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Last week, Part 1 of this series introduced a number of pain points that render most corporate approaches to managing internal movement for development, retention, and talent ROI purposes ineffective.

In reality, most current approaches are relics from years of tradition, loosely defined, poorly integrated, and barely managed.

During this installment, I will build upon the goals and key elements of more effective second-generation programs discussed in Part 1 by focusing on the benefits of adopting second-generation approaches and methods to increase program participation rates. keep reading…

More often than not, it is the simplest things in life and in business that produce the biggest impacts. Having spent more than 30 years analyzing corporate recruiting practices and strategy, I have noticed there are some rather basic questions that, if only posed, would have a profound impact on the effectiveness of most recruiting endeavors.

Unfortunately, the questions are rarely asked, resulting in inefficient, ineffective practices.

Do not pose these questions periodically; incorporate them into your approach to build an engaging candidate experience, a more compelling offer presentation, and ultimately, a more productive hire.

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As the economy tumbles, and companies right-size their recruiting departments, the bottom-half is the first to go. Under this scenario, those formerly in the relatively secure 2nd quartile are now in the bottom-half. So be wary or get better.

With this sobering news in mind, I offer those of you in all quartiles this short, 10-point personal evaluation guide. While some of them are a bit crazy, they’re based on comparing your performance to the best in the business. It will tell you quickly whether you’re in the top 25% and how to stay there.

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If you work at a company that has recently cut back on its recruiting budget, but not on its high expectations, attempting to deliver can be frustrating.

Fortunately, if you have the courage to shift your approach you can still produce significant results using recruiting approaches that require little or no money. I am sure you are probably thinking that the old adage “you get what you pay for” holds true, but I am sure you also realize that there are exceptions to every rule (after all, ERE.net is free!).

Over the course of my career, I have compiled hundreds of innovative steps that recruiters and line managers have taken to reach top talent when other solutions simply were not working or they didn’t have the money to fund them.

I recently put pen to paper and completed a new book entitled 1,000 Ways to Recruit Top Talent, which as the name implies, offers numerous recruiting ideas, all of which have been used successfully.

The following is a checklist of some of those ideas that require little or no budget to implement. These approaches also work during strong economic times but they are especially appropriate during a major business downturn.

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An interview with Rich Kenny of Northwest, who talks about the company’s combo with Delta; reducing time-to-hire; background checks; on-the-spot hires; recruitment advertising; and improving the candidate experience.

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During tough economic times there is intense pressure on all functions within the business to re-think their current approach in an effort to become more competitive and aggressive all while containing cost.

Unfortunately, many recruiters and recruiting leaders choose an opposite path, becoming more conservative in their approach. When markets head south and fear about economic issues grip the populace, consider a counter-cyclical recruiting strategy that sends a clear message to everyone inside and outside your organization that talent truly means something to your organization.

One controversial yet extremely public, effective outside-the-box recruiting approach you might consider is “proximity recruiting.”

You Must Do Internet and Physical Recruiting

Even with the tremendous growth of Internet recruiting, not everyone is actively surfing the Internet looking for a job or combing through their email in anticipation of your generic form letter introduction.

Reaching a greater percentage of the population relevant to your job searches often requires using at least three channels to reach them, one of which should be physical. The underlying concept of physical recruiting is a simple one, just as robbers target banks because that’s where the money is! Recruiters need to target physical locations where a large number of potential hires can be found.

While nearly everyone in recruiting is familiar with the dreaded job fair, there are numerous other approaches to physical recruiting that are far more effective and fun. One such approach is “proximity” or event recruiting. Proximity recruiting at professional events (tradeshows and seminars) is clearly becoming more mainstream, but one location in particular really elevates the visibility of your efforts and qualifies as “outrageous.” The location? Across the street or in the parking lot of talent-competing firms in trouble.

Proximity Recruiting with a Taco Truck

If you have been paying attention to the business press lately, you are probably aware that Internet giant Yahoo! was planning to lay off approximately 1,000 employees worldwide, the greatest percentage of which would come from its Silicon Valley headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.

