates who are now in roles where they may become clients (I hope you looked after them well!)
2. Get a referral from another division or office in your company (“Mr. Prospect, I am calling because our Singapore office has done a lot of work with your colleague, Michael Chew, over there and he suggested I give you a call”)
3. Get a referral from another current client “Mr. Prospect I work extensively with Michael Chew at Apex Industries. He mentioned you had worked with him there, and suggested I give you a call to see how we might be able to assist”.
4. Connect first in a neutral environment and follow up later. “Mr. Prospect it was a pleasure to chat with you at the Marketing Institute Conference last week, and I would enjoy a chance to talk more about your comments on SEO trends”.
5. Follow up previous placements, no matter how long ago. “Mr. Prospect, you probably would not realize this, but I placed Bob Clarke with your predecessor quite a while ago. I would love to come down and see how he is doing and introduce myself”.
6. Engage on social media first “Mr. Prospect I have enjoyed our banter on Twitter and thanks for the follow by the way. I am in your part of town next Tuesday and would love to drop in and find out more about the new training system you were tweeting about” (A Rec to Rec did exactly this to me while I was in London recently. I met her).
7. Follow up on a talk given by a prospect, or a blog written, or a piece of PR they have received. “Mr. Prospect, I loved your blog on the boom in mobile technology, …”

Be creative about this. Brainstorm it in your team. You don’t want to be manipulative or trite, but you do want to start your BD call from a warmish position, get some connection… and then move on from there.

It will increase your hit rate exponentially

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“So let me just clarify your position on this, Mr Client.

You spend 30 minutes telling me all the recruiters you have used so far are hopeless, they provide zero value, they can’t find the talent you want, their service is pathetic, and they do not understand your business.

Then, we spend hours going through your needs, you are excited because we really understand you and your role, and  you are confident we can access the skills you need…

Then after weeks of work, including search, social media, networking, interviewing, access to our database, screening, reference checking, and input from our global team… we do find that elusive talent…

And you review our shortlist and you are overjoyed at the quality. You are almost speechless at the prospect that finally a recruiter actually delivers.

Then you tell me you think our fee is too high because the other guys charge less!

FFS!

Can you actually hear yourself?”

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There has never been a more critical time for recruiters to focus on prioritising their job orders. Clients are tentative and decisions are slow to come, so we simply cannot waste our time on briefs that were never real in the first place. Working with clients who are not ready, willing or committed to hire is a disaster.

Indeed, making sure you apply yourself to where you will get a return is the mantra we all should be living by every day. I wrote on this blog about tight talent selection, and also about the art of job order triage, and asking qualifying questions, and it might be wise for all of us to review the sentiments expressed there.

But still I find recruiters are too ‘generous’ with their time. Every order is treated as equal. Every client is king. This is wrong (Indeed we need to fire some of those clients!), and this little checklist on qualifying job orders, put together with a lot of help from Firebrand Director Simon Lusty, is a great place to start increasing your productivity. (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge)

It is a recruiting skill to actually dig into and expose each of these criteria, and maybe I will blog separately on that in future. But for today, from now on, run every job you take past this template. Be honest. Be brutal. If you don’t know the answer, then get it, before you start any work on a new order.

If you can’t rate every question, then don’t work the order.

Then rank all your job orders by this scoring system. If you have plenty of jobs in the 19+ bracket… well... only work those! Don’t be distracted by unqualified, hard to fill orders with uncommitted clients.

Better to work on 8 jobs and fill 6, than slave away on 20 messy orders and fill two!

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You have a lot of things to do in your job. Am I right?

You are super-busy all the time. Candidates to interview. Resumes to prepare. References to take. Sales calls to make. Visits to go on. Calls to return. Admin to tie up. Your company also has a raft of KPI’s and activities they want you to meet. It never ends.

And it’s all so important

But bring it in tight everyone. There is only one thing you need to measure when it comes to being a perm or search recruiter.

The golden metric.

How many of your candidates are sitting opposite your clients.

That is it.

‘Client Candidate Interviews’, or CCIs as we call them at Firebrand

Yes, our ultimate goal is placements. And the happy clients, happy talent and happy us that will result from lots of placements. But placements are the outcome. We don’t make the job offer. So we can’t control the outcome.

