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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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.

We don’t mean to be tentative, do we? We want to be bold, strong and confident when dealing with clients. Yet time and again, we use words that are stumbling blocks. Our fear takes over. And we use tentative language. Words that offer the client a reason to doubt us. Phrases that reduce our credibility.

Tentative language: How do you know you’re using it? 

Do you use words like ‘normally’? The client asks you, how much do you charge? Do you start off by saying, ‘Oh, normally’. 

Disaster! Right there. The battle is lost.

You’ve stepped onto a landmine. When you say “normally”, the client knows at once that your price is negotiable. She knows you are not sure of your price. You may not even believe in your value. And hey presto – the client is in the driver’s seat. 

There are many words we all use that prevent us from being in the driver’s seat -  

’Approximately’. ‘Usually.’ ‘I feel that…’  ‘Sometimes’. ‘Our average price’.  ‘Ballpark figure’.  All of these words send an instant message to the client’s brain that you’re a bit unsure. Just a little insecure. 

The insecurity spills over.

When the client (or talent for that matter) hears insecurity in your words, they can’t but help simultaneously hear the insecurity in your work and your service.

Don’t say “Firebrand is one of the leading marketing, creative and digital search companies in the world”. You have qualified the statement by prefacing it with “one of the”. Say “Firebrand IS the leading marketing, creative and digital search company in the world”.

When a recruiter says to a client “ For this job, we charge $20,000 and we deliver an outcome in two weeks or less”, your client is instantly impressed. The client didn’t hear tentativeness in your price or your ability.

Talent are sensitive to tentativeness too. Don’t say, “this job might have some of the things you are looking for in a new role”, or “this job is probably worth looking at”. Why would that compel me to go to see that client? Say, “This is an exceptional company with a superb client list and an excellent culture. What’s more it fits all the criteria you outlined for a job move, including more client-facing time and the international travel you are looking for “ (This is an example of course. What you say has to be true!)

Specifics impress. Remember, it’s not just you that’s having the uncertainty in the sales situation. The client is walking in unknown territory as well. As a client what would you prefer to hear? “The job will be advertised tomorrow, my database will be fully searched by Friday night and my research team will map the market in a week, and I will have a shortlist in two weeks or less” or “We’ll get down to it and get the job done soon.”

As a Talent would you rather hear “You have great skills and I am going to market your resume to clients A, B and C by Tuesday.” or  “I will do my best to get you interviews with suitable companies.”?

Think about your words. Think about your voice tone. It can make all the difference. One thing is certain. Stop using tentative language. It isn’t doing you any good.

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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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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!

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In my last blog post I explained how great coaching is built on two key functions – recognition and correction.

Today I expand on one of the tactics I have found exceptionally helpful in mentoring and coaching recruiters to outstanding performance, ‘Live Feedback’.

This may sound unusual, but a good leader who wants to have an impact as a coach should actively look out for opportunities to catch their consultants in the act of doing something good!

Yes, live feedback starts with the positive.

If you want to see a behaviour repeated, reward it via recognition. So for example, if you hear a consultant doing a great job of selling a temp rate to a candidate who was hoping for more, as soon as that recruiter puts down the phone, tell them. ‘Heard the way you handled that conversation Bob. Great job! It’s really crucial we keep our margins up on this temp desk and that starts with paying our temps market rates, but no more. Well done’.

What’s more I think you should pass on this recognition publicly and immediately. It is wonderfully uplifting for the individual, and will certainly reinforce that behaviour. But it also starts to create a team ethos and culture that rubs off on everyone in the team.

But of course as a manager you must also be on the lookout for practical situations to improve a consultant’s skill and performance. This is the ‘correction’ component of effective coaching. This will mean keeping an ear out for conversations where you feel the consultant has said the wrong thing or could have said something differently or better.

The key here is not to be punitive or demeaning in words or tone. It’s a real skill to position your feedback as constructive, but it can be done. Say you heard a consultant making a bit of a hash of handling a counter-offer. You may start with something like this. ‘That was a tricky situation Bob, and you handled it well, but just thinking, when your candidate said he had been offered more money to stay, do you think it would have been good to take him back to his original reasons for considering a move…’ And out of that question will come an impromptu coaching session on handling these situations. It’s immediate. It’s powerful. It’s positive.

Always be prepared to speak to the consultant immediately they have put the phone down. The learning and retention by the consultant is far more powerful if you can relate a concept to a real and recent situation. This takes discipline and means that you often have to consciously listen out for situations and opportunities.

Live feedback is incredibly effective. It’s real because the consultant has just felt the euphoria of success and or the pain of failure. You will never have a better time to really drive home behaviour.

And that is coaching.

Coming up next week in this consultant coaching series of blog posts – ‘Real Life Situations’.