What you may not know is that despite a multi-year trend of notable voluntary exits by key employees, Yahoo! is still considered by many to employ some of the greatest engineering talent in the industry. This talent is extremely valuable to hundreds of upstarts working on next-generation technologies.

Yahoo!, like many organizations planning a reduction in force, kept its plans secret until the day when the axe actually swung. Because employees knew pink slips were coming, but no real guidance was offered as to who would be impacted, more people were concerned than would actually be cut.

Seizing on that fear and the actual swinging of the axe, Tokbox, an upstart enabling free voice and video calling over the Internet without any software download, engaged a proximity recruiting strategy that some may consider outrageous.

While pink slips were being handed out, Tokbox executives were setting up a taco truck across the street from Yahoo’s corporate campus, offering employees affected (and anyone else that wanted to chat) a hot lunch and information about employment opportunities.

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ESPN’s Bruce Feldman’s new book “Meat Market” chronicles the business of recruiting in big-time college football, with a focus on Ole Miss coach Ed Orgeron. In his talk with ERE, you may get ideas (including when he discusses “negative recruiting”) that can work in the corporate America.

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After a lengthy screening process, the hiring committee feels it has found the right candidate for the company. Now comes the tricky part: how do you design an offer and go through the offer stage of the process without damaging the relationship with the candidate?

Many companies are not prepared to go through the offer step of the process. As a result, they damage the relationship with the candidate. This leads to one of two unfortunate conclusions. Either they lose the candidate or the candidate comes on board, but with scar tissue. Applying some of the best practices from the sales world into a sales talent screening program helps to avoid that scenario.

The offer stage of the hiring process parallels the proposal phase of sales. Best practices in sales say that you don’t present a proposal until a thorough needs analysis has been completed. If a sales person is presenting a proposal to a prospect, he has acquired the information needed to design a solution, has discussed budget, has a full understanding of their solution requirements, and has set an expectation on pricing. This is certainly the case if the salesperson is going to be successful in winning the account.

Looking at this process in relation to the offer stage of the sales talent screening program, many of the same best practices from sales hold true. During the screening program, information needs to be gathered from the candidate to determine their financial requirements. Unfortunately, many sales talent screening programs focus exclusively on screening the candidate for fit, but do not consider the needs for the offer phase of the process. This leads to a last-minute scurry to mine the information from the candidate, or they design the offer blindly. Neither of those are best practices for the offer stage.

In sales, it is said that if you are going to lose, lose early. This prevents you from making a huge investment in a relationship that will not generate revenue. The parallel to screening sales talent is understanding the financial requirements of the candidate early enough to stop the process before over-investing in the relationship. There is no point in continuing a process with a candidate who requires a compensation level 25% above what you can offer. This probably seems logical, but hiring executives rarely focus on this as a de-selection element early in the process.

Just like discussing pricing with a prospect, the financial-needs discussion requires finesse. The candidate knows that you are asking questions about their financials, just like a prospect knows a sales person is fishing for budget information. The better-skilled salespeople tell their prospects, “I don’t want to waste your time by getting you excited about a solution that will not fit in your budget constraints…”

In much the same way, this discussion can be had with the candidate, “I don’t want to excite you about an opportunity that might not be a match for your financial needs. As you look at making a change in position, what thoughts have you given to your compensation requirements?”

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I’ve been around a lot of years, and I can’t remember a time when recruiters, recruiting managers, hiring managers, HR executives, and company leaders didn’t complain about the lack of good candidates. When the Internet and job boards came along, we were promised the solution was at hand.

But more than a dozen years later, the problems in finding talent have gotten worse, not better. I’m going to suggest that sourcing is not the problem, and that much of the solution has nothing to do with seeing more candidates.

I equate hiring top performers as a business process similar to manufacturing. My early industry background was in high-volume consumer electronics and automotive components, so this comparison is easy for me to make. In a factory when you have excessive scrap you need to either buy extra raw materials or reduce the scrap rate. This is not rocket science, but somehow the obvious seems to be overlooked when it comes to hiring.

(Note: in this article substitute prospects or candidates whenever you read the term “raw materials.”)

