Like you, I can go off about how behind-the-times the recruiting industry is compared to the rest of the world.
The good news is that the last few years have been showing huge progress in regard to technology (from great new front-office systems, to utilizing Web 2.0 networks, to blogs and forums and niche job boards, etc).
However, most of you are still not doing too much differently than you were before. I have heard from many of you regarding the “bonding” lesson and have heard of some good ideas.
However, they still aren’t really based upon any new technology. During my live Owners & Managers Recruiting System seminars, we get into how to use technology a great deal. We focus a lot on state-of-the-art Internet marketing techniques as well as better utilization of Web 2.0.
But there is NO NEED for you to wait! I have outlined the easiest and the best in this article.
Some Background Information
Before I give away this easy tool, a little background is needed regarding time-management. Make sure you read through it quickly so that you can get to the real money-maker.
Any administrative work or paperwork is probably the most overpaid work that any owner, manager, or sales rep could be doing for themselves! If you are an agency owner or manager, do you have any idea how much your are paying your sales rep or recruiters to stuff an envelope, confirm appointments, post jobs to sites, create newsletter content, or work on art graphics? If you are a sales person, then do you know how little money you will make from those little acts?
It is key that we all look at EVERYTHING that we do and then make sure that we either outsource or assign the non HIGH-PAYING work to others. Believe me, there will be A LOT of that! If you manage people, look at everything they ever do and decide how much you should be paying for that sort of work.
Did you know that distractions and lack of focused concentration affect your productivity profoundly? By not having planned FOCUS time, you can be cutting your product in half or MORE! All sorts of studies, which run the gamut, show that it can take several minutes from any one distraction until you are back in your “optimum” mode where you were before the distraction. Multiply that by the number of times in an hour/day/week/month/quarter/year/career that you are distracted, then just look at all of the time wasted.
In simple terms, work in blocks of time for ANYTHING that you do. This is critical for the money calls (i.e., recruiting time, marketing calls, prospecting), but arguably more important for the administrative/busy work.
In the past, this is where you would be told to make sure you use administrative staff or researchers. You would also be told to return resume calls in blocks of time, review email in blocks of time, and even post jobs in blocks of times.
While I agree, it is a bit archaic. The fact is that you should be spending all of your time doing things that make money and literally OUTSOURCING everything else. Certainly, outsourcing can mean in-sourcing to some admin-support function, but I really do mean OUTSOURCING!
Outsourcing is available for the owner or the manager, the perm producer or the temp producer. I am also not talking about big-ticket items or the things that you know about but may get around to later, but I mean for everything and anything!
In my informal polling of my large industry network, I was not able to find one great story of someone who is outsourcing even the mundane. Sure, I heard about payroll being outsourced, or front-office system or benefits, but not the easy stuff.
For example, “virtual assistants” have become hugely popular for small business owners and many large companies. They simply are a must for any small business or anyone running a sales desk (or large company, for that matter). They do A LOT more than you think and they need to be making you money now!
Why do I almost NEVER hear about this coming from our industry?
We don’t have to be years behind anymore:
- Do you know that I pay $6/page to have my PowerPoint slides created from India?
- Do you know that I paid $8/hour to have 70 hours’ worth of programming done on my Staffing Industry Tube website (www.staffingindustrytube.com)? He was a young kid out of Cyprus!
- Do you know that I have a company in India that I now pay to take some posts I have and put them on some forums in LinkedIn weekly?
- Do you know that I have someone now posting my videos all over the web?
There is someone you can find anywhere in the world to do almost anything (answering phones, forwarding calls, sending faxes, sending newsletters, posting articles, following up on temps, creating newsletters, yada yada, and one more yada).
In fact, most of these assistants are bonded, responsible, and full of great references. They are helping some of your competitors make more money and they are helping so many other industries do more with less. They want to learn your business and will do any work you need while you sleep. Now, I am talking about almost anything! Just look at anything that you do on your desk and branch and they can do much of it for you.
Here are just a few examples of what they will do if you ask (and by the way, some of these are indeed money calls that will easily pay for a full month’s worth of their fees):
- Make follow up calls on your behalf to your top 100 MPCs monthly.
- Make follow up calls to all of your active temps and ask for leads.
- Post all of your new job order openings on the blogs and forums of your choosing (or ask them to research and suggest the sites).
- Organize/research content for you to write your newsletter articles (or ask them to take a first pass for you).
- Gather the names of the potential prospects for you to call (i.e., org charts, email addresses, etc).
- Gather all of the key information that they can find off of the Internet for any face-to-face presentation you have this week or for any sales call you will make.
- Conduct surveys for you.
- Simply call every candidate you ever personally met with on a certain schedule.
- Find LinkedIn contacts for you.
The list is endless. They will make you money and you will pay them far less than they will make for you. This will cost far less than hiring a researcher for your desk (I’m not suggesting that a researcher wouldn’t be a good investment) or by hiring a new administrative assistant.
The great news is that you only pay them when they are doing work for you. So if you get billed for 40 hours, then they really gave you 40 hours’ worth of productivity. The costs can be from $6 up to $20 or $25 per hour if they are out of the country. Most work can be done for $10/hour or less.
Start with a few hours a week for projects and you will be hooked! It will take that first new client from their work to realize that you just struck gold!
The world has changed, the Internet is everywhere, and there are people willing to come virtually to your office and work for you at just a click away. There are people who will make you the equivalent of three, four, or five sales people. Why have you not been in touch with them?
For those of you who say, “Well, Neil. I just run a desk and my boss is so cheap, so good luck with that!” that is nonsense. You don’t need to wait for your boss to approve or, frankly, even know about what you are doing. Who cares if you spend $60 this week out of your own pocket to have the detailed contacts and email addresses and org charts for your top 30 prospects? Or to have your job postings distributed on the Internet? Or to have your blog posted on 20 sites? Or to have your newsletter written for you?
You don’t need to outsource everything. Sometimes we enjoy doing some busy work. But you SHOULD be outsourcing a lot! For those of you now wondering, yes, I do personally write this column, but I bet they could do a decent job setting up the outline for me if I asked.
