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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I have to admit I am sick and tired of hearing talk of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ candidates. Even though I admit to freely using the terms myself… until very recently.

But I am going to stop doing that.

People ramble on about ‘passive’ candidates, as if this is a totally fresh breed of human being, that only new-age, especially savvy recruiters know how to connect with. The ‘passive candidate’ has become a mystical ‘super-talent’, somehow superior and different to the bog-standard ‘active’ candidate, who has demeaned him or herself somehow, by actually sinking to the low of actively looking to change jobs.

Well here is a newsflash. There is no such thing as a passive candidate.

In the modern world of sustained talent shortages in niche areas, and evolving job-search behavior, today’s recruiters must think like this…

Everyone is a candidate, all the time.

What I am saying is that the only difference between an ‘active’ and a ‘passive’ job-seeker is a question of timing!

Everyone is ‘active’ if you convert them.

And therein lies the modern recruiting challenge. Yes, to identify and locate the talent with the skills we need. But then it’s up to us to convert them to ‘active’ status. That’s right, you “runner of job-board ads”, you “searcher of the tired old data-base”. It’s your challenge to find them, connect with them, seduce them… and in time, entice them to consider a new role.

So lets not talk about ‘passive’ anymore. It’s meaningless. All candidates are active… some just have to have their new job search ignited!

I feel pretty strongly about this topic, and am acting as MC to the cutting edge evolve2survive conference in Sydney and Melbourne, where global sourcing experts will coach on how to find those active talent who just need a little ‘ignition’.

I imagine I will be learning a great deal there, and so might you

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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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Don’t get me wrong. I use LinkedIn a lot, and of course so do all the recruiters at Firebrand.

But there are issues with LinkedIn. Flaws.

One of the most obvious is that LinkedIn appears to have no system to monitor accuracy of data on their network. Indeed, they freely admit that many profiles are bogus, and that many people have several LinkedIn profiles.

Only last week I was at a the Recruiters HUB conference in Sydney where a speaker, Kalena Jefferson, HRD for Kelly Services, spoke amusingly, about their office fish ‘Moby’, who apparently has a LinkedIn profile. And get this. Moby once received a headhunt approach via LinkedIn for a sales job!

Increasingly, I have started to detect flagrant misrepresentations on LinkedIn. I have close to 3,000 contacts on LinkedIn. Many of these people are quite well known to me. Some have worked for, or with me (over a 30 year career, that is a lot of people!), or I have interviewed them for a job, or we have done business together.

And even though these people know they are linked to me, many of them create LinkedIn profiles that are as fictional as a Harry Potter novel!

A recruiter who held a bog standard recruiting role with my company, who now, miraculously, was apparently a ‘Divisional Manager’ while with us. A ‘LinkedIn Retrospective Promotion’.

Or a failed recruiter, who was managed out of the business for under-performance, now proudly boasts on her profile that she was the ‘Office Top Biller’ for three quarters out of four!

Or the receptionist – a temp when she was with us, what is more – who has morphed into the ‘Group Administration Manager’ on her LinkedIn profile, which on face value now looks very impressive indeed!

Or (and these are all real actual examples, I hasten to remind you) the ditsy, hopeless recruiter who eventually stole from the company, who just simply leaves the year she was employed here off her profile entirely! And then adds the inconvenient extra 12 months on to another job!

It happens all the time.

And it’s not just qualifications, work history, achievements and job titles that are inflated, exaggerated and quiet simply fabricated. The recommendations on LinkedIn are often as farcical as a John Cleese special.

Like the Senior Manager who worked for me, who eventually had to fire a woefully incompetent Manager… who now brazenly recommends her in glowing terms on LinkedIn! Are we surprised to find she recommends him back in a cozy, all too familiar, LinkedIn tit for tat recommendation love-in?

How can we possibly take LinkedIn recommendations seriously when they are mostly solicited, reciprocal, and worst of all – self-published! If you don’t like what they say, even in nuance, you don’t approve it.

Total nonsense. Useless. Farcical. John Cleese would approve.

LinkedIn has great application. But it is riddled with flaws too. For a start it is packed with fraudulent, exaggerated and inflated profiles.

And it begs the question. Does LinkedIn bear a duty of care to users of their service? In many cases we pay to secure access to these profiles. If they are fraudulent, and we make a hire, or recommend a hire, on the basis of LinkedIn provided data… does LinkedIn bear liability?