When sourcing is viewed as a factory, with prospects coming in at the receiving dock and accepted offers coming out of shipping, you quickly notice two problems. One, the raw material is incorrectly specified or over-specified, and two, the process used to convert the raw material into accepted offers is based more on emotion than science.

In a factory, excessive scrap is usually due to a combination of bad material specs, inconsistent processes, and weak controls. In hiring, these are equivalent to weak job descriptions, managers who evaluate the wrong things incorrectly, and the lack of metrics.

This requires recruiters to find more raw materials than necessary. This becomes problematic when recruiters over-rely on boring advertising and unsophisticated selling techniques to attract a diminishing supply of coveted raw materials.

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For most recruiters the make or break moment comes at the end of the process, when it’s time to negotiate the offer. A successful negotiation means that the process concludes with a hire, and the recruiter rides off into the sunset.

But a successful negotiation doesn’t mean coming out on top with a low-ball offer that gets accepted. That can cause the candidate to get turned off and in the worst-case result in the candidate walking away. Even if accepted, it could leave the candidate with a sour taste in the mouth and essentially starting off with a negative attitude toward the employer. An overly generous offer on the other hand is a waste of the employer’s resources and can upset internal equity. Getting it right is not easy as few recruiters are trained in negotiating.

The number of books that have been written on negotiating can fill a large room — several thousand are in print. But an easier approach can be discerned from recent research at Northwestern University. A study by Prof. Adam Galinsky and his colleagues suggests that a powerful way to influence the outcome to be closer to a win-win situation is to view the situation from the candidate’s perspective — also know as the perspective-taking approach.

What this means and how it works is explained below, but the research has demonstrated that recruiters using such an approach consistently achieve the highest level of economic efficiency, without sacrificing their own material interests. They produce a better overall outcome for both sides.

Getting Inside the Candidate’s Head

The perspective approach means try to get inside the candidate’s head. To achieve an understanding of the candidate — their motives and likely behaviors — consider the world from their viewpoint. Basically, put yourself on their side of the table. This is not as ridiculous as it may appear. The research demonstrates that recruiters adopting such an approach achieve the best possible outcome close to half the time.

To be able to do this well recruiters need to do their homework before arriving at the negotiation. First, have an understanding of the likely issues. These always fall into three categories.

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The best recruiters I know execute the fundamentals of recruiting well and have developed good “habits” within each step of the recruitment process.

One simple, but powerful referral sourcing technique is closing each recruitment cold call with the question: “Can you do me a favor?”

As we all know, much has been much written about overcoming the objection “I am not interested…” or “I am happy; thanks, but no thanks…”

But in reality, you will not be able to turn a “no” into a “yes” in many (if not most) of these situations.

Yes, they might listen to your message (or pitch) but in the majority of cases, they won’t be interested or, they won’t be qualified.

Of course, when this happens, it is your job to network with this person to get referrals. Your ability to extract referrals and/or leads to help you with your search depends on many factors; including (among others):

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A great recruiter should have the same skill sets and qualifications of a great salesperson. All of the great sales visionaries including Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins have taught these steps to sales professionals around the world, yet few recruiters today understand or use any of these available resources.

So much emphasis has been placed on prospecting or sourcing potential candidates that recruiters are not taught the basics of the sales process that follows the sourcing function. Having listened to thousands of third-party and corporate recruiters over the past 15 years, my sense is that less than 10% of recruiters understand basic sales principles.

Although the terminology may differ, the following are the critical steps to every successful sales professional or recruiting professional.

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It seems that nearly every recruiter, at some point in his or her career, has been forced to present an offer that was an insult to the candidate and an embarrassment for the recruiter.

In the first part of this series, I addressed actions that can be taken prior to initiation of the recruiting process and in the initial stages of the recruiting process. Now my attention will turn to actions that can be taken during the offer phase of the recruiting cycle and a listing of non-monetary offer components that often don’t receive the focus they should.

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I recently overheard several people talking about an employment offer one of them had recently received. The candidate, who has received three promotions in three years with her current company, was so under-whelmed with the offer that she was insulted and happy to discuss her disgust with others.

