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The recruitment marketplace has experienced a number of seismic shifts over the course of the last 15 years or so. Fifteen years ago, email was barely being used; Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Google didn’t exist (Mark Zuckerberg was 12 years old!), and advertising for roles was done in print, not online; CVs were still largely being faxed or posted, and the only way to get good candidates in the market was to advertise, use an agency, or through internal referrals.

Now with the Internet, social media, and applicant tracking systems, organizations are no longer entirely reliant on recruitment firms to provide candidates and market intelligence. Of course there has been a shift toward corporate internal recruiters and RPO models in the past 10 years, but internal headhunters (which I differentiate from internal “recruiters”),  and real market-mapping and cold-call headhunting is still very rare. Why? Well, mapping out competitors and building market intelligence takes time and time are of course expensive. Whereas an internal recruiter may work on upward of 100 vacancies per year (the numbers hugely fluctuate from company to company influenced by seniority of role, etc.), an internal headhunter doing the full lifecycle process may work on as few as 15 to 20 searches per year.

There’s also the issue of the skillset required to do both roles. It’s very different asking a recruiter to sift through 100 resumes received in an inbox from a job posting than it is to ask a headhunter to start with a blank sheet of paper and map out the firm’s top six competitors and cold-headhunt call everyone at those firms who may have a relevant skillset. In my time spent heading up an executive search function at J.P Morgan, I never once posted a job advertisement. My role was purely to headhunt top talent in the market.

An internal headhunter is of course a role that should be used only for particular vacancies. It may be the most senior roles, or for niche roles, where typical channels to market aren’t satisfying the requirement.

So how do you convince the budget holders to invest in an internal headhunter who costs more than a typical internal recruiter, but who works on far fewer roles? keep reading…

Hello?

Anyone see this?

Just when you thought not poaching another company’s employees was the right thing to do – BAM!

You get blindsided by none other than the United States justice system.

All this havoc resulted from this in which the U.S. Justice Department settled in 2010 with Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, Walt Disney’s Pixar, and Intuit for not “cold calling” one another’s employees.

In their defense, the companies argued that they “LinkedIn” mailed other company employees and contacted (by email) those they found on the Internet.  keep reading…

I saw an interesting discussion posted in one of the LinkedIn groups I belong to. It asked:

When “cold calling” on a company for the first time, what is the best way to make contact that gets results? Assume you have no “in” at the company.

There were 64 votes. The voting results follow:

• Email (4%)
• Telephone (until you reach them live) (18%)
• Inmail once (1%)
• Email, then follow up by telephone (28%)
• Telephone, then follow up by email (46%)

I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to change “company” to “person” and change “assume you have no in at the company” to, “You don’t know this person.”

Which would you choose?

I’m a phone sourcer who’s asked many times to take my research one step further and contact each of the names I’ve sourced to “profile” them for their interest in the opportunity my customer represents. So, I would choose Door #2.

Telephone (Until You Reach Them Live)

I know that makes me a minority, but I have my reasons for doing this. keep reading…

I had that singsong experience again yesterday while (phone) sourcing.

What’s the singsong experience?

It’s when a Gatekeeper starts offering information, in a continuous pattern, to your request.

Don’t misunderstand — I had spent several hours sourcing into a particular entertainment company with very little — almost none — success.

Several hours.

Admittedly, the customer said it was a challenge.

Then I got “lucky.” keep reading…

Someone called me yesterday in a rush.

“I need to find Application Engineers installing medical equipment — x-ray equipment to be exact — and I looked on LinkedIn and there’s not much I can use. Oh, sure, there are some application engineers who list ‘medical equipment’ in their profiles, but I need people from specific companies — companies like GE, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Medtronics, Becton-Dickinson, Boston Scientific, Stryker, St. Jude, Varian, Cordis — you know, the majors. And I don’t need them if they worked at those companies in the past — I need them working at those companies today!

“I also don’t need all the desperate substitute offerings LinkedIn is giving me because they don’t have exactly what I need –I can’t wade through that mess of misfits.”

“Can you help me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you help me fast?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said again.

“I have to warn you, though, a couple of those companies you listed are customers of mine so I won’t be able to source them but I think we’ll be able to add some other companies that will yield you a list of 30 or 40 that might do the trick for you,” I added.