Should they?

But in the meantime, legal niceties aside, beware the LinkedIn liar.

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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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Recruiters often complain about the fickleness of clients. Clients don’t return our calls, they don’t give commitment, and they don’t follow through.

Often true.

But, is it always the client’s fault? Does the relationship flounder because you don’t put in the effort you should? Indeed, do you commit the cardinal sin of slipping into ‘chronic client complacency’? Honestly, I have done it myself, and paid the price. I see it happening all around me too. Bet you see, and hear, it too.

• “That’s my client”
• “Oh don’t worry about that client, she only uses me”
• “I get all their work”
• “I don’t need to take this job in person, I know this client so well and he is 100% loyal to me”

Sound familiar?

And what’s more, it’s often the very best clients we take for granted, lose focus on, and spend less time nurturing. Which is mega-crazy when you realise how much time we spend on new business development, with prospects who have never spent a single $ with us!

2012 is the time to get ‘client fit’.

That means honing up every aspect of the client relationship. Keeping it oiled and supple and vigorous and healthy. Take this little quiz to check your ‘client fitness’ (Good, regular clients I am talking about, not one-hit wonders or prospects).

1. Have you seen your client contact, face to face, in the last 3 months?
2. Do you see that person at least 4 times a year?
3. Do you take every permanent or search order, in person, if at all possible?
4. Have you met every line manager in the client business who could potentially be a hiring manager for you?
5. Have you met your client’s boss?
6. If your client is a line manager, have you asked to meet the HR team, and gone to see them, and asked “What can I do to make your job easier”
7. Have you studied your clients website, closely, recently?
8. Do you subscribe to your client’s blog, newsletters, Twitter feed and Facebook page?
9. Have you tried, and do you try to use, your client’s products and services?
10. Are you connected to your client on LinkedIn?
11. Do you massage you clients’ ‘social ego’ by re-tweeting his tweets, commenting on his blog and “Liking” his Facebook page?
12. Have you asked, “What is there about my service that I could do better, or what could I add”?
13. Have you found a good reason to get your client into your office? (A quick sandwich lunch in the Board Room, to meet your CEO… whatever!)
14. Have you followed up with every placement you have ever made at your client company, and do so every 6 months?
15. If you have temps on long-term contracts at your client’s site, do you ‘make yourself big’ by going to see them, handing out Easter Eggs, running on-site training, bringing in morning tea, and generally making sure you are ‘visible’?
16. Do you know who your clients’ clients are? And do you know lots about them?
17. Do you keep up to speed with your clients’ industry, and especially their competitors, and know what the key issues and trends are?
18. Have you done an annual or bi-annual ‘Business Review’ with your client which is like a mini performance review, where your work is summarised, assessed and communication both ways occurs to make the relationship better?
19. Do you know what the 3 biggest staffing/HR issues are for your client, and do you discuss them often, with a view to assist?
20. Do you keep up to date with your clients’ benefits structure, vacation allowance, their social media policy, and any other factors that could influence the interest of a future hire?
21. Do you regularly provide your clients with value-adds that you don’t charge for, like salary surveys and market updates?
22. Have you agreed ‘standing briefs’ with your client? Clearly mapped out skill-sets that your client is always interested in – even if they have no specific role for you? Most companies are open to hearing about ‘that special someone’. You need to know who that is, and float them in.
23. Are your most current terms of business up to date and signed off by the client? Or are you still operating off the terms they signed in 1999?
24. Have you introduced your clients to another recruiter on your team, or your manager, so that client ‘feels the love’ and knows they can call on someone else if you are out or away?
25. Have you specifically thanked your client for their business, maybe over lunch or with a small gift, or even just a visit where thanking them was the sole purpose?

OK, feeling exhausted with your fitness test? Score yourself now;

0 -10: You are a slob. Totally out of shape and unworthy of keeping your clients. Commit to get fit! Or accept you will die a young recruiting death.
11-15: Come on mate! Lift your game. You have some things right, but a long way to go.
16-20: You are a ‘client-fit’ amateur athlete. Working hard, looking pretty good, but still carrying a bit of flab.
21-25: You are a superbly honed, ‘client fit’, Olympic-level superstar. Nice job!

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This one is for recruiters. Especially recruiters with a couple of years experience, who think they are good. In fact you may think you are pretty damn good!