The offer, from a well-known company, required the candidate to take a drop in title, relocate to a city with a significantly higher cost of living at her own expense, and all for a $1,500/year increase in salary. Having spent a month chatting on the phone and in person with the company, this candidate was frustrated. Unfortunately, this situation happens all the time.

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It’s the million-dollar question in recruiting that almost no one asks. It’s a simple question, and one that car salespeople around the world ask: “What is it going to take to get you in this car?”

Regardless of industry or geography, every salesperson worth their weight in salt asks some variant of this question at some point early on in the sales cycle.

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I am sure that you have been there. You have a candidate you’ve been working with for a few weeks and you have built a solid relationship.

The candidate has been on a couple interviews with the hiring manager. Things are going well as the candidate and the client are each delighted with the thought of going forward.

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The fight for top talent is intense and it will get worse. Interim results from our 2006 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey (this is the last week you can still take the survey) indicate that the number of offers being turned down is increasing, ad response is declining along with candidate quality, and turnover is increasing. In my opinion, without great recruiters implementing best practices for every search, these problems will not go away.

The purpose of this “On Becoming a Great Recruiter” series is to give recruiters hands-on tactics to hire great people, one search at a time. Over the past seven weeks, we’ve covered the entire recruiting process from the beginning to almost the end. In Part 2, we described how to use performance profiles rather than job descriptions when taking the assignment. In Part 3, we described what it takes to write and position ads that compel the best to apply. Part 4 focused on finding top passive talent using tools like ZoomInfo to identify and network with the best around. In Parts 5 and 6, we described how to conduct a performance-based interview that was not only simple to use and more accurate than traditional behavioral interviewing, but it also gave recruiters the information needed to defend candidates against managers who make superficial assessments. Part 7 focused on negotiating and closing offers on opportunity rather than compensation.

This week, we need to make sure that all of your hard work doesn’t fall apart at the last moment by having a candidate renege after accepting your offer. To minimize this problem, start by summarizing the big reasons people turn down offers:

• They accepted a counteroffer.

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When someone says “no” to your offer, your goal is not to convince him to say “yes.” Your goal is to get him to say “maybe.” Recruiting and hiring top people who have multiple offers or who are passive candidates is not easy. They won’t put up with weak recruiters, weak hiring managers, or an unprofessional hiring process. The purpose of this series on “Becoming a Great Recruiter” is to provide recruiters with the tools and techniques they need to deal with the challenges of hiring the best.

You should take our 2006 Recruiting and Hiring Challenges survey if you want to compare your team’s or your personal performance to other recruiters. Handling objections, overcoming concerns, dealing with counteroffers, and candidates saying “no” is part of the daily grind of every top recruiter. Expect it. In fact, be concerned when these problems don’t come up. In this article, you’ll discover how to uncover and address these concerns. As you get better, you’ll develop new techniques to anticipate and address the problem before the candidate even brings it up. You’ll know you’re a top 10% recruiter when you’re able to do this consistently. Confidently handling a situation in which a candidate decides to opt out of your hiring process involves three basic steps: uncovering the problem, suggesting alternatives, and getting the candidate to agree to move ahead. Good salespeople who represent customized products or services know that uncovering and dealing with concerns is the key to closing more business.

The same is true when dealing with top people who are looking at your job opening as a career move, and not just another job. To begin, you’ll need to eliminate the transactional hurry-up recruiting model based largely on salary and start date if you use this approach. Then, you need to have a clear understanding of real job needs (reread Part 2 and these articles) before you start sourcing. The downside of hiring top people is that it takes a lot longer, and these candidates demand a lot more information like the scope of the job, hiring manager and team competency, company strength, location, opportunities for growth, and complete disclosure on short- and long-term compensation. So be prepared to give it to them in small bites, especially when they hesitate. To uncover possible deal-breakers early on, always ask what the person likes and doesn’t like about the job after every interview.

