Sales and Recruiting...kind of the same thing, no?

[Kristin Gissaro]

Sales is about providing products and/or services to people who need them. Targeting your advertising message to the right people will help you sell more. Simple enough, right? Wrong. It’s tough to know who needs your product before you speak with them. It’s hard to know what their personal preferences are before meeting them. To generate interest and the hope that the right people will respond to your advertising message, the seller will advertise and market the product’s capabilities, show you how it will change your life and tell you how much it costs.

As Lou Adler mentions in his article today on ERE, finding top talent is becoming even more challenging and will only get worse. He examines the close relation of consumer marketing and recruitment marketing. He’s absolutely right. Only 5 years ago, there was different strategy for recruiting talent than there was for selling products. Each day the two overlap even more.

As recruiters, your job is to bring in great talent which usually requires a bit of selling. If you can’t sell, you can’t recruit. In companies across the world, most sales and marketing departments are lumped into one. This is done on purpose. Sales utilizes what Marketing produces to convey their message. Recruiting departments are left on their own to sell or communicate to candidates the company’s selling points. Some companies utilize Recruitment Communication firms and others don’t. Some utilize their internal Marketing department, when marketing has time for them. Some companies are adding a Recruitment Marketing specialist to their recruiting team. But if you are a third party recruiter, you don’t have any of these luxuries.

I recommend that every recruiter, 3rd party or corporate recruiter, read Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling. It’s an informal approach to selling anything. I particularly like his style because he uses common sense to teach you about the sales process and calls you out on your own laziness.

It’s time to reengineer the recruitment process. Here are 5 tips on becoming a better sales person for your jobs.
1. Develop an Elevator Speech. This is a quick 10-20 second overview of the company and the type of employment experience it offers. You want to give the listener a taste that will leave them begging for more.

2. Develop a Deck. This is your longer 15-20 minute presentation that you will give to the candidate that includes Employer of Choice attributes, employee testimonials, real life job overview and examples.

3. Develop a Campaign. Find one compelling word or phrase that TRULY describes the job and/or company and use it over and over in your messages. Consistency is key. Target your message directly to the job consumer you are looking for. This is where you’ll follow consumer marketing trends. Remember, you are asking these people to make a life change just like Coke does when they target Pepsi customers. So you better sell it well enough for them to consider it. Your job may require them to change their commute, their hours, how their time is spent during the day, etc. Keep all of this in mind and point out that you understand it and why it’s worth it.

3.5 Develop a Smart Strategy. Would you advertise snow cones to people in Africa? Didn’t think so. It doesn’t make sense. Know who you are selling to, find out where they are online and offline and put your compelling message in front of them. Brand your job and your company. Remember, consistency is key. Do your homework and find out how your advertising channels will work for you. You don’t have time to spend on manually advertising so make sure your channel partners can do most of the heavy lifting.

3.5.5 Please, I beg you, stop asking for free 30 day trials. All this will do is show you how a product works, but won’t show you how it can work for you. Any good campaign needs at least 6 weeks to 3 months to make an impression on any consumer. If you are going to commit to buying media, commit to the time frame the media salesperson recommends. Believe me, they want their product to work for you so they’d be stupid to recommend too long or too much of their product if they don’t think it will work. Lose the mentality that all salespeople just want to make a sale.

4. Develop non-traditional interview questions. If you want to sell this job to a candidate, you better make the interview a memorable one.

5. FOLLOW UP. When they send their resume, thank them. When they interview, let them know you’ll be in touch. If they don’t get the job, call them and offer feedback. If your excuse is you don’t have time, then you are recruiting too many of the wrong people in the first place and you need to revert back to number 3 on this list. If I were selling concrete and had a potential customer call or write me on possibly doing business, you can bet I am going to call that person back so why wouldn’t you do the same for people who are interested in your job. It’s a horrible display of professionalism and those who don’t follow up should be ashamed of themselves. You know who you are. You are playing with people’s lives here, don’t lead them on only to drop off the face of the earth.
It will take some time to transform the way recruit. But after 6 weeks, your new recruiting strategy should be habit and every day you’ll get better at it.