Well, there is a huge threat facing you. And it’s not social media, or technology or the economy, or RPO, nor the rise of  in-house recruiters.

It’s you.

To be more specific, it’s your attitude. And to be even more precise, it’s your arrogance and complacency. I can’t tell you how many promising recruiters have fallen off the rails, because of early success, which they have mistakenly understood to mean they ‘know it all’.

One of the things I always look for when hiring new recruiters at Firebrand is “coachability”. I don’t even know if that’s a word, but I sure know what it means.

The ability to learn new skills, the willingness to change, a mindset which seeks improvement, and the ego which accepts there may ‘be a better way’.

I see it all the time, and have done for decades. A new recruiter has raw potential, works hard, gets some basic skills, and has some early success. God knows, we all love recognition, but why is it in this business that ‘prima donnas’ bloom so early and with so little reason? Actually I know why. We all worship at the altar of ‘fees’ in this industry. And some companies will excuse ignorance, arrogance and lack of real understanding of client and candidate need… as long as a recruiter bills. In fact they reward it. So little recruiter Johnny, who knows 2% of f***all, is now a hero because he stitched together a good quarter of billings! No wonder he thinks he knows it all!

And that is the danger period. For you. Usually after about 2 years. Complacency emerges. The barriers to learning go up. In reality, little Johnny plateaus, stagnates, and unbeknown to him, starts to whither!

Give me a dollar for every recruiter who told me ‘we always do it this way’, ‘this works for me’, ‘I know what I am doing’, or heaven save me….. ‘that won’t work in this market!’

I would be a very rich man.

Or even worse, the ‘silent antediluvian’, who does not voice disagreement, but just avoids or ignores any new tactic or advice, any technological advance. It’s not that they want to sabotage. They are just closed to any new ideas whatsoever.

Dinosaurs, who are always looking backwards, scoff at training sessions, and maintain excel spreadsheets of candidates or hard-copy résumés in their bottom drawers. FFS!

Intransigent fossils, who dismiss success by new-comers with fresh ideas, as ‘luck’, and complain that new technology, designed to help them become more efficient, merely  ‘gives them more admin to do’.

And slowly these people start to fail. And the more they fail, the more they blame it in on their employer, on the economy, on the market, on the technology, on their colleagues, on their clients, even on their admin support! Anyone, anywhere, but the real culprit. Themselves.

You want to be great at this job? Forge a real career?
 Then you have to understand the concept of your “Skills Briefcase”.

Imagine all your skills, capabilities, competencies, and knowledge – and then place them in your imaginary ‘skills briefcase’.

The question is simply this. What skills, what knowledge, what tactics, what relationships, and what competencies will be in your skills briefcase one year from now….. that are not in there today?

Or, what is in there now that was not there 12 months ago?

Nothing?

Hmm.

Tackle skills you are not good at and perfect them. Look for a mentor. Seek training and coaching. Tune into industry trends and changes and grab what you need.

Above all, be open to learning the nuances of this tough job we all do.

Anyone can match a résumé with a job description. That takes a week to learn. And you may even make some placements. But it’s the craft of recruiting I am talking about. The art. The skill of it. That takes years. Decades. Forever.

Great recruiters are sponges. For life. You are never totally ‘on top of your game‘ in this business. You can always get better.

And if you don’t, others around you most certainly will.

And then, for you, it’s welcome to the 80% of recruiters who enter our industry…and fail.

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No doubt you have been overwhelmed with high-level forecasts from wise recruiting soothsayers about 2012 being the year of mobile recruiting, the critical importance of building talent communities, the rise of employer branding… and many other trends that, truthfully, you hardly understand and definitely have little control over.

These people are smart, and much of what they say is spot on. But a lot is total hogwash too, no more than a distraction, and certainly most of it, you personally, cannot act on.

So what about the desk recruiter? The person doing the day-to-day slog? What resolutions can you make, today, that will equip you for a better year. Indeed, a better career?

Here are mine.

Fire lots of clients …now.

That’s right. Your eyes do not deceive. 2011 was truly the year of the tyre-kicker. At Firebrand we were overwhelmed with clients ‘testing’ the market, using multiple recruiters on the same brief, comparing our talent with internal candidates, withdrawing jobs at the last minute, even rescinding on offers.

