IT Staffing Sales Effectiveness

Many staffing firms have taken a hit because of the COVID-19 pandemic. With all the changes and millions of people being furloughed, it seems as if the economy has hit the pause button. While it may be difficult to drive revenue right now, it is imperative that staffing firms continue to consistently cultivate sales leads.  When staffing firms struggle to generate enough quality leads for their sales team, they're forced to be perfect at everything else they do because they leave themselves no margin for error.  Specifically, 

As a professional recruiter, think of all the times you have to negotiate. You negotiate with your candidates over salary and benefits, vacation time, start date, you negotiate with your salespeople and account managers, and of course you negotiate with your clients including hiring managers. No one wants to ask for too little, undervaluing their work, or ask for too much, potentially ruining the chance of an agreement.  Effective negotiation takes finesse, awareness and social acumen, self-awareness and self-confidence.  One thing is for certain, if you're a recruiter, you have to know how to negotiate. This is non-negotiable.

Your candidate pitch can make or break your deal, so it's a good idea for recruiters to have their pitch nailed down before meeting with their account manager or customer.  I've coached thousands of recruiters and have heard my fair share of both great and not-so-great candidate pitches.  For this post, the recruiter's guide to making the ultimate candidate pitch, I'd like to share with you the anatomy of a good candidate pitch including our seven-step framework.

In order to properly address and overcome candidate objections, recruiters first need to understand why they occur in the first place.  To understand why candidate objections occur in the first place, you need to understand the concept of the candidate-recruiter alignment framework and how candidates evaluate you. 

For many recruiting professionals, the goal and expectation of the introductory candidate call is to secure a candidate submittal. For many other recruiting professionals, the goal and expectation of the introductory candidate call is to either conduct the candidate interview or schedule the candidate interview with the end client. Pretty lofty goals eh.

It goes without saying that recruiting professionals have to have a killer candidate sourcing strategy in order to thrive in today’s war for talent. As we all know, recruiters need to be proactive, not reactive when it comes to identifying and cultivating relationships with candidates.  In this blog post, ten candidate sourcing tips for recruiters, I'm going to share with you LinkedIn hacks, ideas for engaging passive candidates and few other tips we share in our recruiter training program that you can easily integrate into your sourcing strategy, all of which will help you get an edge over your competition 

Candidate sourcing is the process of finding and qualifying candidates – both passive and active candidates– who have not applied directly to your open role.  In today's hyper-competitive talent market, sourcing candidates is one of the most valuable recruiting skills for anyone concerned with hiring high-quality talent. Candidate sourcing remains a crucial talent acquisition channel: according to Lever, sourced candidates account for 24-33% of all hires, the second most common origin of hire after direct applicants. Candidate sourcing is also one of the most effective ways to hire. On average, one in every 72 sourced candidates are hired as compared to one in every 152 applicants. 

There has been a great debate whether or not cold calling candidates remains relevant in professional recruiting.  Perhaps you have seen the articles on Google and LinkedIn that read “Cold Calling is Dead.” The so-called “experts' and “gurus” say that recruiters should never make cold calls because candidates despise receiving them. They go on to say that cold calling no longer works and that it’s not a productive use of time.  

Good communication is crucial to recruiting success. Sounds so obvious, right?   You can’t get candidates to engage let alone make a placement without clear and consistent communication.  The ability to clearly communicate with candidates is the bedrock for the candidate-recruiter relationship.  And with today’s highly educated and highly empowered candidate, it’s paramount that recruiters possess world-class communication skills.

As a recruiting professional, we can no longer expect to recruit the same way we recruited 10 years ago or even 5 years ago and continue to get positive results. Too much has changed including candidate behavior and technology. While most recruiters do need to increase their activity level, we can’t focus exclusively on increasing our activity as our only means for success. Recruiter activity is important and most recruiters need to do more of it. But most recruiters need to work on achieving better results from the time and effort they're already investing. We must continually evolve and rethink how we recruit so we are not simply just interviewing and submitting more candidates, but recruiting more effectively and operating at a higher efficiency level.