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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.

This is one of my favourite topics. I believe this is what will differentiate the winners from the losers in recruitment. In the end, a recruiter is as good as the number of candidates that she or he can close.

That is it.

So what recruiters are going to need in the next 3 years, is the ability to architect the deal. Something I feel we as an industry lost in the boom era.

I use the word ‘architect’ because it suggests designing, building, creating, managing. And these are the complex and subtle skills you will need to thrive going forward.

In recent years recruiters did no placement process architecture. What 90% of recruiters did, and still do, is pure introduction. That’s all we did. We were like organisers of a speed dating night. Throwing loosely compatible people together in an artificial environment for a short time and hoping they would fall in love!

That won’t do any more.

Those recruiters who understand that the human touch is still our primary tool in making a hire work, are those who will be most successful.

So how do we get better at ‘Placement Architecture’? There are three components to building strong hiring process, and these are skills you are going to need:

1. Take the time required. Recruitment is a series of discrete human interactions, and great recruiters will manage, control, and influence the outcome of each of those interactions to maximise success.
2. Listen better than ever before. Uncovering, questioning, and understanding are sadly undervalued recruiter skills that we need to hire and coach back into our business. Most recruiters do none of this. They act on the client’s word as if it is the true gospel, or they tell clients what to do without asking questions first. It sounds counter-intuitive, but great recruiters will purposely be “slow to understand”.
3. Question everything. The biggest cause of placements falling through is people making assumptions. Recruiters taking what they are told at face value. Ask for the “why and how” of everything that does not ring true, and don’t stop asking until you get an answer.

The good news is that the role of the recruiter, per se, is not under threat from technology or anything else. But the bad news is that the days of the dinosaur recruiter, unwilling to adapt, are well and truly numbered.

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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.

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.

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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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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!

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.

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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.

During my recent RCSA speaking tour around Australia I spoke to over 500 Australian recruiters on the upbeat topic of ‘Riding the Recovery’.

I have to admit it was refreshing to talk about positive ideas and strategies to ensure we take advantage of the opportunities presented by an economic revival.

One of the key areas I covered was the use of Social Media as a sourcing and influencing tool for our industry going forward. I have already blogged on my finding that Australian recruiters use Twitter in tiny numbers, but I also used this opportunity to survey (by show of hands, so not very scientific), the use of LinkedIn by Australian recruiters.

It turns out that in Sydney and Melbourne about 80% of recruiters have a LinkedIn Account (I have to say I am wondering what the other 20% are waiting for). However when asked whether their LinkedIn accounts were worked ‘actively’ with status updates, participation in groups and all the other available applications, only 20% kept hands raised.

In Brisbane, 70% have LinkedIn accounts but again, only 20% of those are ‘worked actively”.

I am no LinkedIn expert, but it seems self evident that it’s a great branding tool, a fantastic sourcing tool and an exceptional way to connect with otherwise inaccessible people –not to mention its research capabilities.

I have spoken to clients who acknowledge freely that the first thing they do when assessing a new recruitment service provider, is to review their LinkedIn profile, including an evaluation of history, stability and quality of the recruiters network.

Personally, I could do far more with my LinkedIn account. However I do review it every day, participate in groups, answer questions, update my status and add connections every week. So far I have hired new Firebrand employees from LinkedIn, won clients and secured speaking engagements.

So Aussie recruiters, let’s get with the programme. Slow to buy into Twitter I can half understand.

But if you are not LinkedIn… you are lucked out.

We are recovering from this downturn, and when we do, the talent shortage is going to be more severe than anything we experienced a year or two ago. Finding talent, connecting with those talent and building talent communities is going to be what separates the winners from the losers in the recruitment industry, in my opinion.

Sourcing talent will become far more fragmented in the future, and candidates will be accessed from an ever increasing variety of channels including social media, blogs, specialty sites, as well as user and special interest groups. Job boards will play a role, certainly, especially niche boards, but increasingly they will become less effective, particularly when it comes to connecting with the elusive passive candidates.

At Aquent we have taken what I believe is a bold but decisive decision to remove all job search or job board functions from our website, completely.

