Communication within sales

Last week we looked at communication. This week we’ll take a moment to look at why it’s important to relate communication specifically to the sales techniques that you use in recruitment – whether this is face to face in meetings or telephone sales.

We all have our own personal communication style. As a salesperson it’s looking at how we can adjust that to build rapport with our candidates and clients. There’s an age-old saying “People like people like themselves”. To be able to utilise this, it means that we have to be able to adapt to other personalities and in essence be a bit like a chameleon, blending in with our environment.

Here’s a quick synopsis of just one or two traits of four common personality types, that can help you build a better relationship and achieve more in your sales communications;-

Communication – the cornerstone to recruitment

We all communicate, we do it every day, every second, even when we’re asleep (although I’m not sure what the elbow in the face that I received whilst fast asleep last night was trying to tell me!). In recruitment it‘s the keystone to everything we do and if you put some conscious thought into it, you can consistently communicate well. If not, well then it’s just as easy to do it badly… really, really badly.

A 500 word blog is not really enough to do this subject justice, so I’m going to look at 3 key aspects of communication, verbal, non-verbal communication (NVCs) and written in relation to recruitment.

2011 blog in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Season’s Greetings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click to view our Christmas e-card 

Organisation through time management and prioritisation

Part four of my series and as a recruitment consultant and manager, there were 5 key lessons that I learnt, which meant that I could take control of my business, rather than my business controlling me.

Tip 1 – Plan your day, but don’t plan your whole day. Leave space for the reactive tasks that will inevitably interrupt your day. I always hear that “recruitment is a reactive business, so you can’t plan”. Well, knowing it’s going to be reactive, we can plan for that!

To be able to plan for the reactive tasks, it means that you need to do some analysis of your normal day / week. There will be some trends that you’ll start to identify. For example, as a recruitment consultant working in the commercial sector 80% of my average Wednesday was proactive. Knowing this, I would persuade my clients to meet me on this day, as I knew I could be away from my desk without too much reactive stuff happening for others to deal with.

Interviewing for Commitment

Part three of my series and after qualifying the candidates, vacancies and clients last week, we now move on to interviewing best practice.

There is a process to gaining commitment from your candidates and making sure that they represent your consultancy in a positive way.

If you are only spending 5 minutes or so when you identify a possible candidate before putting them forward to a role, the likelihood is that you won’t make an ideal match and you certainly haven’t done anything at this stage to gain commitment from this candidate.

Qualifying – Working on the ‘good stuff’

Part two of my series this week and we pick up where I finished last week – the realisation that we can all be ‘busy fools’.

It’s easy to get distracted by a job with a big salary or a candidate that initially looks amazing. The problem is that they aren’t the pre-requisites to making money in recruitment. A candidate with a great CV and top notch skills will not make you money if they are not motivated to move into the position that you are offering them. Similarly, the big salary might be because no-one else has been able to find a candidate either.

I’m going to tackle qualifying from three different angles:

• the candidate
• the role
• the client

Any one of which could cause the placement to fall through.

A Systematic Approach to Training

In these tough economic times, employers are looking for ever more cost effective ways to up skill, develop and retain their talent. Finding training that delivers a true benefit to the individual and the company can sometimes prove more challenging than you might imagine.

Often, employers are unsure as to the specific development needs of their teams, which can cause them to adopt a “sheep dip” approach to training. Whilst this may undoubtedly be more beneficial than no training at all, the impact of the training can sometimes lose momentum after the event.

This may be for a number of reasons;

“So you’ve become a recruitment consultant… what does that really mean?”

Due to the great response from our two part Recruitment Essentials blog, we’ve decided to take a session each week and expand a little more on it.

To start off with I’m going to review the first 3 months in recruitment from my own experiences. My first memory when joining the recruitment industry was that of a headache for the whole of the first week! There was so much to remember and I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember what all the acronyms and abbreviations stood for.

So my first tip when joining the recruitment industry is write everything down. This job isn’t like any others that I’ve come across when recruiting. I see it as 9 jobs in one. Let me explain.

In your first 3 months you are likely to be asked to be the following: –

Recruitment Essentials – Part 2

In part 1 we looked at the key sessions within our recruitment induction courses and I gave you tips for each. These included key result areas, communication, sales, taking a vacancy and sourcing candidates. This week we will look at the remaining sessions.

Profile and Qualifying Candidates
Before you register a candidate, decide whether they will represent your company well and whether they will work with you and not against you! Just because they have a fabulous CV, doesn’t mean they are a great candidate. Tip 6 – Spend time profiling the candidate before you decide to register them. This will save you a lot of time later. You won’t clog up your database with people you can’t help.