If you have plans to be a great recruiter, please remember.

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.

(So, acting on a job that was emailed to you without any briefing is utter madness)

You have to make sure, at the very get-go, that the order you are so excited about, is, in fact, fillable!

Most contingent recruitment firms fill somewhere around 25% of the permanent jobs they take. Everyone refutes 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.

This means we end up spinning our wheels on 75 % of our permanent orders. It is madness, and I have written extensively on selling exclusivity in the past and more recently, too.

The Savage Recruitment Academy has hours of training on this.

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 act and believe you are the expert.

Every recruiter must ask these three golden questions whenever they take a job order.

Must.

I cannot imagine a single circumstance where you should do one minute of work for a client unless you have asked these questions and got a satisfactory reply.

Here they are. Never take an order again without asking these three questions. I mean it. It is that important.

“How long has this role been open…?”

How could anyone start work without asking this? But trust me, they do. It’s like driving a bus blindfold. Ok, it’s not as dangerous, but it is nonsensical in the context of recruitment. How can you judge a client’s sincerity in hiring? How can you assess whether the job or company is flawed in some way? What if the answer is “Six months”? What does that imply? What if the answer is, “My Financial controller resigned this morning, and then I called you for help”? What opportunity does that suggest? You must ask this question and then dig down on the reply, especially if it’s been open for a while. There is a reason. The salary is too low. The client is not really committed to hiring. The company has a poor employer brand. There is something. Why should you jump into that hot mess without finding out what it is? Once you know what it is, work with the client to ensure the job is ‘fillable‘, and they are committed to hiring before you start work.

“What have you done so far to fill it?”

Again, do not lift a finger to help until you know this. What if the answer is, “We have given it to four agencies, we are advertising on three job boards, we have two internal candidates, and our TA team is working on it too“? Is that a job you are likely to fill? Is that client giving you ‘Recruiter Equity’? You need to know the answer to this question to ‘Triage‘ the job, and you also need to know this to understand whether selling exclusivity or a retainer is possible in this case.

“Could we get an offer by morning?”

This question is a bit funkier but can uncover excellent information. The question is verbalised this way. “Ms Client, if I found a candidate that fits the brief perfectly with all the qualifications, experience, and skills, as well as the cultural fit you seek, and I was to present their resume to you this afternoon, could we get an offer by tomorrow morning?”

You are not really expecting the client to hire within 24 hours. But the answer can be most revealing. So, these are the actual answers I’ve had to this question.

“No, Greg, I can’t do that because I am only interviewing the internal candidates next week”.

And this one.

“Sorry, Greg, that’s impossible. The CEO hasn’t signed off on this appointment, and I’m just testing the market”.

How does that make you feel about your commitment to filling this job? In both these and innumerable similar cases, I politely discussed with the client my willingness to start work on his role as soon as they had decided that the internal candidates were unsuitable or once he had signed off from the CEO. And remember, the client never intended to reveal this information. They are not going to volunteer it. So, you must ask, and out it all comes. Alternatively, the client could’ve said something like, “well, I’m not sure we can move that fast, but I’ll certainly interview first thing tomorrow”. An answer like that would give you much more confidence that this is a committed client, prepared to move urgently.

Of course, you can finesse these questions and ask them your way, but these are superb qualifying questions that will clarify how fillable the job is and what additional questions you need to ask to work out the triage level.’

Never ever work a job again unless you have asked these questions.

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