Aquent.com attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, and many of our best talent are captured this way. But we are are entering a brave new world of talent management I think, and now we must focus on connectivity at a human level with our candidates.

Aquent.com now encourages job seekers to search directly for an Agent (our name for Consultant) who specialises in the area that the candidate is interested in. The candidate can now connect with a personalised Agent URL (PURL), and from there can connect with the Agent directly via phone, email or social network.

We believe it’s time for a fresh approach to candidate communication. Talent are tired of applying for jobs via a job board, and never hearing back or getting a “Dear John” standard response. Ironically, our research suggest recruiter websites are the very worst offenders in this regard.

Now Aquent is taking the concept of connectivity and visibility to a whole new level, embracing the social medial model as an intrinsic way of doing business.

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.

On our agents’ profile, a job seeker will see the Agent’s face and their contact details. The job seeker will know what our Agent specialises in, and what they are passionate about. They can read our Agents’ testimonials from talent and clients, and then connect directly.

We want to turn the tables on the recruitment industry. Many recruiters go out of their way to make themselves uncontactable, hiding behind job reference numbers and generic email addresses.

All of this is just dumb business, because increasingly the recruiter who owns the talent market…will own the market!

Aquent’s processes are now transparent and gives total responsibility to our business – mature, specialised recruiters to satisfy talent enquiries. It puts the pressure on us to actually do what we say we do, and I love that.

Besides, the reality is that job boards don’t find people jobs. People find people jobs.

(Last year, Aquent won the 2009 WebAward for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development” in the “Employment” category. More information on this can be found here)

There is an elephant in the room when it comes to the basic business model of our industry. People don’t talk about it much, yet it’s a fundamental flaw in the relationship between client and recruiter, and it drives poor service and lack of satisfaction for all parties.

Multi-listing of job orders across multiple agencies, and recruiters accepting briefs on a contingent and in-competition basis.

There are three primary reasons client multi-list job orders and expect recruiters to compete on the same order with a “winner take all” outcome for the agency that fills the role.

• Clients live under the erroneous belief that by pitting several agencies against each other, they some how “keep us honest” and will get better service because we will compete more aggressively
• Clients want to give the job out to several recruiters because this way they will “get a better spread of the candidates available”, and
• The third reason is the most damning. Clients do it because most recruiters don’t have the knowledge or the courage to tell them why it is NOT in the clients’ best interest to give a job order to more than one recruiter.

This goes to the heart of being a ‘consultative ‘ recruiter. Unless you want to be a transactional beast of burden, you must 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. But not on the same job. That’s just dumb business by all parties.

Let’s look at the first two client reasons listed above and 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 quite the reverse is true. We have to be 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 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”.

It’s a compelling argument and most clients can see the logic when they think it through. Far from getting more commitment when clients get recruiters to compete, they actually get less commitment and lower quality service. At best they can expect a flurry of activity as the recruiters first refer who immediately comes to mind. But when the hard work needs to be done in terms of sourcing hard to find talent, the recruiters will drop off and focus on clients who DO give them commitment.

Once this is explained to the client, then a skilled recruiter will go on to ask the client for a “window” of opportunity to handle his 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.

Then let’s address the second client reason. “I want to get a better spread of candidates out there.” Again you need to have courage to face the client down on this.

Ask the client what percentage of people he thinks are available to move jobs (who are suitable for his job) who are currently registered with any recruiter at all. Latest research suggests this number is less than 5%. We need to explain the active vs. passive job market. Explain that you need time to winkle this person out of a job where they may be now. (Advertising, networking, social media, headhunting, database search).

Passive candidates do not respond to advertisements.

If the client gives the job to four recruiters, he is just fishing in the same limited, active job-seeker talent pond – and no recruiter will be committed enough to invest time searching beyond that pond.

A great recruiter has the credibility and the confidence to secure the role on a retained basis or at least exclusively so he/she can have the time to put a full range of appropriate strategies in place to find the right person.

Paying a contingent fee for a multi-listed job is like paying a bounty hunter in the days of the Wild West.

And if you pay recruiters like you pay cowboys, you just might get cowboys.

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