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Tag: coldcalling
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…
According to a recent Facebook blog post, “Half of employers (50 percent) are using Facebook in their hiring process. A majority (54 percent) already using the social network anticipates Facebook becoming a more important part of the talent acquisition process in the near future.”
Job candidates are also infusing their job search with Facebook activity. In a recent study conducted jointly by Facebook and Carnegie-Mellon University, results revealed that job seekers with strong ties who shared private messages, commented on each others’ posts, or posted directly on each others’ walls found new jobs at a rate of 33.2 percent over the three months. Those with weak ties found jobs a fifth as often, at only a 6.5 percent rate.
This data suggests two things: The first is that we are hiring people who are spending a lot of time on social media. (Let’s hope they’re not doing it while on the job!) And second, Facebook is a powerful tool for active, hands-on users. Like job seekers, recruiters need to do more than just jump on to the Facebook wagon — they need to learn how to drive it and not to forget to use the phone along with it. keep reading…
Plan your flight and fly your plan. That is the adage that aviators use before setting foot into an aircraft. The same should apply to a recruiter making a call to either a client or a candidate. So many of us filled with the urgency to get our message out and connect with clients/candidates just pick up the phone and start gabbing when a real, live person answers. Similarly, and more often than not, when we get an answering machine we stumble and stagger in terms of what to say. It doesn’t make us appear to be or sound professional.
Recruiting is a profession, and recruiters serious about their profession are always seeking ways to improve their skills, message delivery, and overall success in the business. Success not only translates into income but overall job satisfaction.
When calling a candidate or potential candidate, lay out in your mind what you would like to accomplish with the call and your desired outcome. For example, we generally want to know three things: keep reading…
There are many different things a phone sourcer says everyday, but there are some that are said most everyday.
You have maybe three seconds to engage a Gatekeeper.
What you say in those first few, fatal moments will determine in what direction your sourcing call will go.
The following are the most used words and sentences you’d hear if you could sit next to a phone sourcer for a day. keep reading…
As a recruiter, the way you communicate can make or break you. It can keep you employed and keep your candidates loyal to you.
I’m sure you have all heard the saying, “It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.” It’s wise to follow this advice, but the most successful recruiters need to know what to say and how to say it. Consequently, to be a truly effective oral communicator, it’s imperative to be a great listener. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to focus on oral communication.
Knowing what to say and how to say it means you’re listening, asking questions, and prepared for questions, concerns, and/or objections.
As an in-house recruiter or HR professional, have you ever been in a meeting with a recruitment supplier and been very impressed with their pitch and excited about the results that are going to follow, only to be completely let down by their performance? It won’t surprise you to read that you’re not the only one.
We all know that for every good recruiter who walks the earth, there are others who don’t quite make the grade. Many sell a value proposition that isn’t being followed up with action — recruiters who purport to headhunt and cold-call top people in the market, but actually only advertise their clients’ vacancies. As a client of these external recruiters you need to be in a position to make an accurate assessment of their worth — not just by what they tell you, but what they actually prove.
Many contingency-level recruitment firms haven’t evolved their value proposition as technology has evolved over the past 10 years. As in-house recruiters have been able to catch up with doing direct sourcing through job boards and social media, external suppliers should be getting more sophisticated in their approach to maintain a value proposition worthy of the fees that are charged — mapping out competitors, gathering referrals, building expertise and relationships in their chosen niche, for example. Too many contingency firms are still charging 15% to 25% for doing nothing more than advertising a poorly written or cut and pasted job spec, and it’s just not good enough.
So here are some questions to ask your suppliers next time you invite them in for an update or suppler appraisal. keep reading…
There is no index of character so sure as the voice. – Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister and novelist 1804-1881
When we open our mouths, we reveal all sorts of things about ourselves that can have nothing to do with the words we’re using.
We all know that our tone is important when talking with a Gatekeeper, but how many of us realize that pressing on just one word in a sentence can change the impression and sometimes even the meaning that the emphasis gives?
In all of our jobs there are times when we must think about how we’re going to say something (in order to get the best result) before we say it. So my advice below applies not just to phone sourcing but to any recruiting or business-related call, such as a call with a job candidate, not just a gatekeeper.
Nuances that include inflection, stress, and context are all meaningful signals that convey information but inflection is the one that can change entirely the meaning of a sentence and the idea(s) behind it.
The emphasis on a particular word implies additional information than what the words say.
Say the following sentences with emphasis on each bolded word. keep reading…
If you work in an office, you realize that many times the Christmas season can be a less hectic and even a slack period. In most cases everyone, including recruiters, gear down and change their work patterns for the holidays. But if you’re a corporate recruiting leader, December should be viewed instead as a golden opportunity. It is a prime recruiting month (along with January and June) because many employed prospects have free time to consider a new job due to their own reduced workloads.
The end of the year is also a time where many individuals are reevaluating their current work and life situation and planning for the future. You may be skeptical but in this article I provide more than 20 reasons why corporate recruiting leaders should actually ramp up recruiting during the holiday season.
Here’s a riddle for everyone looking to make a hire or get a date for Saturday night: How is Sadie Hawkins Day like recruiting?
Give up? Really?? This is an easy one! Both of you get to court the object of your desire.
Sadie Hawkins Day is “celebrated” on the first Saturday after November 9, which of course, is tomorrow. According to tradition — a tradition that evolved from a comic strip back in 1937 — Sadie Hawkins is the day when girls could ask boys out on a date and they pretty much had to accept. Back in pre-war America, that sort of thing just didn’t happen. But it caught on fast, after cartoonist Al Capp inked the first Sadie Hawkins Day race in his L’il Abner strip.
keep reading…
In Part 1, we looked at the importance of “knowing your numbers.” To be successful in meeting demand from hiring managers, great recruiters need to know how to move “suspects” (think: passive candidates) through a sales funnel, or pipeline, quickly, and effectively. And they need to know their conversion rates throughout the process.
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.
There are many reasons why gatekeepers reject your efforts to breach their lines. I’m going to go over four of them with you in this article, but first I want to tell you a story. keep reading…
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:
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.
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…
The National Security Agency has made our jobs easier with the release of a 646-page document called “Untangling the Web: A... more »
