How Much Phone Time?

Hi Danny,

It’s a phone business! I have heard that so many times in my first 2 years as a recruiter.

My boss is an old school recruiter. He isn't a dinosaur or anything. We email people, text them, use LinkedIn, cyber hack the internet to download resumes etc. However his advice to me always centers around getting on the phone.

I've got the job orders and plenty to work on. I feel increasing my volume of communication to potential candidates is the key to my desk taking off to the next level.

Don't get me wrong, I agree to a certain degree about the need to get on the phone. When I need candidates I call my bird dogs, call candidates I know and leverage my network. The thought of cold calling resumes or cold calling a company phone directory scares me. I have tried it and gotten little to no results. Does anyone return a cold voicemail anymore or pick up the phone when they don't recognize the caller ID?

2011 was my best year yet and after doing this for 2 years I am ready to take the next step. My goal is to become a big biller in 2012 but what type of communication should I focus on and how much?

Are your recruiters cold calling people? If so, how much? What else are they doing? Email blasts? Text blasts? How much?

When it comes to recruiting candidates, what metrics and what volume of those metrics (daily, weekly or monthly) should I target to become a big biller in 2019?

Danny's response,

Your boss wants you to communicate as well as you can with both clients and candidates, and without doubt a live conversation is the best alternative. It’s just that it is increasingly not an alternative people will choose to accept. (There’s no question walking to work would get me exercise, but uh, I have a car.)

Much of this is a matter of age. The older the demographic, the more willing they are to have a live conversation. In her epochal book, “Alone Together”, Sherry Turkle makes a very good case that young people see live conversations as increasingly harder to justify, inconvenient, and interestingly, scary. Email and texts give us plenty of time to pick and choose, and prepare our answers.

So for now, while the balance of communication is shifting, I recommend to my people they work in all “silos.” Yes they need to be on the phone 3 hours PLUS a day, but they back up nearly all Voice Mails with a corresponding Email. (Because you don’t know the demographic marker of the recipient, at least not often and usually not on the client side.)

Make it your mission in life to ask everyone for their cell phone number. Your live connects are dependent on the cell phone numbers in your database. Get their cell phones, and suddenly you’ll be having the kind of conversations your boss had back in the day. Or you can text them. People respond to texts within minutes, not days.

When you get a client on the phone to take a job order, tell them that while you understand it’s an email and text world, there are times when there is no substitute for a live call, and you need to know they are on board. Those times include:

1) Submissions of first candidates.
2) Follow up to interviews.
3) Reference check reporting.
4) Compensation discussions.
5) Pre Offer and during Final Negotiations.

Make sure you Link in and Friend your clients and candidates on Facebook and ask them to follow you on Twitter.

Finally, every time a person in our office gets a search, they take the following steps:
1) Email Blast to the database (yes, before searching database and making calls)
2) Hobson website posting, which leads to Indeed
3) Twitter and LinkedIn Status updates
4) LinkedIn Groups/Facebook Groups
5) Job board sweep (done here by researchers)

Do this IN CONCERT with asking for referrals with the same classic salesmanship your boss no doubt advocates, and you will be keeping pace with the new world order of recruiting.