As long as there is some level of interest, all you need to do to keep the process moving forward in the early stages is to just say that you’ll make sure that these issues are addressed in the next round of interviews. Then, ensure they’re covered to the candidate’s satisfaction. When you’re down to two or three candidates, ask the person if she wants to be on the short list of final candidates. If the candidate says no, it’s time to use a solution-selling technique called “closing upon an objection” to uncover the problem and keep the deal alive. First, ask your candidate why she wants to opt-out of the process, and then validate it. Assuming, for example, the problem is associated with the scope of the job, ask something like this: “I can understand why you might be concerned that the job isn’t big enough for you. But, let me ask you this: If we can demonstrate that the job is in fact bigger than your current understanding, or if we could make it bigger, would you be willing to come back for a final round of interviews?” The key here is that you don’t have to solve the problem. You just need to ask that if it could be solved to the candidate’s satisfaction, would she be willing to move on to the next step in your hiring process? If the person agrees to go forward, you’ve probably uncovered the primary concern. Unfortunately, many times the person will still say “no,” meaning the initial concern was just a smokescreen.

To figure out the real problem, use the same close-upon-a-concern technique as you inquire about other concerns, always asking that if these could be satisfactorily addressed, would the person agree to go forward? When the candidate finally agrees to proceed, you’ve identified the real problem. Of course, then you have to solve it, and unfortunately not all problems are solvable. For example, “I think the hiring manager is a real jerk,” might be difficult to overcome even with an, “If I can prove to you he’s not,” counterargument - especially if the person is a real jerk. While you won’t close every deal using the close-upon-a-concern technique, you’ll close many more than normal, and you’ll better understand the reasons why when you lose some. This is how you move the hiring process forward by taking modest “maybe, if…” steps before you get to “yes, I’ll accept your offer.” When negotiating the actual details of the offer, you can use another form of this same process. The principle here is to never make your offer formal unless you’re 100% sure it will be accepted on the spot. You do this by testing. Testing is important if too many of your offers get rejected; if many candidates say, “I have to think about it” after receiving the offer; or, if some of your candidates say “yes” but later renege.

While we want to give candidates plenty of thinking time before they’re ready to accept your offer on the spot, if you make the offer formal before they’re ready to accept it, you won’t find out any potential problems that could have been resolved. Here’s how the “testing the offer” process works. It’s based on the sales techniques known as secondary or trial closing. The simplest way to use this technique is to just ask the candidate if she would be in a position to accept an offer if something satisfactory were put together. If the person says “yes,” find out what she considers satisfactory. You’ll have to negotiate around this point a bit, but when some rough agreement is reached, ask the person if an offer with these terms were made, when she could start. If you get a specific start date like October 17th or two weeks from Monday, you’ll close this person. Anything vague or general like “in a few weeks” or “I’ll have to think about it” is a cause of concern. It means the person isn’t even ready to consider an offer from your company. In this case, you’ll have to find out what the underlying problems are by repeating the close-upon-a-concern techniques described above. However, don’t stop testing even if the person does agree to a tentative start date and you believe the person is ready to accept your offer. Use this approach to test the next step: “If we could put a formal offer together this week under the terms discussed, when would you be in a position to formally sign and accept the offer?” Anything other than “right away” is a clue that the candidate has other opportunities or that your offer is not all it’s cracked up to be. Again, back up and uncover any other potential problems, resolve them if possible, and then ask when the person will be in a position to accept your offer. Of course, some issues are not resolvable. But the techniques described here give you a good chance.

One last test you should use, even if the person said she’ll accept your offer, is by saying something like, “I’m ready to get the offer approved today under the terms we discussed. If Bill (the hiring manager) meets you for lunch tomorrow to make if official, are you in a position to tell him you’ll accept it, other than reading the fine print, and signing it within 24 hours?” The point here is to get the candidate to formally state she’ll say “yes” to your offer with the only contingency being reviewing the key terms, discussing it with her key advisors, and getting back to you the next morning. Under no circumstances should you give a person another three or four days to accept your offer. You’re just asking for problems. When this process is conducted properly, the candidate has just had three to five days to seriously consider every term of your offer. If, after all of this work, you then get a last minute “I have to think about it,” your deal is likely dead. While we want candidates to think about all of the terms of your offer in great depth and take a reasonable time to do it, you don’t want the candidate to use your offer as a negotiating tool with other companies or as leverage to obtain a counteroffer.

Being deliberate and thorough in this closing process is how you make your offer the last one the candidate receives. Doing this every time for every candidate is why great recruiters close more deals, especially the tough ones.

