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The Science of Recruiting - Part 1: Making First Contact

By Lou Adler, January 2, 2004

Welcome to our new series of articles, The Science of Recruiting. Over the next ten editions, we'll look at every skill and technique necessary to be a great recruiter. At the end of it all, you'll have a sense of what you need to do to take your performance and success as a recruiter up another notch or two, or maybe more.

Read more articles by this author.

Related Topics:

The Science of Recruiting, Networking, Recruiting

Related Articles:

The Science of Recruiting - Part 10: Closing and Negotiating Offers - Advanced

The Science of Recruiting - Part 9: Negotiating and Closing Offers - The Set Up

The Science of Recruiting - Part 8: Influencing Hiring Managers - The Hiring Decision

Recruiting is a multi-phase process that leads to the discovery of a perfect job match. It starts with an intricate knowledge of what the job requires. Finding top candidates is another part of this process, and is assessing candidate competency. Interspersed throughout these activities is the recruiting, convincing, and influencing part. Recruiting isn't heavy-handed, in-your-face selling, it's finesse. It's about convincing top candidates to stay involved even though their kids don't want to move. It's about convincing a hiring manager to see a top person even though he or she doesn't have all of the experience that had been originally demanded. Recruiting is about taking a fuzzy, imperfect, human process and using it to find and place perfect candidates. The profession of recruiting will always be a bit of a black art, but in the effort to make hiring top people a systematic business process, trying to find science where we can will most certainly be a useful effort.

The Basic Recruiting Process

We all know that the best candidates are more discriminating and therefore have more concerns, have more opportunities, need more information, and require more hand-holding. The ability to hire top people correlates directly with a recruiter's ability to provide this information in a professional manner. This first Science of Recruiting article will provide recruiters with the tools they need to do just that.

As many of you know I divide the recruiting process into four primary areas

• Candidate Development - all sourcing activity (except for networking)
• Processing - processing of resumes, care and feeding of tracking system, administrative tasks
• Red Zone - working one-on-one with strong candidates and hiring managers, taking the search assignment, assessing and presenting candidates, networking
• End Zone - negotiating and closing offers.

It is my opinion that hiring top people requires exceptional one-on-one skills, in the Red Zone and the End Zone. Administrative processing should be minimized, and some of the initial sourcing activity should be assigned to a research group if possible. Recruiters need to proactively minimize administrative work and organize their daily activities to be in constant phone contact with top candidates. How well this is done will determine a recruiter's personal success. The Science of Recruiting articles describes how best to do this. Here are the core topics we'll be discussing during this series:

The Science of Recruiting - Key Topics

1. How to Make First Contact with a Top Person - Engage 1st, Network 2nd
2. The Art of Networking - The Difference Between Good, and Great Recruiters
3. Overcoming Basic Candidate Concerns
4. Overcoming More Serious Candidate Concerns
5. Addressing Mid-stage Candidate Concerns
6. Influencing Hiring Managers - Taking the Assignment
7. Influencing Hiring Managers - Presenting Candidates
8. Influencing Hiring Managers - The Hiring Decision
9. Negotiating and Closing Offers - The Set-up
10. Negotiating and Closing Offers - Testing and Closing

So, let's get started. In this first session we'll describe how to make first contact with a top person. A top person can be an active candidate who is exceptionally well-qualified, or a referred candidate whom you know little about, other than that the person is well-qualified. Well-qualified people always have multiple opportunities, so how you first approach them is critical. Two basic ground rules of good recruiting apply at this initial stage.

Recruiting Ground Rule #1: Only talk to pre-qualified candidates.

Recruiters don't have time to talk to marginal candidates. To minimize time spent on unqualified candidates you must pre-qualify everyone before you ever look at their resumes, or call them on the phone. Finding top candidates on job boards takes too much work, that's one of the reasons I don't think much time should be spent using this channel. Done correctly, networking with top employees and other highly referred candidates offers a much better return on your time investment. Make sure that every time someone like this gives you a name, you have the referrer describe why the person is strong. By making sure you only talk with qualified people, and minimizing time spent talking to unqualified candidates, you can dramatically improve your personal productivity.

Recruiting Ground Rule #2: You must get 99% of all candidates to say "Yes" when you first call.

Even if you pre-qualify everyone before you call them, about 90% of the time the person will still not be a candidate for the current job. (That's 1 in 10 success odds. If the person is not pre-qualified your success rate drops to about 1 in 100.) However, about 50% of the time the person will be well-qualified for some other current or future position, or personally know someone who is qualified for your current position. So this is still a very valuable person, and when you first call, you must make sure that the candidate doesn't say "I'm not interested," too soon. It's best to call the person assuming they could be a potential candidate, rather than the common indirect technique many recruiters use. You'll have more leverage this way if you do it right. That's why the concept of Engage 1st, Network 2nd, is so important to follow. Your opening pitch is critical to pulling this off. You need to delay the candidate's yes/no decision by 5-10 minutes to establish your level of professionalism. This gives you the chance to maximize your networking effectiveness.

Here's a pitch we've used with great success in training some top corporate and external recruiters. Try this out the next time you cold-call a candidate.

"Hi, my name is _______________. I'm a recruiter with ______________. Your name got brought to my attention as someone I should connect with for a senior level search effort in (marketing, etc.) I'm leading. Before I get into any details, let me ask you a very basic question: If the assignment I'm working on was clearly superior to what you're doing today, would you at least be open to exploring it?"

It's hard to say no to this type of call. 90% of the time the candidate will say yes. Once a candidate says yes, most recruiters then go into sales mode telling the candidate all of the details of the job. Don't do this ever again! Instead, say -

"Great. Let me first obtain a quick two-minute profile of your background, and then I'll give you the two-minute overview of the job. If it makes mutual sense to pursue the job, we'll set up some time to get into a more in-depth discussion."

We'll discuss how to address the reluctant candidate later in this series, but for now assume the person agrees to move forward. If you sound confident and professional, about 90% of the people will follow your direction without hesitating. The key to "engage 1st, network 2nd" is to be vague about the job title (e.g., a senior level position), and get the person to describe their background before the person knows much about the job. Once a candidate says "yes" to the above question, the recruiter is in a stronger position. The candidate now views the recruiter as someone who might have the key to a better job. If the candidate learns about the job details too soon, and is uninterested, the recruiter has lost this leverage. Since there's only a 10% chance the candidate will be viable for the current job, but a 50% chance they know someone, you want to maximize your chance to network with this person. You do this by peaking their interest in the job, and then obtaining their profile. This takes at least five minutes. If you come across as a professional, and even if the candidate is not qualified for the current opening, you'll then have a strong chance to network with the person and obtain some great leads.

You'll learn how to obtain some good names in the next session, but for now practice this pitch until it becomes automatic. Reveal as little as possible about your current opening until after you have learned the candidate's qualifications. This way the recruiter makes the decision to go forward, not the candidate. Being a good recruiter starts by staying in control of the hiring process. This begins the moment you get the pre-qualified candidate on get on the phone. Unfortunately, for too many recruiters, this is also where it ends.

Next edition of the Science of Recruiting, we'll get into the keys to networking. Until then, good luck.