Jordan Greenberg’s average fee collected in 2009 was down 53% from 2008. He had had a good life, home, and education for his kids — but things sure turned awful, he told the Fordyce Forum today.
He made sure things wouldn’t stay that way. In short, here’s what he did:
- He started saying, “no.” Greenberg was “workin’ a lot of crap in 2009,” he says. “So I stopped working B and C assignments.” Greenberg realized that “the lower the fee, the harder the position is to fill. If they don’t value who we are and what we bring to the table to begin with, the chances of them ever writing us a check are slim to none.”
- He did a makeover. Sure, he’d done something similar for decades: placing software salespeople on a contingency basis. But what worked in the past wouldn’t always work now, and new tactics, such as getting paid by candidates, would work.
- He renewed his faith in myself. He made sure his attitude was positive and he believed in his ability to succeed, to help his clients and his candidates achieve their goals, rather than getting down.
- He became much more aware of, and developed a greater faith in, the world around him. “There is so much negativity in the world,” he says, “and there is so much negativity in the mass media.” If you watch the live webcam of the oil spill, he says, you might convince yourself the world’s crumbling to an end all around you, which it’s not. Instead, he said, find faith in a church or other outlet that will help you appreciate the beauty and not the shortcomings of the world.
Greenberg says that recruiters have done the same thing so long that they forget the stress that candidates and clients go through in the hiring process. “A candidate going home to her husband and saying, ‘I have an interview tomorrow’ — these are stressful decisions,” he says. For recruiters who are part of these decisions, their “success is more dependent on emotion then perfection. Everyone has the mental part down, but not everyone has the quality of interactions down.We need to focus more on connecting with people on an emotional level.”