http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/ en mitch@fasttrackrecruitment.com Copyright 2012 2012-09-06T14:49:07+00:00 http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/blog/five-words-that-all-recruiters-should-stop-using-in-their-job-ads/ http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/site/five-words-that-all-recruiters-should-stop-using-in-their-job-ads/#When:14:49:07Z These five words are: Seeking Due To Continued Expansion 2012-09-06T14:49:07+00:00 http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/blog/recruitment-groundhog-day/ http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/site/recruitment-groundhog-day/#When:12:39:10Z Whenever you see a recruitment agency website claiming to have “35 years combined experience” what they’re not telling you is that it’s the same year, repeated over and over. While I’m on the subject of websites, why do 95% of them all say the same thing?  You know the sort of stuff: ...“We believe in really getting to know our client’s business” ...“We’re passionate about delivering the most talented candidates” ...“We never send out a CV without your permission” ...“Our service is second to none” Plus, have you noticed how all of those sentences are about the agency - and not about the client? Is it possible that this might be the real reason why the rest of the world thinks all recruiters are the same? How about offering some insight into how you can take away a potential client’s pain?  Because it is this that motivates nearly all companies use an external recruitment supplier.  To take away the pain. If you shed some light on how you might do this, the chances of them getting in touch are increased. One last thing.  Try replacing as many of the “We” and “I” words with “You”.  That’s because ‘you’ is the 2nd most powerful word in advertising. Whaddya reckon, too radical? 2012-07-26T12:39:10+00:00 http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/blog/the-secret-to-cold-calling/ http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/site/the-secret-to-cold-calling/#When:09:52:00Z Ever seen those training providers that promise to help you unlock the secrets to cold-calling?  Most of the time this “secret” turns out to be something inane like sounding really happy when you make the call or only doing it when the sun’s shining. What seems to drive of most of the recruitment sales training I’ve ever seen is the fact that cold-calling is an omnipresent part of a recruiter’s life - and so they had better get good at it. Frankly, I think that’s bullshit. It’s bullshit not because it isn’t true, because it is.  It’s bullshit because it doesn’t have to be true. Cold-calling is probably the toughest part of the sales process because it’s time-consuming, it’s boring and repetitive and because it’s often hard to even get through to the decision-maker.  The only thing that makes it a worthwhile activity is: 1. If what you’re selling has a high-margin, one-off sale price. 2. If the cold-call is the first step in a longer sales journey where the customer regularly buys an increasing number of products/services from you. Recruiters can fall into either or both of those categories.  The first when they’re canvassing-out a real, specific and available candidate and the second when they’re broadly looking for jobs to fill. Canvassing-out candidates can be a valid way of establishing some credibility with a potential client, but it requires some decent market research before any calls are made.  Many recruiters seem to struggle with this part.  Assuming they do establish that credibility, what next?  Invariably what the recruiter is looking for next is a regular source of new jobs to work on - which brings us to the 2nd category.  More jobs. The trouble with getting more jobs from more companies is that on average, a recruiter only fills about 1 in 4 of the jobs they get given access to.  And I’m being generous here - for many it’s closer to 1 in 6.  That means that around 80% of the time the recruiter is going to disappoint the client.  “But sometimes I will fill some jobs with some of those clients!” I can already hear you saying.  True.  But all you are entrenching here is the perception in the client’s mind that your performance is somewhat ad-hoc and difficult to predict.  If that’s the pinnacle of how your clients view you then I have some potentially bad news for you; You’re always going to have to be spending large chunks of your time cold-calling.  The upside is that this is good news for the recruitment training industry There is no secret to being good at cold-calling when all you’ve got to sell is probable disappointment. Sorry. 2012-07-16T09:52:00+00:00 http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/blog/why-recruitment-should-be-moved-out-of-hr-and-into-sales-marketing/ http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/site/why-recruitment-should-be-moved-out-of-hr-and-into-sales-marketing/#When:09:08:16Z Recruitment is, at its most critical end, a function of sales and performs best under a well-defined brand and when underpinned by a decent marketing strategy. This is an ethic that is largely embraced in the better recruitment agencies, yet isn’t in the corporate sector. In most companies there is little or no interaction between the Sales & Marketing function and the HR/Recruitment function. I’ve heard a lot of people speak in business about corporate hiring and much of it misses the point. They seem to see the most important element as the selection process, but this is just the ‘buying’ part of the recruitment life-cycle and important as it is, it’s only actually possible if enough qualified candidates are found.  