This article gives you quick, easy-to-implement ideas on various subjects. This month’s topics have to do with improving your recruiting calls and expanding your marketing reach.
Topic #1: Getting a “Yes” on 90% of your recruiting calls
When you make a cold call (to a candidate) are you first looking to pitch a job or learn about the candidate’s skills and aspirations? Are you looking to open a dialogue or sell a job? If you are like a lot of recruiters, you start off the conversation by attempting to sell the candidate on the job opportunity.
Pitching a job or asking for a referral right off the bat puts you in a low-level conversation with your candidate. Passive candidates who are top performers will see you more like a telemarketer than a career consultant. These conversations tend to be very transactional and do not build rapport as quickly as other approaches.
Here’s an excellent leading question that will get you a “yes” 90% of the time and will put you in a more consultative role:
Would you be open to exploring a new career opportunity if it was clearly a stronger fit for you?
When they say “yes,” don’t tell them about the job yet! Say,
Great, why don’t you give me a 2 minute overview of what you do and what you are looking for and then I can give you a quick overview of the job, and if it makes sense, we can go into more detail.
Most people you call are not going to be a candidate for the job at the moment, but they know people they could refer. The referral is much easier to get if they first trust you and your professionalism. Try to establish a professional relationship before pitching a job.
Topic #2: Expand your marketing reach
How many people hear about your service on a regular basis? Your marketing “reach” has to do with how big a net you are able to cast with your marketing efforts. In a slow economy, expanding your reach and delivering your message to a bigger audience has to be a top priority if you want to be able to sleep well at night.
Let’s say that you offer an excellent service and have a strong follow-up marketing plan, but you only expose your offer to 10 prospects in a year. No matter how good your presentation is, your plan will likely fail because you don’t have enough client exposure. You may be the best kept secret in your niche and if so, it’s your job to change that and get your message out there.
Example: Let’s say that you decide to write an article for a niche publication that your target market tends to read. First you interview 10 industry leaders for information and then you write the article. The article gets published and is read by 10,000 people. Your reach for that effort would be 10,000.
If instead you interviewed 100 leaders (potential clients) and got the article published in three publications that would be read by say 50,000 people, you would have five times the reach as compared to the example above. Keep in mind that writing the article takes the same amount of time either way. But by focusing on expanding your reach you have gotten much more leverage from the effort.
Another way to expand your reach is to think about growing your client email list. This is your “goldmine” to which you want to send a client newsletter, candidate hot list or articles on a regular basis. If you send these items to 100 people, that effort is less valuable than if you send them to 500 people.
Again, the effort of creating the hotlist or newsletter takes the same amount of time no matter how many people you send it to. Set an aggressive goal to increase your prospect list by 30% in the next 90 days to be sure that you are getting the best results possible. Assign this task to yourself or someone else in your office and then schedule a follow-up meeting after 90 days to review your results.