We need to focus on the activity that leads to the outcome

What is the one thing that must happen for a talent to be hired?

They get interviewed!

Everything else you do in this job either leads up to that happy moment, or supports the outcome of that event.

(Of course quality counts too. You have to take qualified job spec and find great talent and make a great match. But that’s a given, right?)

The reality is that if you arrange for one candidate to sit opposite one client in one week, you can by definition make… one placement! And only then if all the recruiting Gods are smiling on you.

But if you get three interviews on different jobs you could get three placements. Or three interviews on the same job, exponentially increases your chances of one placement. And if you get 15 candidates sitting in interviews…

The point is you got to make lots and lots of interviews! So obvious I know. Yet I often hear what a great week a recruiter had, and when I dig a little… busy, busy, busy… but no CCIs!

It’s in the CCI that the magic happens!

So you have had a ‘busy’ week. Go, go, go. You are so tired. So satisfied you have given it your all.

Ask yourself as you open that first beer Friday at 6 pm.

“How many of my candidates are sitting down opposite my clients as a result of what I did this week?”

None?

#Fail

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Productivity in recruitment is totally linked to activity.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking anything else.

Yes, the quality of that activity is key, and whom you actually do that activity with is important too. But if you don’t do enough ‘stuff’, you will fail.

Take that as gospel.

So, it is to maintain a pipeline of the key activities that drive success. Any fall-off in that pipeline, and a rapid decline in your placements and therefore revenue is as predictable as night following day.

The activities that need to fill up your ‘pipeline’ could include a wide variety of things, but typically you need to meet quality talent and meet face to face with clients. Those are the metrics that drive the ultimate match. Think about it in the simplest way for a moment. If you are running a perm desk you only earn money;

• If people get hired
• And people only get hired if people get interviewed – by the client
• And Client/Candidate Interviews only happen if qualified job orders are secured
• And qualified job orders typically result from face to face meetings
• In addition, people get hired only if they accept job offers
• And job offers come to quality, qualified talent
• And of course, qualified talent are typically the result of a thorough interview with the recruiter

So if you believe the bullet points above, you must maintain a pipeline of consistent activity or the desired end result (placements, fees, and therefore fun and money) will not eventuate.

But.

What happens when you go on leave for 2 weeks? Does the pipeline abruptly dry up?  Typically, what happens is this. The recruiter pushes hard to get as much closed before she goes on leave (or she winds down, having started her leave mentally before it has begun physically).

When she comes back the pipeline is as dry as a camels crotch.

Demoralised, she shuffles paper for a while and clicks through her database, until eventually the penny drops and she starts to make sales calls and recruit talent.

It takes 2 weeks to start to crank up momentum.

It takes 4 weeks before the pipeline is flowing.

It takes 8 weeks before the first placement, post-holiday, is made.

A two week holiday has ruined an entire quarter

But it does not have to be so.

Here is a simple strategy to keep that pipeline healthy – even if you do go away.

10 days out from your holiday starting, you set yourself a few simple goals.

“Before I leave on holiday I will have arranged…”

• 10 sales visits for the first 10 days after I get back
• 10 talent interviews for the first 10 days after I get back

That’s it. And you make it happen.

Actually it’s a lot easier calling clients and prospects and arranging a meeting for 3 weeks time. It can be done quite quickly.

Same with talent.

Be honest. “I will be away for a couple of weeks. But as soon as I get back lets get your situation moving. I will see you in two weeks time. How about 10 am on Tuesday the 12th?”

Sure, some meetings will be cancelled. But here is the point…

Instead of getting back to a dead desk and weeks of grinding the activity wheel and maybe months before the $ flow, you hit the ground running.

You get back from holiday and you have no orders to work on but you have 2 client meetings on day one. And another the next day. And two more the day after that. Plus you are seeing fresh candidates immediately.

By the end of the week after your break, you are in full swing. Feeling busy, being busy.

Yes you can take a holiday and be a successful recruiter. But make sure a 2-week holiday costs you two weeks of down time.

Not six weeks.

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Last week I blogged on the importance of “job order triage”. Great recruiters ruthlessly prioritise the briefs they work on, and put most effort into the highly fillable few.

Well, what about the candidates to invest time in?

