Recruitment – Do you want the blue pill or the red pill?

I love that scene from The Matrix where Neo gets shot at with 100 bullets and he slows time down, leans back, relaxes and dodges every one of them. He seems to control time and space. What he has done is change his perspective of what is going on in reality. As you can tell, I’m hooked on this theme, hence the name of my company!

How much free time do you have at work? How about in your life in general?

I know, Neo never worked in recruitment. How many management meetings, candidate calls, client visits, sales reports and other constant interruptions did he have to deal with? I take your point.

I think it is fair to say that recruitment is one of the most demanding sales jobs that anyone can do. As you know, recruiters have to deal with customers from both sides of the sale i.e. candidates and clients. Your products change their minds and are unique, which requires you to make a different sales pitch each and every time. There are so many moving parts that you have to be constantly on your toes, dodging bullets from all sides. Exhausting isn’t it.

So, if you are not in the Matrix, how do you deal with so many priorities in the limited time that you have? The answer lies in paying attention to what is taking up your time.

There are already many models and theories for assessing people’s work activities. Most of them are very broad reflecting the activities that people carry out in their work. The models often stress the need to categorise activities in to URGENT / NON URGENT / IMPORTANT / NON IMPORTANT and combinations of each.  They are generally extremely valid and effective.

However, here I want to address two specific recruitment activities.

Jobs

In the current economic climate, it is very easy to pounce on every possible job lead you get and spend time searching for relevant CV’s in order to have a chance of filling the vacancy. In many markets now there are far fewer jobs to go round so why waste an opportunity! However, being busy and being productive is not the same thing.

Most recruiters were trained how to qualify a job. Many had tick box forms with relevant qualifying questions to ask. In these tough times, it’s time to re-examine the criteria by which you evaluate the quality of job’s you receive. Old school, go back and categorise them in to A, B or Z grade jobs. I predict anywhere between 10% and 50% of the live jobs you are spending your time searching on need downgrading.

But you have to be “in it to win it”! In truth, for many jobs you were never really ‘in it’. Also, what’s the opportunity cost of spending time searching unqualified or unproductive jobs? You could spend that time hunting for clients and opportunities that do meet your criteria. Exactly how you qualify jobs depends on your particular market or client type. Typically, the big time wasters are jobs:

• That have not been signed off yet
• Where you cannot deal with the proper authority
• That have been open for a long time without being re-qualified
• That pay below market rate.

Clients need to meet you part way or you are not a consultant, you are a lackey or paper pusher at best.

Clients

As recruiters, your market swings from client led to candidate led and back again. For most, it is currently a client led market. So if the client is king, how do you decide whom to spend your time on?

You don’t have time to deal with everyone in your market. So you need to decide who you will deal with and who you won’t. To do that, firstly you need to be clear what you are looking for and secondly, how to get that information.

If you read any recruitment websites, blogs or forums you will see many, many recruiters pitching their ‘consultative’ approach. But what does that actually mean? Pitching random candidates to test the water? Emailing CVs or lists of CVs? Enquiring about any available jobs? Asking general questions about the company?

To be consultative, you need to understand the client’s situation and therefore what benefit you can be to them. You can’t benefit them unless you know what their situation is. However, you can’t be consultative to the entire market, you don’t have time, unless you are in an excessively small niche, in which case you might want to broaden or add to it.

What you really need to find out is the size of the potential opportunity that exists for you at each client in your market place. Then compare them to each other:

• How many staff, relevant to your niche, reports to your contact. Too few and you probably need to speak to a contact further up the command chain
• In terms of length of service, how many have been there less than a year. This will give you their staff turnover % (compared to relevant total staff)
• Where does your contact expect their (relevant) team to be in 12 months time? Now you have the best guess growth over the next year
• What % of staff do they hire from recruiters

The above information will give a reasonable view of your opportunity within that contact’s team. Of course you will need to gather this information in a conversational, relaxed tone, not interrogation style! It might take more than one conversation. This is clearly very difficult with large master vendor managed clients, but working with them in a consultative style is not the way to go anyway.

Once you have the information above it should be clear who gives you the best chance of success. They are obviously the ones that you want to spend your time pursuing and schmoozing. Do you dump the rest? Of course not! You can spec CV’s to the remaining clients for roles that they have told you they find hard to fill.

In the end, like Neo, which pill you take is up to you. If you keep a clear head and carefully analyse how you spend your time, hopefully you will take the one that suits you.