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The Secrets of Top Recruiters Finally Revealed

By Lou Adler, October 31, 2007

I'm very proud of the fact that I've helped hundreds (maybe thousands) of recruiters in the U.S. and around the world increase their monthly placement rate by 50-100% and in some cases much more. As part of our planning for our 2008 "The Official Rules for Hiring Top Talent" tour, I've put together my list of "recruiter essentials" we'll cover during the workshop. These are the secrets that every top recruiter follows in order to maximize their placement rate. [FYI: We've incorporated these same points into our final Recruiter Boot Camp Online program for this year (the four-part course starts Nov. 2, 2007) and our San Jose LIVE: Performance-based Hiring Tour 2007 event on December 5, 2007.] While there are about 20 key techniques we teach during the workshop, in my opinion the following 10 techniques represent the difference between average and great recruiter performance:

Read more articles by this author.

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1. Know the job. Recruiting is sales, but in this case you have two customers, and if you're working with the best, two very discriminating customers. In sales, lack of product knowledge can kill any deal before it starts. Recruiter credibility with clients and candidates alike starts by knowing the real job, not the qualifications required to get it. Then, once you know the real job, you'll discover that the hiring manager will focus more on the candidate's ability to achieve comparable results rather than having comparable skills. Getting managers to make this shift is a core skill of top recruiters, and it's how you make more placements. (Here are some articles on this critical topic.)
2. Maintain applicant control. By withholding information, being vague about the opportunity at hand, and by asking questions rather than selling, strong recruiters are in a position to have candidates describe their backgrounds in great depth without revealing much about the job. Developing information about the candidate this way gives the recruiter the leverage to determine if the candidate is suitable for a position, rather than having the candidate make the decision. Part of applicant control requires recruiters to not take "No" for an answer. A "No" or "Not interested" just means the prospect doesn't have enough information to proceed. Good recruiters persist at the moment of first contact, shifting the discussion from short-term issues (comp, location) to long-term opportunity (growth, impact).
3. Create an opportunity gap. This is the difference between the candidate's current job and other jobs he/she is looking at, and the real job you're representing (that's why point one is number one). By asking questions during the screening process, good recruiters look for areas of growth and challenge that can offset other objections and concerns the candidate might have, such as location and compensation. Creating an opportunity gap is how you shift the candidate's emphasis and decision-making to growth and impact, rather than compensation and location.
4. Delay the comp discussion. Don't get caught in a compensation discussion too soon. This is a clear sign of an unsophisticated recruiter and shows a lack of applicant control. Instead, call a time out and ask the prospect to consider the jobs he/she has previously held that provided the most personal satisfaction. Then ask if the satisfaction was due to the pay or to the type of work being performed. Go on to suggest that it would make sense to at least discuss an opportunity if it offered the chance to maximize personal satisfaction and growth in combination with a competitive compensation package.
5. Advertise careers, not jobs. "Don't use Wal-Mart advertising techniques to attract Tiffany customers." Discriminating people don't make decisions about applying for a job based on a boring title and a list of qualifications. Instead, describe the challenges and growth opportunities and add a clever title. Then put the job on a niche board the good people you're trying to attract use. One of our clients used this ad to attract government contract administrators to a non-aerospace locale: "Contracts and wine... together at last!" The ad copy described the challenges with little about the qualifications. She had 15 qualified candidates the day the ad ran.
6. Never make an offer until you're sure it's accepted. Don't give your candidates signed formal offers until they're ready to sign it immediately. Before you get to this point ask your candidates if they're ready to accept an offer based on an agreed-upon list of terms. Then negotiate the terms and test them using standard solution selling techniques until the person says "Yes." Testing offers this way is a critical aspect of maintaining applicant control and closing more deals.
7. Stay the buyer. Recruiting top talent is comparable to dating - you need to hold back something to gain interest. During the wooing stage reveal as little as possible about the job, including the exact title. Saying you're leading a search for a senior marketing executive will attract more interest and generate more leads than if you say you're looking for a marketing director. Staying the buyer means asking questions to determine interest and concerns, and then offering solutions as the next step in the process. Staying the buyer needs to start with first contact and continues until the offer is extended. Once you make the offer the candidate becomes the buyer, and the recruiter the seller. At this moment all open communications stops.
8. Wait 30 minutes before deciding yes/no. Never make a decision about candidate competency during the first 30 minutes of a one-on-one interview. At the 31st minute you might be able to determine if the candidate is totally incompetent, or have some clues as to whether the candidate is worth considering, but that's about it. More mistakes are made in the first 30 minutes of an interview due to biases, nervousness, and incorrect emotional readings than at any other time. Recruiters need to implement proactive techniques to ensure their clients aren't inadvertently excluding top people for superficial reasons during this 30-minute "window of disaster."
9. No 2s! The reason managers only want to see superstars - we call them Level 5s - is that they can't tell the difference between a great person who presents extremely well and a very good person who is an average interviewer. To address this, we've changed our 1-5 grading scale to better assess the subtle differences between Levels 3, 4, and 5 - all excellent hires - and Level 2s - people who are competent, but not motivated. These are the worst and most common hiring mistakes of them all. With this additional guidance and the caveat "No 2s!", managers are urged to dig deep into a candidate's accomplishments to find areas where the candidate has been motivated to excel. In the process they find some people who they would have overlooked, and not hire people who only look good during the interview.
10.  Call only warm leads. It's a waste of time calling passive candidates if you're not getting at least 75% of your voice mails returned. Unless you're a brand name (you or your company), the only way to pull this off is to make sure you only call referred candidates who are known to be strong. And the only way to do this is to be great at getting referrals. This means that recruiters must be able to obtain 2-3 high quality referrals on each call to a passive candidate. Recruiters learn how to do this at our Recruiter Boot Camp programs. It starts by mastering the first nine of these recruiter secrets.

If you're a corporate or a third-party recruiter who wants to be in the top 20% of your peer group, you need to master these techniques. If you're a recruiting manager you need to send every one of your recruiters to Recruiter Boot Camp Online or to our LIVE: Performance-based Hiring Tour 2007 event on December 5, 2007 in San Jose. These are both intense workshops, so you need to bring your "A" game if you plan on attending. You'll leave being a better recruiter.