Some recruiters take the view that as there is a talent shortage, every candidate needs equal help and focus.

Afraid not. Big mistake.

You need to discriminate when it comes to talent selection. Obviously not on the basis on creed, colour, ethnicity, or any other irrelevant, illegal or immoral prejudice.

No, you need to discriminate on the basis of the answer to one golden question.

Is this candidate placeable?

And a placeable candidate is one about whom you can answer YES to these two questions.

• If put in front of the right clients, will this candidate likely be offered a job?
• If offered a job on reasonable market terms, is this candidate likely to accept it?

There it is – the definition of a placeable candidate. Obvious huh?

Well not so obvious if you see the bumbling efforts of most recruiters when it comes to deciding who they spend their precious time on.

Common errors include working on the candidate with the most marketable skills (cool but what good is that if his salary expectations are 25% above market?). Or working on a candidate who deep down has no real intention of leaving where they are, but in fact have had a bad week and are just flirting with leaving. After you have done all the work to find them a job, their current employer will easily woo them back with money, or emotional blackmail, or both.

But a great recruiter knows all this before they ever start trying to find someone a job.

Placeable candidates. The ones you should discriminate towards when it comes to effort, typically have all or most of these characteristics:

• They have skills and experience currently in demand.
• Their salary expectations are reasonable and they present as an affordable option to a potential employer.
• They have legitimate and tested reasons for leaving where they are now. You have dug down and unearthed their true motivators to leave and you believe you can find them these things in a new role.
• You have pre-empted the possibility of a counter offer from their current employer.
• They interview well. Likeable, personable, communicative.
• The candidate buys into your “rules of engagement” where you explain how you and he will work together, and during the process they deliver on that commitment. (For example returning your calls, attending all interviews etc.
• The candidate agrees to allow you to exclusively handle their job search.

Remember this: Finding someone a job is only half the battle. Getting them to accept it is the other half.

So “discriminate” to your heart’s content. Work hard on candidates who will get a job offer if put in front of a client and will accept it once it comes.

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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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This can sound like a cliché but it’s never going to be more important than in the next few years.

Recruiters must build relationships. Real ones.

So many of the people who lost their jobs in our industry over the past 2 years did so because their relationship with clients and talent were superficial or non-existent. They had become technology driven, resume shuffling drones who competed on speed and price alone.

Now, the core competence of every recruiter is the ability to find great people and build relationships with them. This is what all great recruiters must do.

Recruiters need to get out of their organisation and get to know people at all levels who might be useful to them and their firm. You might use technology to help create the initial relationship, or it might be via networking or sales effort.  Then you need to leverage that by using social media including Twitter, blogs, websites, and anything else that will create authentic interaction with a potential candidate pool.

But remember, the technology part is an enabler to the solution, it is not the solution. More than half of every recruiter’s time should be used to network, build relationships, communicate, and get involved with candidates. Start now to get a head start on your competition. You need to build a community of talent who you know and engage with. Just running an ad on a job board is the lowest level of candidate interaction I can think of. It’s not differentiated in any way, and of course it does not work and that will get even worse.

We have to fundamentally shift our mentality in relation to candidates. “Just in time” recruitment is history and job boards will increasingly become ineffective.

Recruiters who can provide real career advice, listen to candidates’ concerns, and truly consult on which positions might be the best fit will be recruiters who grow and prosper in this, and any economy.

So if you are going to thrive in the recovery you will need to find new and innovative ways to engage with the talent market because I guarantee you, talent shortages will be back with us soon.

In fact, top recruiters will build talent communities that they communicate with on an ongoing basis. “Post and pray” will not be enough.

Those recruiters who stick with outdated sourcing methods, who fail to innovate, who fail to really work at sourcing, will fall way behind. And won’t reap the full benefit from the recovery when it comes.

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In financial markets they talk about canny investors being “stock-pickers”, which refers to an ability to select ‘diamonds in the 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 is 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 a 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 those needs. In fact, we need to predict impending client needs and source talent accordingly; ahead of time.

Then we need to assess which candidates are truly motivated to move. Finding someone a job is only half the battle. Getting them to accept it is the other half.

Winning clients is important, obviously. But as the market tightens, increasingly those recruiters who select committed, in-demand candidates to work with will emerge the winners.

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