2012 is the year to sort out these serial time-wasters and fire them. Don’t forget, you can choose who you do not work with. You have to prioritise your clients, and triage your job orders. Work on only those where the client is committed to working with you. Indeed you want a laser-like focus on clients who give you a return. The rest? Coach them on ways to work together. Give them another chance. Then kill off those bikers!

Spend less time on social media.

What? This is blasphemy! Spend less time? Who is this dinosaur? Well, I may be a dinosaur, but I am a dinosaur with 10,000 twitter followers, a blog read by 5,000 plus people every week, a busy Facebook page,  and many thousands of LinkedIn contacts.

So I know two things about Social Media.
i) the benefits
ii) how much time it wastes.
And you need to learn from this. Of course social media is a critical channel for recruiters. If you have not developed a social media profile yet, then get going. But don’t confuse the much touted mantra from the ‘experts’ that is ‘all about engagement,’ with banal banter and time-wasting that will lead to nothing. Don’t con yourself. Use social media wisely, with focus, with intent, with a plan …… and with a limit on how much time it sucks up. While we are on this topic, spend less time on your computer.

Spend more time on the oldest social networking tool we have – the telephone.

Yes, I know, seriously old-school. Yet it is a fact that recruiting is still about influencing, connecting, persuading, negotiating, listening, selling and closing. And if you think email or social media can do those things better than face-to-face or telephone contact…you are… how shall I word this? Ah yes! Dumb as mud.

Focus on $ productive activities.

There are so many distractions these days. So easy for a recruiter to ‘be busy’. On social media. On research. On admin. Your goal for 2012 is to spend as many hours as possible on dollar-productive activities. And those are the activities that lead to an invoice. And typically they are the ‘contact’ activities. Talking to, and meeting, with talent. Talking to, and meeting, clients and prospects. They are the money-moments. Again don’t fool yourself. A ‘busy day’ without lots of these activities, is not a dollar-day.

Increase innovation and time on talent acquisition.

Remember, not everyone is looking for a job, but everyone is available to change jobs. 2012 is the year for you to actually do something about tapping into the passive 90%. The future of recruitment is that everyone is a candidate -  all the time. And it is up to us to convert them into active candidates, not wait for them to come to us.

Focus only on things you have control over.

I am sick of hearing and talking about the shaky economy, fickle clients, the situation in Europe, the stock market gyrations, elections in the US, the talent shortage, what the Chinese may do with the currency. I mean seriously, can YOU do anything about those things? Of course not, so don’t waste your energy and denude your motivation with this stuff. Focus on what you can impact and control.

And mostly, those are the things I have outlined in this blog.

Wishing you all a fantastic 2012.

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2011 was a tumultuous year in recruitment. Global financial turmoil, the impact of social media and the rise of internal recruitment teams and RPO.

‘The Savage Truth‘ clocked up close to 50 blogs during the year, trying to make sense of it all. For those who like this kind of detail, The Savage Truth received 235,000 page views in 2011 (so far) with average time on each page being 3 minutes 19 seconds.

Below is a list of the most popular 2011 posts largely in order of ‘views’, but also taking into account Re-tweets on Twitter and the most blog comments this year.

If you missed these posts, just click the links below:

1. Being a recruiter rocks! (255 RTs, 56 comments)
2. “God, I hate recruiters!” (108 ‘strongly worded’ comments)
3. Recruiters, toughen the f*** up! (Over 5,000 social media shares!)
4. Two killer questions great recruiters ask every time
5. Sorry guys, women are better recruiters than men (46 contentious comments)
6. Recruiters, at last! Social media for dummies (285 RTs)
7. HR and internal recruiters, YOU need to lift your game too (40 fascinating comments)
8. 15 reasons why ‘exclusivity’ is in your clients’ best interests
9. Don’t be a LinkedIn ‘tart’!
10. 15 sure signs your ‘client’ does not take you seriously
11. 5 signs your new recruiter is destined to fail!
12. Fun and money – The two reasons to come to work
13. Recruiters: 8 reasons why your client meetings suck
14. My biggest ever recruitment stuff up!
15. Stressed recruiter? Take a chill-pill
16. What George Clooney taught me about recruitment
17. Client or not, behaving like a jerk… means you are a jerk
18. Discrimination in recruitment. Not only good – essential!
19. Recruiters, everyone is a candidate – all the time
20. You take the holiday – not your business

I hope you have enjoyed The Savage Truth this year, and see you in 2012!

Cheers

Greg

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