To find enough qualified candidates, the company’s employment brand needs to not be weak, its employment propositions attractive and compelling and its various candidate sourcing channels well-defined.  This is just as relevant if that company only use agencies to source candidates. The view that recruitment is more about buying than selling belies a kind of institutional arrogance that makes many companies believe that if they have vacancies, good people will come – that somehow they are doing the wider community a favour by actually inviting people to come and work for them.  It is this misplaced arrogance that has enabled the agency sector to gain so much traction over the past 15 years - because the more companies fail to source their own candidates, the more they buy into the myth (a myth often perpetuated by agencies by the way) that finding good candidates is some sort of ‘dark art’ that can only be performed by certain types of people.  This ‘myth’ is only half right.  It isn’t a ‘dark art’, but it is something that can only really be done by certain types of people – and that is people who know how to sell. Unfortunately, many internal company recruiters come from HR and administration backgrounds and not sales. HR requires knowledge of laws, policies and managing people resources, which are all extremely important functions - but they are not sales and as a result too many people who handle recruitment within corporate HR just become an administrative cushion between their hiring managers and the agency PSL. The basic stages of the sales cycle are to find, to qualify and to sell to and to close and these broadly cover the key stages of the recruitment cycle – namely to source enough decent candidates, to screen and short-list the best qualified and to convince them the job and the company are right for them. So, how can the Sales & Marketing function help re-invigorate a company’s recruiting effort? Firstly, HR could do a lot worse than outsource (or sub-contract) their recruitment & resourcing function to their Sales & Marketing department rather than to an external provider.  Their Sales and Marketing people are best placed to do this because: 1) They know the company, its ethics and its strengths and weaknesses 2) They know how to help build brands 3) They’re good at developing routes to market, managing distributors/suppliers/resellers 4) They are used to getting the best out of CRMs 5) Building dialogue with prospects is second nature 6) They know how to sell and how to close In recruitment terms, this means; 1) Being able to inform and articulate all of their recruitment materials 2) Building and disseminating a powerful employer brand 3) Managing agencies, headhunters and other recruitment suppliers 4) Optimising the use of an ATS (applicant tracking system) and using it to build Talent-Pools 5) Communicating with these Talent-Pools to enable ‘just in time’ hiring for business-critical vacancies 6) Attracting better candidates and converting more of them to attending interviews and accepting job offers An ongoing working collaboration between HR and their Sales & Marketing colleagues could work with recruitment reporting directly to the head of Sales & Marketing with a dotted line reporting to HR also.  HR would still retain some ownership of recruitment - something they would need to do given their offer-management and onboarding responsibilities, but most of the commercial activity that recruitment entails would be driven by people who have some intimacy with the ethos and practices involved. The recruitment function of any company needs to think and act more like a Sales & Marketing department if it’s to win its unfair share of the best available talent and to build a ‘I want to work there’ employment reputation. Having the Sales & Marketing and HR functions operate independently is a huge mistake. If the two worked more closely together, or even better, if recruitment was moved out of HR and into Sales & Marketing, companies would save hundreds of thousands of pounds every year and the recruitment agency market, already overcrowded with too many wide-boys and paper-pushers who feed off HR’s recruitment frailty would shrink so that those left would the ones that offered real commercial value. Further reading and related links: How HR can become a true strategic partner of Sales - source: mercer.com Establish Rapport with HR and Boost Sales-Force Recruiting Efforts - source: hrtools.com   2012-05-25T09:08:16+00:00 http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/blog/why-recruitment-agencies-need-to-become-pigs/ http://fasttrackrecruitment.com/site/why-recruitment-agencies-need-to-become-pigs/#When:16:14:34Z Bear with me on this one. It must be searingly obvious to anyone who works in recruitment that recruitment agencies (and more specifically the people therein) are receiving a lot of flak at the moment – most of it around their oafish sales tactics and their diminishing ability to deliver a viable recruitment service to either the company or the candidate. With the advent of the Internet came a lot of predictions that it would spell the end of recruitment agencies.  