If you’ve followed the advice provided in the previous four articles, you’re now finding more top active and passive candidates. Finding top people is actually easier than hiring them (Part 2 and Part 3).

Here’s why: First, they won’t accept offers unless they’re for bigger jobs with better long-term prospects than their current jobs or competing offers. That’s why taking the assignment and preparing performance profiles are so important (Part 1). You need to understand real job needs to present a convincing case that the job you’re representing offers a true career opportunity.

Second, top people who are in demand generally want a nice bump in compensation as an incentive to accept one offer over another. The situation is worsened because these people are generally already at the top end of their salary ranges for comparable positions. However, you can alleviate these problems if you know how to use the interview to shift the decision to accept an offer from one based on compensation to one based on opportunity. This is what we’ll cover in this article. First, you should retake the online recruiter diagnostic to determine how you’ve progressed so far in becoming a top 10% recruiter. Then, you should take our current Recruiting Challenges 2006 survey. Especially review the questions on recruiter compensation.

Once you learn how to use the interview to both assess competency and negotiate offers, you’ll be able to command compensation for yourself in the upper half of the ranges shown in the survey. Many recruiters, and just about everyone in HR and OD, think that the primary purpose of an interview is to assess candidate competency. Yet, this is only one of many competing objectives, with the most important being the need to use the interview to demonstrate to your awesome candidate that she is not as awesome as she thinks she is in comparison to the job you’re representing. Now that you know the ending, let me start at the beginning.

When I left Corporate America to become a third-party recruiter, I was very good at finding and identifying top people for jobs I was quite familiar with, including staff to mid-management spots in operations, as well as engineering and finance/accounting jobs for manufacturing and distribution companies. In those days, the key to recruiter success was networking. While I could always find the right people, many deals fell apart because the compensation plans offered were not attractive enough. To minimize this, I developed a two-pronged recruiting strategy. The first was to get my hiring manager clients to shift their decision to performance and potential rather than skills and experience. Creating a performance profile opened up these jobs to a broader range of candidates with high potential, but with a slightly different mix of skills, lighter experience, and generally lower compensation. The second part of the strategy was to start convincing candidates early in the recruiting process that compensation shouldn’t be the reason for evaluating or taking a new opportunity.

To accomplish this, I just asked candidates if they would be open to explore a career opportunity if it could be demonstrated that the job offered was at least 10-15% bigger than their current jobs, and that it was growing 5-10% faster per year. I then went on to say that this should be the basis for their decision to accept an offer or not, even if the compensation increase itself was modest. This point was stressed by presenting evidence that those people who made compensation the primary reason for accepting one offer over another usually were disappointed when they discovered that the jobs themselves were not as substantive as they had hoped. Most accepted the logic, and over 90% agreed to proceed on this basis. Now, all I had to do was prove to them that the job offered both immediate stretch and increased long-term growth. I’ve written about performance-based interviewing before, but to demonstrate job stretch you need to be especially good at two parts: 1) conducting an in-depth work history review; and 2) digging deep into the candidate’s major accomplishments. During the work history review, you need to find out why the person changed jobs, how successful these transitions were, the scope and scale of the jobs held, the person’s trend of growth over time, the types of work where the person excelled, any recognition received for doing great work at each position, and the types of people the person worked with, including the breadth of management or project responsibility.

Since you’ll be negotiating the offer on job stretch, during this work history review you need to specifically look for areas where the candidate is deficient in comparison to your job needs. This generally involves factors like the size of the budget managed, the team size, the chance to do and learn different things, the complexity of the task, exposure to different types of people, and the importance of the job in relationship to the overall company business strategy. But, telling (or selling) the candidate about these doesn’t help the negotiation process. It’s far better if the candidate internalizes or figures out for herself where she’s deficient.

