What I told the African headhunters!

I just got back from a speaking tour in South Africa. We spoke to 800 recruiters over six events in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The response was phenomenal, and it was fascinating to note that the issues they face on the southern tip of Africa, are for the most part very similar to the challenges recruiters face in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

The ‘Savage SPRINT’ full house in Johannesburg show some love!

Chris Savage and I were on our feet in front of recruiters for 26 hours over four days, so we both said quite a lot! (especially him). Here is a tiny sample of some of the things I told the African recruiters, and they probably apply to you too.

(UK readers, we are bringing these events to the UK in November. Love to see you there!)

• Our clients are our competitors now, and our suppliers like job boards and LinkedIn, are increasingly competing with us too. But beware too the emergence of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This is not science fiction. It’s reality.
• Ironically, AI itself is not the threat to agency recruiters. You should embrace AI and allow it to soak up all the drudgery and hackwork. You need to get better at the things that only you can do, and machines cannot.
• Most recruiters are still trying to sell a service that is basically screening candidates off job-boards and racing to see who can get their resume in front of a client first. That is a business model that very soon, no-one will pay for.

• Today’s recruiter is never ‘done’. You are never ‘trained’, ‘expert’, or ‘finished with learning’. It’s constant renewal, up-skilling and starting again.
• Past success as a recruiter is no longer a reliable indicator of future success. The more experienced you are, the more danger you are in. Complacency is your enemy. Inertia will kill you. Your competition is you!
• Nobody, anywhere, apart maybe from your Mum, cares about your career. Not really. Apart from you, no one else is having sleepless nights about your recruitment career. You have to be assertive and take charge of your own future.

• A future-fit recruiter is a world champion sourcer, a skills-hunter. But she is also a genius at seduction, that being the ability to approach a prospect in a bespoke, tailored, sophisticated way, engage with that prospect, and bring that prospect to the hiring table, all the while managing the many obstacles between first contact and new-job-starting day.
• You must not offer your clients exactly what they can do themselves, like go on LinkedIn or run Ads on job boards. Sure you may do those things, but they are not differentiated! Where is the value there?
• In recruitment, a ‘seducer’ is a highly sophisticated human influencing ability, a finnesser, a story-teller and a builder of trust. It starts with how you reach out to a prospect, which needs to be tailored, and continues right through a very sophisticated communication process.

• The majority of recruiters do not source! When they do, they have no idea on how to ‘engage’. And their ability to actually finesse the conversation into a conversion is close to zero
• The new recruitment metric that matters is your ‘Seduction Conversion Rate’. Your hit-rate when approaching target candidates.
• The masses are in love with LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is important, but it has massive faults and gaps and a relatively small number of engaged users. The biggest social network, Facebook, is strangely still one of the least used social sites for recruiting. Yet it is has the most engaged audience of all networks, which means that there is a better chance of data being current and up to date.
• ‘Digital’ is a two edged sword. It’s given us so many ways to find and engage with candidates and clients. But it’s also allowed lazy, low-skilled recruiters to hide behind technology. They have lost the influencing skills; they have reduced recruitment to a keyword-matching, mega-spamming, resume race. You must go the other way.
• All the training you have had as a recruiter is a total waste of time, unless the skills you learnt are built on a platform of self-belief.
• You have the power to set the tone of the relationship with your client. If you are subservient, apologetic or lacking in confidence, the client automatically takes control, and you will be lost.

• Equity means ownership, or a share of ownership. In the case of Recruiter Equity, I mean the joint ownership of the problem and the solution. Do your clients trust your judgment? Do they take your advice? Interview every candidate you refer? No? Then your Recruiter Equity is low – maybe non-existent.
• Recruiter Equity is built on your attitude, and on the fact your service is consultative rather than transactional. In other words do you provide resumes, or do you provide expertise? This is how great recruiters succeed. Believe in your value.
• In an era of rapid digitalisation, transactional keyword-matching and ‘dumbing down’ of the process, there has never, in the history of recruitment, been a greater need for differentiation through brand, reputation, thought-leadership and partnership.

• ‘Social’ is not a ‘fad’, or a ‘task’, or a ‘project’. You have to embed social and digital engagement in your everyday recruitment activities
• The Future-Fit Recruiter will invest more in networking, branding, and social, than they do in old school, hard-core sales. They still ‘sell’, always. But they also master the art of social-selling.
• Building relationships and managing the process via highly developed skills in the craft of recruitment, becomes the differentiator. That is true of candidates as much as clients. The Future-Fit Recruiter excels at the craft, and can influence outcomes.

• Filling a job does not start with finding good candidates for that order. It starts with taking a qualified order in the first place.
• Many recruiters are so proud of being great multi-taskers. Well here is some bad news. Multi-tasking is a big fat lie. It makes you less productive to try and manage too much at the same time. What multi-tasking really means is ‘screwing up a number of jobs at once’. What you need to do is ‘Task switch’, moving to the project that needs doing now, and seeing it through until it becomes imperative to switch to a different task. That takes focus and discipline.
• The fact is power is shifting to the candidate, and if it hasn’t in your sector yet, it no doubt will do. And in a candidate driven market place, waiting for them to respond, simply does not work. It changes everything. Relationship building and candidate experience become key.

The hospitality, openness and unbridled enthusiasm we experienced in South Africa was second to none. Special thanks to organiser Shane McCusker and also Vanessa Raath

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