Good morning, Mr. Phelps.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to call someone and quickly establish rapport.

This person will be someone: (a) you don’t know; (b) will not be expecting your call, and; (c) will not want to talk with you.

You will have approximately 30 seconds to accomplish your mission. If you don’t succeed, you won’t have a second chance. Good luck, Jim! keep reading…

Does this sound familiar? You are having a great conversation with a “rock star” candidate who has applied for one of your positions. You share the details about the position and your candidate seems genuinely excited. You might even be getting lots of “buying signals.” You assume that you are both in “violent agreement” that this is the perfect position!

So you move your rock star forward — setting up an appointment with the hiring manager. Your candidate sounds excited, and you are looking forward to one more “fill” on your scorecard for the month. Life is good!

But not so fast. keep reading…

In the world of sales, there is a high correlation between presentation skills and sales success. Great salespeople work to hone their communication skills and are able to communicate with confidence and impact. In addition, they are often remembered and acknowledged as key business partners — not simply as “someone trying to sell us something.”

Less successful salespeople, on the other hand, spend very little time consciously building their competency in this area.

But what are the elements of a great presentation? Is there a way to make a compelling presentation over the phone? And more importantly, what can recruiters do to build their phone presentation skills? In this article, I provide a simple 5-point checklist for recruiters who make presentations to candidates and hiring managers during phone conversations. keep reading…

In this article, we turn our focus away from the recruiter’s activities and look more closely at the passive candidate’s activities. In order to be effective at moving people through a sales funnel or pipeline, know the key factors that affect whether a person is open to moving forward or not.

So what makes a person even want to move from being a “suspect” to a “prospect”? From “prospect” to “candidate”?  There are three key decisions that your suspects, prospects, and candidates need to make in this “change process.” Let’s look at each of these.

Key Decision #1: Is This Worth My Time? keep reading…

Many great recruiting departments and organizations pride themselves on being “metrics-focused” or “metrics-driven” — And for good reason. There’s plenty of research that confirms the value of having clear strategic and operational targets.

Generic recruiting pipeline

In addition, employees appreciate having expectations (think: metrics) that are “SMART” (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time bound). In the recruiting world, some common metrics include time to find, time to hire, survey scores (from hiring managers and candidates), as well as various quality of hire metrics.

How confident are you that you can “hit your numbers”? Are you able to consistently and quickly deliver qualified candidates to your hiring managers? If you are highly confident in your ability to meet or exceed the expectations of your hiring managers, that’s great! Chances are, then, you “know your numbers” very, very well.

This article focuses on one specific aspect of managing opportunities — knowing some key metrics. The next article in this two-part series will focus on some specific techniques for moving individuals through your funnel, or pipeline.

What Have You Done for Me Lately? keep reading…

(…and start asking questions instead).

Why? Simply stated: Because people need to know they’ve been heard and understood. Today’s top sales performers know that it’s more important to understand than to persuade.

So what does this have to do with recruiting? Good question. Perhaps you can begin by answering these three questions yourself: keep reading…

If you are reading this article, you may already have a great recruiting process. Perhaps you have worked hard to identify a series of defined, repeatable steps that (when performed correctly) lead to excellent results for you and for your recruiting organization. You may even have key metrics to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your recruiting process at each step.

But have you ever wondered what you might be able to do to drive to even higher levels of performance — individually or as a group? Consider aligning your recruiting process with a great sales process. keep reading…