Like any other profession, prioritization is important in recruiting. Everybody has the same number of hours in a day. So what you do with that time is critical to your success as a search consultant. As a result, you must identify those recruitment tasks that are the most important and focus on those almost exclusively.
You’ve no doubt heard of the “80/20 Rule.” According to this rule, which is also known as the Pareto Principle, 20 percent of your activities account for 80 percent of your results. When you apply this to recruiting, it dictates that 20 percent of your recruitment tasks will account for 80 percent of your results. Or in this case, your billings.
What are recruitment tasks?
What are recruitment tasks? They are any task that a recruiter or search consultant does that contributes to the execution of their duties. Now, as we just mentioned, not all recruitment tasks are created equal. In other words, some recruitment tasks are more important than others. These are the ones that contribute most directly to higher billings. And that’s what we all want, isn’t it? Higher billings . . . and maybe world peace.
But what are the major recruitment tasks that search consultants should perform on a daily basis? To help answer this question, we’re going to call upon renowned industry trainer and coach Bob Marshall of TBMG International. This year, Bob is celebrating his 39th year in the recruiting business. When you can last that long in the search profession, it’s considered the epitome of success.
According to Marshall, there are five major tasks that we as recruiters perform on a daily basis—and they all have to do with picking up the telephone!
Recruitment task #1 — marketing
We make daily marketing, or sales, calls. It is our first key to success. In the immortal words of the famous Sidney Boyden, who founded Boyden Associates in 1946 (as quoted in The Headhunters by John A. Byrne):
“When I employed an associate, I was interested in a man who could be a business getter and a merchandiser. I was looking for widely acquainted, top sales executives. Because the ability to go out and promote business and get business is more important than finding the men. I was least interested in somebody who would know how to track down a man and find him.”
Recruitment task #2 — recruiting
We recruit for a living. That means we find prospective recruits who are happy, well-appreciated, making good money, and currently working, and we entice them to move for better opportunities (i.e., our search assignment-quality job orders). We don’t work with job-hoppers, job-shoppers, or rejects.
Recruitment task #3 — discriminating (in a positive sense)
We are especially selective of our job orders, only choosing the best, search assignment quality job orders on which to spend our straight-commission time. These job orders for recruiters fall into the following three distinct categories:
- Those JOs that have a tremendous urgency attached to filling the position. We are often paid to circumvent the time factor.
- Those JOs that are very difficult positions to fill. This is where our client companies have run ads, offered referral bonuses to their employees, checked with competitors, consulted with colleagues, and extensively interviewed with no success. In these scenarios, the recruiter offers the company a window of opportunity—a “court of last resort,” if you will.
- Those JOs from good client companies who wish to be kept apprised of top-notch talent as those talented people surface, regardless of whether there is an opening.
Recruitment task #4 — negotiating
We pre-prep, prep, educate, debrief, act as buffers, and close our deals.
Recruitment task #5 — selling
We thrive in a marketplace where our normal Marketing Attempt to Marketing Presentation ratio is somewhere between 10%-25%. We are successful in that marketplace where we only place with 4% of our client base. And we deal, on a daily basis, with emotional people on both sides of our transactions (refrigerator salespeople don’t have to worry about their refrigerators changing their minds, getting pregnant, or moving to Topeka!).
And we do all of this via the telephone, which effectively eliminates 3/5ths of our sales tools. We can only talk and listen. We can’t reach out and touch, use body language and physical mirroring, or make eye contact. Instead, we have to be exceptional to accomplish all that we accomplish!
Recruitment tasks and continuous training
Top Echelon offers a free training webinar every month as part of its special Recruiter Coaching Series. We conduct this webinar on the second Tuesday of the month. Incidentally, Bob Marshall has presented more webinars for the Top Echelon Recruiter Coaching Series than any other industry trainer. In addition, Bob’s sessions have been among the most highly rated by attendees in the Series.
When these webinars are over, we post the recorded versions in our extensive Recruiter Training Library. You can access all of these webinar videos, including Bob’s 16 videos, by clicking here. For more information about Bob Marshall and the coaching services that he provides, visit his website.
Visit the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Library today and subscribe to our Recruiter Coaching Series email list!
And whether you’re figuring out how to start a recruitment agency, or you’re a seasoned veteran looking for a few go-to tools to streamline these processes and get more business, Top Echelon’s recruiting network is a great place to start. Share job orders and candidates from our massive database. If you need help keeping all of your applicants organized, try out our recruiting software.