
The recruiting secret that made me more money than any other
Success in recruitment is ‘lots of activity – done well, with the right people’.
Activity x Quality x Target Market
= Success
I believe (actually, I know) that activity is key to the ongoing success of any recruitment professional.
It’s not all about activity, but activity counts.
You just have to do a certain amount of ‘stuff’ to get the results you want. Now, those activities might vary a little depending on your sector, your experience, and the depth of your customer relationships, but they are likely to include all the usual suspects such as client meetings, follow-up calls, talent interviews, and client/candidate interviews.
And these days we are going to want to add new activities; networking events, content creation, connections, engagement and talent community building, if we have a well-evolved social networking component to our work.
The point is that I have never seen a successful recruiter who does not consistently churn out activities that drive the outcomes we seek. It just comes with the territory.
But it’s not all about activity is it? In fact too much activity, of the wrong kind, and of inferior quality, will be counter-productive. Hundreds of low quality, ill thought-through cold calls, for example, is not going to enhance your billings or your reputation. Nor are desperate in-mails to source people on LinkedIn, or indiscriminate resume spamming around town.
No, the second component of the success formula is quality. We have got to have lots of activity to be successful, but it needs to be activity of the highest quality. And by quality I mean quality through every step of the process. In fact your job is made up of thousands of tiny little interactions. And our success is driven by the volume of those interactions (activity), but also crucially, by the quality of those interactions.
And that is where a real recruiting professional will display her well-honed questioning skills, influencing skills, counseling skills, persuasion skills and negotiation skills. That is the quality I am referring to.
So success is about activity, and success is about the quality of that activity. But there is a third leg to the equation. One most recruiters fail to spot. We have to do lots of activity. Yes! We have to maintain high quality. Yes! But we have to do that high quality activity…with the right people!
If you do 15 client meetings a week, and the quality of those visits is superb, you can still fail if you are meeting with two- bit companies that have no need for your services, or if you meet people who are not decision-makers.
And I know what you’re thinking now. You are thinking “but this is so obvious”. I know. Isn’t it just?
But do you do it?
And if you re a leader, do you run your business on this premise?
In 35 years of coaching recruiters and running teams of recruiting professionals, whenever I have seen someone go off track or a team start to fail, I have always found the answer by applying this formula.
- Are we doing enough activity?
- Is that activity of the right quality?
- Are we doing it with the right people?
It has never let me down. The reason for the failure will be found in one or more of these areas.
And the funny thing is, that the explosion in technology impacting our sector makes applying this formula even more pertinent. We all know people who pump out lots of activity. Check out some recruiters on Twitter for a day if you want a modern example of dubious productivity. But is it quality stuff? Is it targeted to the right audience? Are they spending more and more time, getting better and better… at the wrong things?
So there it is. The holy grail of how to be great at this job.
Activity x quality x target market
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Image Courtesy of Kristina Flour
- Posted by Greg Savage
- On June 20, 2017
- 13 Comments
13 Comments