“And you’ll be able to get me names of the application engineers at those companies who are installing medical equipment today?” he asked. There was an emphasis on the word “today.”

“Yes,” I answered.

“And you’re sure they will be application engineers — the guys in the field installing the equipment?” he pressed, still unsure I knew what he was talking about.

“I promise,” I solemnly swore.

“How long will it take?”

“Give me 48 hours,” I answered. I’ll be able to send you probably half of what’s out there to get you started. Give me another 48 hours and I’ll send you the rest.”

I heard the surprise in the silence that followed. keep reading…

Krista Bradford recently wrote a timely and provocative article here on ERE about LinkedIn.

One of ERE’s long-time members, Ted Moore, in a comment to that article, stated, “If you rely heavily on LinkedIn and similar tools to connect with those your clients can easily find and recruit on their own, at least as they perceive it (and what else matters?), I look forward to competing with you.”

I know Ted and I also know he means what he says.

I also know as time marches on those who think LinkedIn is sourcing are eventually going to pay a heavy price for their growing addictions.

In my “Help Me Help You” document that I send to all my new customers requesting telephone names sourcing, there is a paragraph that instructs the customer to provide me:

– Any names you might already have — this does two things: 1) avoids me duplicating your efforts and 2) gets me in to the targets faster. Be sure to include their titles and any contact info you have on them — their titles help me understand how close I am to the target and what these folks may be called at the respective companies and their contact info gives me clues as to how to get inside their organizations.

More and more we have the LinkedIn discussion. keep reading…

I was talking to a dear friend this morning who told me all the rain we had recently washed out the rear of her house and caused substantial damage to her foundation and the low-lying rooms on that level of her home.

“Insurance doesn’t cover this. I need a second job,” she said, matter-of factly and in the common-sense tone I have always known her to adopt.

We went on to talk about several other things — how the “guys” in her male-dominated industry don’t appreciate or are willing to pay her fairly for the tremendous extra volume of business she has drummed up for the sales team in the past three years she has been with the company she works for now.

Granted, that’s her side of things and there may be another.

However, at the end of our conversation she happened to mention that she had developed a business relationship with someone who hates the telephone.

“How does that work for him?’ I asked, laughing. keep reading…

Cold Calling is Proactive – Productive – Profitable… it gives you instant gratification… and when you know how to do it right it is the most powerful skill in your sales arsenal.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out The Fordyce Letter!

In this last and final installment of this series we’re going to talk about how to use low and high technology appropriately to tailor your message to your audience.

One of the ideas behind technology is that it empowers us to work creatively. By blending different technologies we can democratize communication in new and surprising ways.

If you buy into the theory (and I do) that future generations will design and build their own technologies by blending what works and what doesn’t work in different situations, then you’re far on your way to understanding that what works for one person might never work for another.

Once again, I’m going to approach this subject from a phone sourcer’s perspective and demonstrate how I blend the use of high technology with low technology. keep reading…

We often ignore the basic elements we use in both our personal and business communications.

In truth there’s not a lot of difference in the two.

In both, you want to engage people naturally. Talking with a business associate should be not much different from talking with a friend.

Talking with a friend employs many of the same techniques we use in business communications — respectful and tactful interaction.

There are some areas of intimacy that should not be transgressed. Revealing too much of your personal business in a business transaction is generally thought to be not good advice. Use common sense here.

We’ve all heard the so-called “7%-38%-55% rule”: that communication is comprised of 55% body language, 38% tone of voice, and 7% content of words.

That’s mostly true except when… keep reading…

“I don’t know who I’m calling,” Marianne said.

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” I answered, while thinking to myself that none of us ever really do.

She nodded unhappily.

“Did you read One Lesson Lois?” I asked.

She nodded that she had.

“Did any of that resonate with you?” I asked again.

“Well, sort of,” she said.

“But Lois was never in the recruiting business so I can kind of understand her reluctance. I know it’s my job to call people …” she trailed off.

I watched her body language as she said this.

The right hand that she had drawn back clenched to her chest moved to her leg and she started to scratch at her knee. Her left hand went to her mouth and started pushing at her lower lip.

She appeared to be thinking. keep reading…

Last week I told you we were going to continue Marianne’s story by exploring the opportunities LinkedIn did offer, and I promised that’d we build on those results and a few others using Hoover’s and brief search engine visits to create a robust search that would surprise you.

