The Key to Successful Recruiting is in the Networking
Recruiting is a hard business. It consists of long days, lots of phone calls, and more time than we would like to admit staring at a computer screen. When someone is new to the recruiting industry they want to be successful, so we tell them that if they make X number of phone calls a day they will be successful, and if they hit that number we praise them, if not, we evaluate their plans, we retrain on developing compelling scripts for each call and we over stress the importance of making the calls and speaking with people. The lesson we teach: speaking with candidates ultimately leads to successfully placing them into open positions.
Well, to attain X number of calls, new recruiters have to learn where to get resumes to call. So they get trained on a variety of job boards, how to search on specific terms or keywords, how to set up saved searches, or how to search outside the box. Then they forward the resumes to their email and start saving them to folders to call candidates. Usually they are trained on the firm’s internal database, as well, to supplement their calls so they have enough people. They are also told to spend a portion of their time on Linkedin, social media, or other sites messaging candidates directly. The underlying theory is that if you do a little bit of everything you will find success in at least one of the areas.
But what happens when despite their best efforts they still aren’t seeing the level of success that they or the agency they work for wants? The pressure builds, recruiters come in feeling stressed about making calls and finding candidates and they focus on quantity instead of quality.
So what is the solution?
Over the last couple of years we have noticed a lack of candidates putting their resumes on job boards and responding to Linkedin in-mail’s. Don’t get us wrong those are still viable avenues for finding candidates but not the quantity we are looking for.
So we have gone back to basics and focus on referrals.
The golden question – Who Do You Know?
If we get a software development role, instead of trying to call all the developers we have in our database, that have gotten hundreds of calls already this year from us and other agencies… we ask the question – who sits next to the people that we are looking for? And we call them instead.
We focus on building relationships with people instead of trying to recruit them directly. Why? Because we have found that the amount of success we have is significantly higher when we ask them who they know instead of if they are looking. It takes the pressure off of the candidates we are calling and then if they do start looking in the future they feel more comfortable reaching out to us because
1 – they know us
2 – they like us
Recruiting is not just about making calls but it requires a process where candidates are contacted and a rapport is developed. Through that rapport we build a relationship and we move together towards a common goal.
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