Inbound Marketing Blog

Generating quality sales leads on a consistent basis is critical to the success of any recruiter. In this blog post I’m going to outline the different types of sales leads recruiters can generate, the role and responsibility of the recruiter in generating sales leads and sales lead generation strategies to adopt. I will also lay out the different scenarios or context in which a recruiter may generate a sales lead.

Before we can start to discuss candidate rate negotiation, it is important that recruiters first understand exactly what is within their control and what is outside of their control. There are a lot of things in recruiting and sales in general that are outside of our control, but there are also a lot of things recruiters can control including: What candidates we submit What we offer and are willing to pay our candidates Whether or not we establish a clear pay rate or salary history How we position our opportunity with our candidate The questions we ask our candidates It’s important that recruiters focus their time and energy on the things they can control rather than worry and complain about the things they can’t control.  Recruiters also need to understand that there are three things that all smart candidates do:

The key to a successful candidate interview lies within your preparation.  Simply telling your candidate what to say and do in the interview is a poor approach to candidate interview preparation.  And simply telling a candidate where and what time the interview is, who it is with, or what to wear is NOT preparing your candidate for the interview either. In fact, one could argue that simply informing a candidate of this information is really just an activity associated with sourcing candidates.  If this is what you consider “candidate interview prep,” than you should know that all you’re really doing is preparing your candidate to BOMB the interview.  Even the smartest and most skilled and experienced candidates needs to properly prepare for the client interview.  Properly preparing a candidate for an interview means that recruiters must run a mock candidate interview. After all, how can a recruiter truly coach and prepare a candidate on how to effectively interview without first seeing the candidate conduct him or herself in an interview? They can’t and that is the point of running the mock candidate interview.

Previously I discussed the keys to effectively screening and qualifying a candidate’s current situation, their technical skills and experience and how to qualify and establish pay rate/salary history.  I also shared best practices for screening and qualifying your candidate’s compelling event and motivators for leaving their current situation and accepting a new opportunity. In this blog I’m going to share with you why recruiters must understand their candidate’s decision making process including how they will arrive at a final decision.

IT recruiters interested in improving their recruiting effectiveness including their fill ratios and interviewing skills will want to make sure that they know how to screen and qualify their candidate’s current situation, their technical skills and experience and  how to qualify and establish pay rate/salary history.  Executing the candidate interview and mastering these screening and qualification skills are the lifeblood for any recruiter, but perhaps the most important aspect of screening any candidate is the recruiter’s ability to qualify a candidate’s compelling event and motivators.

Money is a funny thing in our culture. It’s taboo to even talk about it. In general people don't go around sharing with other people how much money they make or what they paid for their house or car.  Money is emotional and people have different feelings and attitudes toward money. But to be clear, in order to be a top performing recruiter, you must be comfortable discussing money.  Recruiters have to learn to get comfortable discussing money and asking direct questions about a candidate’s pay rate and salary history because its a core component of the candidate interview process. This is the heart and soul of sales and recruiting (recruiting is selling). Recruiters who are afraid to ask the pointed questions or push back and challenge their candidate on salary expectations are often those who struggle with closing candidates. In this blog I’m going to share tips and best practices for qualifying your candidate’s pay rate and training exercises you can adopt to improve your pay rate qualifying skills.

Once you have effectively sourced and qualified your candidate’s current situation, you can transition the interview into which you screen and qualify your candidate’s technical skills and experience.  Before you make the transition however, you want to be sure to share a little bit of information with the candidate about the opportunity and client company. This is a critical step because if you don’t share any information with the candidate, you risk losing his or her interest, or turning the conversation into an interrogation.  You also don’t want to share too much information because you want to remain in control of the discussion and continue to qualify your candidate. Be sure to share just enough information to wet their appetite and pique their interest.  And remember, to get information, (as a recruiter you have tons more qualifying questions to ask)  you have to share information and learn to effectively disarm your candidates. If you always ask for information but never offer any in return, don’t expect your candidate to open up and be fully transparent with you.

One you have sourced your active and passive candidates it is time to begin interviewing and screening your candidates, and I think a good and natural place to begin is by qualifying your candidate’s current situation. Uncovering and qualifying your candidate’s current situation refers to understanding their current employment status including:

In my prior blog I discussed the key skills that recruiters must master in order to effectively execute the introductory candidate call. In this blog post I’m going to highlight best practices for sourcing and screening candidates.

This may not be the case with you and your team of IT recruiters, but many recruiters are struggling to hit their weekly candidate submittal goal. For many staffing firms the weekly goal or standard is ten candidate submittals yet most recruiter’s are only submitting six to seven candidates per week and many more are only averaging three to five candidate submittals.  Are candidates really that much more difficult to source and speak with today than they were five or ten years ago?  Arguably. Yes, the market is tight but there is a massive passive candidate market that is prime and ripe to recruit from. So what is the real reason for why recruiters are struggling to submit ten or more highly qualified candidates each week?  Are that many candidates failing the technical interview?  I have a theory-one that I think you may find pretty compelling-as to why recruiters are struggling with candidate submittals. More importantly, I have a solution for recruiters and recruiting managers.