One of our readers, Ben Ness, SOSed Marianne (in Part VIII, Comments section) with the following:

I googled “pigging,” figured out it was the same as “pipeline inspection,” did a keyword search on linkedin using “pipeline inspection” and came up with 280 results who currently still work in this industry. And that is just in my network. The Internet is a beautiful thing. Marianne, if you arereading this, I hope this helps.

I asked Ben what kind of LinkedIn account he had, because when I put the words “pipeline inspection” into LinkedIn’s keyword box I got 280 results too, but guess what?

NONE of them had any names attached to them — only titles like: keep reading…

She sat quietly adjacent to me at the oblong table we used on the first day of training.

Her six coworkers all seemed to like her.

Her name was Marianne and she was a pretty 20-something and this was her second job after graduating from college.

She mostly didn’t say anything but she did answer willingly when called upon.

I sat down next to her at her desk on the second day of training.

She was scheduled after Max and she seemed organized and efficient when I sat down.

Her job was up on her screen and it was formatted exactly as I had asked the class to do it the day before.

She was quiet and attentive as she had been the day before.

I asked what we were looking for.

She answered that she wanted to work on a job that had been causing her quite a bit of stress.

She needed people involved in the pre-sales activity for a piece of pigging machinery that would be installed onto a food-manufacturing floor.

The client wanted them to live in the Midwest so they could travel around the country more easily than if they lived on one coast or the other.

Sound reasoning.

I asked her if she had found anyone. keep reading…

So here we are on the second day of the onsite MagicMethod phone sourcing training.

We’re about to embark on the actual calling that is an integral part of the training.

It’s 8:15 a.m and my MagicMethod student and I are all cozy sitting next to one another in his cubicle with his phone and his screen before us with his worksheet pulled up .

It’s an Excel doc. Remember, I had asked everyone, the day before, to set the following day’s work up in Word.

I work in Word because it’s easy to manage and I can easily navigate it when I’m on the phone; filling it with notes and information from each call.

I find Excel exceedingly jumpy and confusing and the last thing I need when I’m on the phone is to become flustered because I can’t handle the document in front of me.

Handling Gatekeepers is hard enough. keep reading…

Remember, at the beginning of the last lesson, I asked the nervous sourcer sitting next to me if I could see his call sheet?

He busily pulled up the Excel sheet that he normally works in.

In the day-long phone sourcing class I had given him and his cohorts the day before I had instructed them to prepare a call sheet (in Word) for our individual work together that included not only the job description of the job we’d be working together but also the companies they wanted to target for names as well as information on each company. That included listing those companies along with:

“…their addresses, websites, main numbers, their fax numbers, a brief bio on what the company does and any names they already have at the company.”

I looked at the Excel sheet and asked him where the job description was. He said he didn’t have one. keep reading…

“Can I see your call sheet?” I asked the nervous young recruiter as I pulled up and sidled another chair along his.

I was there on the second day of the phone sourcing training I was doing for the company — the day where I visit each participant’s desk and sit with them, demonstrating and then listening in to them on the phone approaching gatekeepers.

Think of this as that day in school you sweated when the teacher handed out the “big test.”

You’re scarcely able to contain yourself for wanting to get the thing over with.

You fidget. You sit up straighter in your chair. You’re ready to begin.

And then it happens.

The page lands on your desk.

You wait anxiously for her to say “begin” as ‘she continues past you down your row.

You put pen to paper and you begin — at the beginning.

So it is with phone sourcing- there is a beginning point and an ending point.

The beginning point is with organization. keep reading…

“What’s thorough sourcing?” you ask.

“We’re doing that!” you hope think.

Are you?

Thorough sourcing is when you are confident you have everyone inside a specific company (or companies) that you can contact for your open opportunity.

It’s when you have a list of names along with their titles (and hopefully their direct dials!) that you can sit down and call through and pitch your position to.

Many of you are dealing with some very hard-to-fill positions.

Candidates are not answering your ads.

They’re ignoring your social media call-outs.

You’re not finding enough of them on the job boards and when you do find them on LinkedIn you can’t get in touch with many of them or they don’t answer your e-mails.

You’re not taking things far enough. keep reading…