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IN THIS ISSUE
Newsletter Sponsors
A Note from the Editor
Today's Recruiting News Headlines
Featured Recruiting Jobs
Weekly
Article:
The
Science of Recruiting – Part 1: Making First Contact
Special Trials and Discounts
Recruiting
Polls and Trends
Layoffs and Downsizing
Report
Recruiting Essential Bookmarks
Upcoming Conferences
Site Of The Week:
TruStar Solutions, Inc.
Final Note - On The Lighter Side
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Today's Recruiting News Headlines
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Featured Recruiting
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Weekly Article
The
Science of Recruiting – Part 1: Making First Contact
By Lou Adler
Welcome to our new series of articles, The Science of
Recruiting. Over the next ten weeks, we’ll look at every
skill and technique necessary to be a great recruiter.
At the end of it all, you’ll have a sense of what you
need to do to take your performance and success as a
recruiter up another notch or two, or maybe more.
 Recruiting
is a multi-phase process that leads to the discovery of
a perfect job match. It starts with an intricate
knowledge of what the job requires. Finding top
candidates is another part of this process, and is
assessing candidate competency. Interspersed throughout
these activities is the recruiting, convincing, and
influencing part. Recruiting isn’t heavy-handed,
in-your-face selling, it’s finesse. It’s about
convincing top candidates to stay involved even though
their kids don’t want to move. It’s about convincing a
hiring manager to see a top person even though he or she
doesn’t have all of the experience that had been
originally demanded. Recruiting is about taking a fuzzy,
imperfect, human process and using it to find and place
perfect candidates. The profession of recruiting will
always be a bit of a black art, but in the effort to
make hiring top people a systematic business process,
trying to find science where we can will most certainly
be a useful effort.
The Basic Recruiting Process
We all know that the best candidates are more
discriminating and therefore have more concerns, have
more opportunities, need more information, and require
more hand-holding. The ability to hire top people
correlates directly with a recruiter’s ability to
provide this information in a professional manner. This
first Science of Recruiting article will provide
recruiters with the tools they need to do just that.
As many of you know I divide the recruiting process
into four primary areas
- Candidate Development - all sourcing
activity(except for networking)
- Processing - processing of resumes, care and
feeding of tracking system, administrative tasks
- Red Zone - working one-on-one with strong
candidates and hiring managers, taking the search
assignment, assessing and presenting candidates,
networking
- End Zone - negotiating and closing offers.
It is my opinion that hiring top people requires
exceptional one-on-one skills, in the Red Zone and the
End Zone. Administrative processing should be minimized,
and some of the initial sourcing activity should be
assigned to a research group if possible. Recruiters
need to proactively minimize administrative work and
organize their daily activities to be in constant phone
contact with top candidates. How well this is done will
determine a recruiter’s personal success. The Science of
Recruiting articles describes how best to do this. Here
are the core topics we’ll be discussing during this
series:
The Science of Recruiting – Key Topics
1. How to Make First Contact with a Top Person -
Engage 1st, Network 2nd
2. The Art of Networking - The Difference Between Good,
and Great Recruiters
3. Overcoming Basic Candidate Concerns
4. Overcoming More Serious Candidate Concerns
5. Addressing Mid-stage Candidate Concerns
6. Influencing Hiring Managers - Taking the Assignment
7. Influencing Hiring Managers - Presenting Candidates
8. Influencing Hiring Managers - The Hiring Decision
9. Negotiating and Closing Offers - The Set-up
10. Negotiating and Closing Offers - Testing and Closing
So, let’s get started. In this first session we’ll
describe how to make first contact with a top person. A
top person can be an active candidate who is
exceptionally well-qualified, or a referred candidate
whom you know little about, other than that the person
is well-qualified. Well-qualified people always have
multiple opportunities, so how you first approach them
is critical. Two basic ground rules of good recruiting
apply at this initial stage.
Recruiting Ground Rule #1: Only talk to
pre-qualified candidates.
Recruiters don’t have time to talk to marginal
candidates. To minimize time spent on unqualified
candidates you must pre-qualify everyone before you ever
look at their resumes, or call them on the phone.
Finding top candidates on job boards takes too much
work, that’s one of the reasons I don’t think much time
should be spent using this channel. Done correctly,
networking with top employees and other highly referred
candidates offers a much better return on your time
investment. Make sure that every time someone like this
gives you a name, you have the referrer describe why the
person is strong. By making sure you only talk with
qualified people, and minimizing time spent talking to
unqualified candidates, you can dramatically improve
your personal productivity.
