The Evolution of a Recruiter
.. and why it matters
By Steve Finkel
If you’re an experienced recruiter, chances are you’re doing pretty well. The business has its ups and downs, but on balance, you have an existing base of clients, candidates and you’ve settled into a consistent pattern of production.
But there is a harder reality: what made you successful is not necessarily what will sustain – or increase – that success going forward.
While we don’t like to think about it, you will lose clients — even established ones — at some point and have to launch some immediate new client development activity to replace them. And there are emerging pressures on our industry – and for you – which may cause you to reevaluate your current methodology. But for right now, the question is how can you best improve production and prepare for what may lie ahead?
The Beginning
To answer this question, we have to go back to your actual foundation — how you were originally trained and the depth of the skills you have accumulated since. Because times are changing, and your initial focus — even when years or decades of experience are added — may not be your best choice now.
Chances are when you started, your manager concentrated on two areas. Marketing the candidate and recruiting the candidate. Along with these, of course, would have been the concept of selling your services and identifying candidates. “Identifying” might have been working your back database or simply finding new candidates to recruit.
None of this is wrong. In fact, it is the foundation of what we do. But is it enough? Enough for what, you may ask? Enough to fully prosper in today’s market.
The Depth
Moreover, how long was your initial training? Two days? Five, if you’re lucky? Is that enough to learn a genuine profession? Of course not. And where did the person who taught you learn this business?
If you go back, at some point in the previous generations of our industry, you will encounter either a franchise or larger firm. Did they have trainers on staff? Certainly. But what was their purpose? It was to get new people from zero knowledge to a limited degree of adequacy and then turn them loose and see what happened. That method of “developing” recruiters has permeated our industry and remains the standard to this day.
Did some succeed? Yes. But they did so with a combination of hard work, hopefully some luck and a certain amount of talent. But none of these things can be passed on or transferred. The fact that your manager was successful is certainly fine. But you are a different person. And it takes more than a scanty foundation – or even talent and hard work – to maximize results in today’s challenging market.
So what do we have?
So there you are, a reasonably successful recruiter of some experience. But things are changing. The focus on which you started — finding and recruiting candidates — is now coming under increasing strain from new forces.
We all know it. Offshore “recruiters” who work for minimum money. Internal “recruiters” who rely on advertising and technology to find candidates. And now the famed AI, that can send out thousands of inquiries to theoretically qualified people to do sourcing and engaging. For you… and the same for your clients.
These tools have their place, and used properly, they can be helpful. But they do not determine the outcome of a search.
The ground has shifted. Here is a simple reality. Anything that is widely accessible is not a sustainable competitive advantage.
In many cases, the discussion in our industry has moved from how to influence outcomes to how to generate activity – often with the mistaken belief that activity alone will determine the result.
Where does that leave you?
The response to this shift is not to double down on the very activities that are being turned into a commodity.
That means, in practical terms, you don’t hire the same offshore people that are readily available to your clients. And you don’t focus on the same AI/techno whiz-bangs that the human resource employees of your clients – and your competitors – can also utilize.
Andrew Grove, the founder of Intel, addressed this very point in an excellent book entitled Only the Paranoid Survive. He observed that when a new variant of technology arrives, there is always a surge of enthusiasm – claims that it will transform everything. And this is intensified by the many that will be involved in hawking, promoting, exaggerating these ideas for their own benefit.
“But mostly,” he said, ”they aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.”
Do these new technologies have benefits in many fields? Certainly. But in our business, you cannot achieve – or even maintain – success in this manner when everyone has the same technology. If you try, you will simply place yourself in direct competition with many — here or overseas — who will do the same work for less.
Reevaluating your strategy
You are probably already very good at what you do. But improvement – and shielding yourself from the shifting sands of our current market – does not come from refining what you already do well. That yields only marginal gains.
Rather, it comes from developing skills where you have not been trained or focused – and which most others simply lack.
For us, that means advanced-level debriefing and closing the candidate.
Where results are actually determined
We all recognize the fact that candidates tend to hesitate at the end of the process. When we get a turndown, of course, we know it and it costs fees. But equally to the point, it costs us repeat clients. The client is frustrated too, and he is likely to blame you. That’s clear.
But the greater loss is less visible.
The real costs
The real costs aren’t just the obvious turndowns — it’s the searches that nearly close: good candidate, genuine client interest, and then hesitation or a quiet decision not to proceed. Nothing overt. Just a result that never quite materializes.
Sourcing and recruiting remain essential — but they are also where competition is highest and alternatives are abundant. Where the outcome is actually determined is after the interview, once the client is interested and the decision is still in play.
Even experienced recruiters often leave that final stage — moving the candidate from the first interview to the second — and ultimately to an acceptance once an offer has been extended — to instinct. That’s where solid searches tend to break down, costing fees and future business.