That didn’t happen because the job boards loaded their pricing in the agencies favour and recruitment consultants got better at using the Internet than HR people. Now that HR are finally waking-up to the fact that they don’t know much about recruitment and have started hiring inhouse recruitment specialists, those initial predictions are starting to look like they could finally come true. So, what can a recruitment agency do to start reclaiming its relevance and its margins?  Well, that is a huge question that can vary depending on the sector it serves and the candidate types it trades in - so for the purposes of this piece I’m going to assume that the agency-type in question is a broad vertical market specialist and places permanent candidates.  It could equally apply to any generalist agencies. Recruitment agencies have long been addicted to the thrill of what I call ‘the easy placement’.  That happens when: - They receive a job from a company (often with minimal commitment) - They happen to either know of a suitable candidate or find one quickly - Interviews happen - That candidate gets the job - An invoice is then raised for anything up to 20K Invariably the company then assumes that the agency has some kind of magical insight – which of course it doesn’t.  Those kinds of rewards for doing very little work can become addictive - I know because I’ve been there. Thereafter, everything the recruitment agency does is geared around collecting candidates to increase their chances of getting lucky – much of this activity is wasted and nearly all of it is advertised on job boards.  But it only takes a couple of placements like that every month for that business model to take root.  Cue more companies getting cold-called and being asked for a chance to throw a candidate or two at some of their open jobs and more candidates responding to adverts that the agency is never actually going to work on.  Both are being set-up for disappointment. 10 years of that and we arrive at the flak recruitment agencies are getting today. So the old model isn’t working anymore because there are a lot fewer HR people who are desperate for candidates to appease their critical line managers.  So what are HR people, inhouse recruiters and managing directors of SMEs more likely to need these days?  My experiences as an agency employee, search-business owner and contract inhouse recruiter is that these people need (and more importantly, want) commitment.  Let me say that again loudly - THEY WANT COMMITMENT. So, if you’re an agency recruiter, most companies want you to commit to filling a particular job - regardless of the salary level.  They would rather have one external recruiter that is totally committed to filling one of their open jobs than 10 of them saying they’ll “have a look around and send over some CVs”.  Many will gladly pay some of the fee upfront too - but you have to sell the benefits to them.  And unlike the old days, chances are your client (for that is what they now truly are) will want to know how you filled it. They want you to take problems away from them – not add more by sending speculative CVs and pissing-off their target candidate audiences.  They want value for money and they want you to work for them.  Hard.  They’d also like you to share some of their pain because that’s how real relationships are formed – both in business and socially. So instead of asking for jobs, saying that you “have the best candidates” (which 9 times out of 10 you don’t) and punting out a few CVs, why not try actually selling something for a change?  Don’t sell them the line that you’re not actually selling them anything, sell them on the fact that you will not stop working until you fill their job.  Then sell them on the fact that you will work to a pre-agreed sourcing strategy, that you will genuinely assess who the best candidates are, manage all the candidates professionally and offer them a realistic guarantee period when they do hire someone. If you sell this properly, enough companies will pay you upfront to do the work, which in turn will enable you to deliver a much better service and have a sales-pipeline that makes forecasting your business easier and more reliable.  Some of these jobs will be quite easy to fill too - the only difference being that you’ve actually spent real time working a pre-agreed recruitment plan.  The client will like the fact that you’ve worked on their vacancy rather than plucked a candidate off a database. The relationship will be sealed as they don’t wince when they see your bill. Which brings me back to the title of this article.  Recruitment can be looked at as a plate of ham and eggs.  The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. Most recruitment agencies need to stop being a chicken. 2012-03-14T16:14:34+00:00