One way to pull this off is to challenge the candidate a little bit by suggesting that while she has great skills in one area, the job itself might be a bit of a stretch in another. Here’s an example: “While I’m quite impressed with your technical depth, this job might be a real challenge for you in the areas of dealing directly with our major clients in negotiating product requirement specifications. Can you give me an example of a major accomplishment in which you’ve done something comparable?” If you have conducted an in-depth work history review, the candidate will more likely trust your judgment and will see this as an important skill to add to her resume. Better, she will shift her attitude and attempt to convince the interviewer that she’s capable of handling the task. Now, you’ll need to spend 10 minutes or so digging deep into the accomplishment to validate the person’s skills. Even being a little skeptical helps, but, in the end, the person will clearly understand the importance of the task and your professionalism in understanding her capabilities. If you do this a few times for other critical tasks, the candidate will clearly understand where the job offers real stretch. To create long-term growth, you can use a similar accomplishment question, but with a twist. In this case, rather than challenging the candidate, offer an inducement by tying the job to some major company initiative.

Here’s an example: “One of our major challenges in this job is to lead the launch of a new series of products. We’re putting significant resources into this product and assigning some of our best people to run it. Can you tell me about your most significant product launch accomplishment?” Again, you’ll need to spend about 10 minutes digging into this accomplishment to understand the candidate’s role, the challenges faced, the decisions made, and how comparable it is to your needs, the environment, the team, and the culture. As you do this, you might uncover some areas where the candidate is a bit deficient compared to your needs. Then, you can suggest that you have a bit of a concern here, but probe further and see if the candidate has overcome comparable deficiencies.

The key to all of this is to dig deep into the person’s accomplishments and then compare these to real job needs. If the person is a top person and the job is significant, you should easily be able to find areas that offer 10-15% job stretch and 5-10% job growth. To do this properly, you must know real job needs and be a pro at the interviewing process suggested. To accept an offer with only a modest increase in compensation, the person must be convinced that the job offers both immediate stretch plus long-term growth. The interviewing method suggested above starts this process. But, don’t stop here. Recruiters can only facilitate the process. The hiring manager and hiring team need to become personally involved in the recruiting and selection process. This includes spending extra time conducting this type of in-depth interview, taking the candidate to lunch or dinner, handling follow-up calls, and even making the offer some type of big event. All of this helps, since the candidate not only must internally justify the decision to accept your offer with less compensation, but she must also justify it to her circle of personal advisors and even to her boss when she turns in her resignation.

To help this along, give the candidate a marketing version of the performance profile summarizing the major tasks, challenges, and opportunities. Collectively, this is how you use the interview to switch the decision criteria for accepting your offer from one based on compensation to one based on opportunity. This is a critical process you’ll need to learn and implement if you want to become a top 10% recruiter placing top 10% people.

Over the next eight weeks, you have a chance to learn what it takes to become one of the top recruiters in the country. This means you’ll be able to make at least $150,000-$175,000 per year; you’ll be seen as a true career consultant by your candidates and a true partner by your clients.

Bottom line: What this means is that you’ll make more placements with better people more quickly while negotiating on opportunity, not compensation. However, to get to be a high-earning, well-respected recruiter, you’ll need to try out the techniques presented in this article. Most likely, many of them will run counter to your current approach. It’s in these areas that you’ll have to work harder to overcome your beliefs and still try out the ideas. This is how you grow, and getting through these rough spots is the key to personal change management. So, put some extra effort in here. But enough of the talk. Let’s get started on getting better.

First, I want you to write down the one single thing you need to do to become a better recruiter. Whether it’s making cold calls, taking the assignment, negotiating offers, or whatever, I want you to focus on improving this one skill over the next eight weeks. This focused intensity will allow you to extract something meaningful from each of these articles and apply it directly to your work.

Feel free to email me the area you’ve chosen for personal improvement, but beware - if you tell me now, you’ll need to tell me in eight weeks how you got better. Here are the eight key topics we’ll be covering during this series, and a few tips to get you started right away.

1. Benchmarking your performance. Since this a project, and not just a series of articles to read, you’ll first need to figure how good you are today. Take this recruiter diagnostic right now to get started. At the end of the project, you’ll take the same diagnostic again to see how much you’ve improved. We’ll also be taking a big survey as part of this. It will be the first to collect critical recruiter performance metrics like requisitions handled by recruiter, sendouts per hire, placements per month, and income. Sign up here if you want to be part of this important study.

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