Recruiting Ground Rule #2: You must get 99% of all
candidates to say “Yes” when you first call.
Even if you pre-qualify everyone before you call
them, about 90% of the time the person will still not be
a candidate for the current job. (That’s 1 in 10 success
odds. If the person is not pre-qualified your success
rate drops to about 1 in 100.) However, about 50% of the
time the person will be well-qualified for some other
current or future position, or personally know someone
who is qualified for your current position. So this is
still a very valuable person, and when you first call,
you must make sure that the candidate doesn’t say “I’m
not interested,” too soon. It’s best to call the person
assuming they could be a potential candidate, rather
than the common indirect technique many recruiters use.
You’ll have more leverage this way if you do it right.
That’s why the concept of Engage 1st, Network 2nd, is so
important to follow. Your opening pitch is critical to
pulling this off. You need to delay the candidate’s
yes/no decision by 5-10 minutes to establish your level
of professionalism. This gives you the chance to
maximize your networking effectiveness.
Here’s a pitch we’ve used with great success in
training some top corporate and external recruiters. Try
this out the next time you cold-call a candidate.
“Hi, my name is _______________. I’m a recruiter with
______________. Your name got brought to my attention as
someone I should connect with for a senior level search
effort in (marketing, etc.) I’m leading. Before I get
into any details, let me ask you a very basic question:
If the assignment I’m working on was clearly superior to
what you’re doing today, would you at least be open to
exploring it?”
It’s hard to say no to this type of call. 90% of the
time the candidate will say yes. Once a candidate says
yes, most recruiters then go into sales mode telling the
candidate all of the details of the job. Don’t do this
ever again! Instead, say –
“Great. Let me first obtain a quick two-minute
profile of your background, and then I’ll give you the
two-minute overview of the job. If it makes mutual sense
to pursue the job, we’ll set up some time to get into a
more in-depth discussion.”
We’ll discuss how to address the reluctant candidate
later in this series, but for now assume the person
agrees to move forward. If you sound confident and
professional, about 90% of the people will follow your
direction without hesitating. The key to “engage 1st,
network 2nd” is to be vague about the job title (e.g., a
senior level position), and get the person to describe
their background before the person knows much about the
job. Once a candidate says “yes” to the above question,
the recruiter is in a stronger position. The candidate
now views the recruiter as someone who might have the
key to a better job. If the candidate learns about the
job details too soon, and is uninterested, the recruiter
has lost this leverage. Since there’s only a 10% chance
the candidate will be viable for the current job, but a
50% chance they know someone, you want to maximize your
chance to network with this person. You do this by
peaking their interest in the job, and then obtaining
their profile. This takes at least five minutes. If you
come across as a professional, and even if the candidate
is not qualified for the current opening, you’ll then
have a strong chance to network with the person and
obtain some great leads.
You’ll learn how to obtain some good names in the
next session, but for now practice this pitch until it
becomes automatic. Reveal as little as possible about
your current opening until after you have learned the
candidate’s qualifications. This way the recruiter makes
the decision to go forward, not the candidate. Being a
good recruiter starts by staying in control of the
hiring process. This begins the moment you get the
pre-qualified candidate on get on the phone.
Unfortunately, for too many recruiters, this is also
where it ends.
Next week in the Science of Recruiting, we’ll get
into the keys to networking. Until then, good luck.
If you like what you’ve read above, you can learn
more in my Zero-Based Hiring Workshops, currently
touring the U.S. until June 2004. Check the schedule and
read more information at our site.
About the Author
Lou Adler is the
president of The Adler Group, a training and consulting
firm that develops leading-edge recruiting strategies.
Adler is a veteran recruiter and founder of CJA
Executive Search. He's also the creator of POWER Hiring
and “Zero-Based Hiring -- The Six Sigma Process for
Hiring Top Talent.” His industry career included general
management positions with the Allen Group, as well as
senior-level financial management positions with
Rockwell International's Automotive and Consumer
Electronics groups. Lou is the author of Hire With Your
Head - Using POWER Hiring to Build Great Companies (John
Wiley & Sons, 2002), and the award-winning Nightingale
Conant audio tape program, POWER Hiring: How to Find,
Assess, Hire and Keep Great Talent (1999). Adler holds
an MBA from UCLA and a B.S. in Engineering from Clarkson
University, New York.
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Recruiting Polls and Trends
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Layoffs and Downsizing
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Recruiting Essential Bookmarks
Recruiting Consultants
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Upcoming Seminars &
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Final Note - On The
Lighter Side
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