Had one of ‘those’ days recently? When you review your progress against your goals and find that you’re short of your target by three placements? The problem is a longstanding client you relied on for a chunk of your billings just announced a hiring freeze and your latest new hire went AWOL on their first day, taking your bonus with them.
What can you do?
In these days of LinkedIn, recruitment software and automated messaging, it’s easy to hide behind the façade of technology to avoid picking up the phone and calling prospective new clients. But by incorporating an element of ‘new business development’ (i.e. making those calls) into your everyday routine you’ll be more prepared for the unexpected but inevitable moments in recruitment when things don’t go to plan.
It requires focus and self-discipline. Here’s our daily 9 step plan to get you back on track:-
- Schedule prospect calling in every day, in the morning – Bryan Tracy’s book Eat That Frog focuses on dealing with procrastination by tackling the ‘frog’ (your most important task on your to-do list and the one you’ll do your utmost to avoid) before you take on any other task. For the majority of recruiters, your call list is your frog. Eating that frog before you do anything else helps you to become more productive.
- Plan your call list the day before frees your time to hit the phones without any excuses the next morning. Aim for 30 calls, bearing in mind that you’re unlikely to get through to at least half of the people on your list.
- Start by 9am with a list of target clients in your sector.
- Set yourself a goal of how many business conversations or actual job orders you want to achieve by the end of the morning. 10-15 is a good target. Include only actual conversations with hiring managers or decision makers. Leaving a voicemail doesn’t count.
- Don’t replace your phone on the handset at the end of a call. If you do you will be distracted by emails, text messages and the trivia of office life. When you end the call, dial the next number on your list immediately. If you need to update information, either note it while you are on the phone or after your calls have finished.
- Screen all mobile calls and don’t respond unless the call is from a prospective client or a candidate you urgently need to speak to.
- Ignore your e-mail. Checking your e-mails every few minutes is a time consuming and placement costing activity.
- Repeated rejections at the start of a work day are demoralising. Start with the companies you know are hiring in your sector. Check out the recruitment press and your industry sector news to see which companies are hiring. To expedite the whole process, let 8LEGS do the hard work for you. Our state of the art technology offers a global client lead generation tool for all recruiters, identifying open jobs based on your search criteria. We continually monitor over 13 million unique domains which we revisit every 24 hours so you can be confident the data provided is live.
- Revert to speculative calls only after you’ve worked through the leads gathered from your research.
Daily planning and getting into the habit of working through your call list every day takes self-discipline. Persistent effort will soon yield results and help you to get back on track with your KPIs and monthly bonus.
Get a head start on your call list with 8LEGS. Contact us today to discover the plan that will help you to hit your targets in 2017.