The keys to improvement
Let’s take a few moments – just a few – and address some points which are mandatory if you’re going to get the best results from these critical but overlooked portions of our business. What follows is not theory; it actually changes outcome.
Debriefing
A) A follow-up form. Don’t kid yourself; if you’ve been in the habit of debriefing the candidate without written-out structured questions to be asked, you may think you’re relying on your experience – but you’re leaving things out.
Your purpose is not simply to “see how things went”; it is to gather specific ammunition which you will need when you get to the point of an actual close. The form I use has 14 questions on it. Are they all asked at every interview? Almost certainly not. But if you leave one out which should be asked, it is likely to cost you the fee.
B) Record the call. It is an axiom that “repetition is the mother of skill.” This applies to us. How many debriefing calls do you do per week? Not very many. Thus it is far more difficult to improve skills. And without feedback, it is more difficult yet.
The answer is to get the most you can in terms of improvement from every call. If you are not recording your follow-up with candidate calls and evaluating them after hours — when the time elapsed yields objectivity — you are simply not improving as much as you should. And your production will suffer.
C) Reinforce the positives. This is one of the foundational premises of subliminal selling. We can broadly define this as something that happens below the threshold of conscious awareness to influence perceptions. You must not only gather the information, but must increase the candidate’s interest in the opportunity.
When a candidate states a positive in response to your questions, don’t just say “fine” and go to the next question. Expand upon it! Ask for specifics. Then indicate that you agree, and give an example of how important this is.
Have you heard about this before? Of course you have. But unless you evaluate your calls as mentioned above, how do you know that you’re doing it?
There is much more to advanced-level debriefing than what we are covering here, but this is the place to start.
Closing
Sometimes you hear things so frequently that you absorb them and treat them as fact. A good example of this is the phrase, ”If you do everything right up front, the close becomes automatic.” Is this true? No. It is one of a number of misconceptions that are common in our industry. It persists because it is comfortable. It suggests that closing requires little deliberate skill – that it is the natural result of earlier steps.
In practice, that false assumption leads recruiters to underdevelop one of the most critical parts of the process – closing the candidate.
Let’s cover a few simple keys to doing it right.
A) Plan the call. When there is an offer out, do not accept a call from the candidate until you have planned that call. We all want to know the candidate’s intentions. But grabbing a call in the absence of genuinely thinking out your responses for the three options to that offer – yes, no, and maybe – is to put yourself in a position of being off guard and unprepared.
You will not lose anything by taking the time to first strategize on how best to proceed in each of these areas and to plan in writing. You must summarize positives, prepare for possible objections and outline the call. Without that preparation, you are simply reacting rather than directing the outcome.
B) Industry-specific closes are needed. Closing techniques that were originally developed for one form of selling can perform poorly in a different industry. Most of the “closes” you hear bandied about — the Ben Franklin close, the Assumptive Close, the Alternate Choice Close and many others — were originally developed for face-to-face sign-on-the-dotted-line situations, and frequently for one-call closes. Are they effective? Indeed they are – in the environment for which they were originally intended.
Our business is different. It is far more complex and the investment on the part of the candidate — a genuine career change — is much greater and more personal. It requires advanced-level closes designed for our industry. Anything else is unlikely to be successful.
C) Logic first, emotion second. By the time the candidate has an offer, an entire series of decisions has been made. You have recruited him, moved him to a first interview, moved him a second interview. He has given you full feedback and information at each step. If there were no interest in the opportunity, the process would have been discontinued. Moreover, he is moving away from the genuine concerns in his current position which you identified at the initial recruiting call.
He should accept the position. You know it. He knows it. But you must clarify that fact in his own mind. Emotional concerns – hesitancy, uncertainty – must be addressed, but only after the logical foundation of a more successful career move is secure. And he must acknowledge this.
The path forward
Even successful long-established recruiters must recognize that changes are taking place in our industry. Moreover, even repeat clients are not forever, and we must at some point reach out to new prospective clients. If what we offer is indistinguishable from what clients believe they can do themselves — or obtain elsewhere at lower cost — our position weakens.
The solution is not to compete where everyone else is competing. Rather, we must re-strategize, and focus on those elements of our business from which we have not fully benefited previously. We must develop skills in the areas that are least understood, least practiced, and most determinative of results.
How complex are these skills? Very. My brand-new 300-page book Closing for Recruiters! addresses debriefing and closing in great detail and specificity. Mastering them will take time and study. But it is the difference between struggling with today’s market, at best maintaining current production — or significantly increasing it. These are not refinements at the margin. They are the point at which results are determined.
For those who choose to pursue improvement that matters, the opportunity remains substantial.
If the ideas addressed in this article resonate with you, you will find the complete answers in Closing for Recruiters.