BLT review our Recruitment 101 course

‘Like a human sponge’ is the best way to describe how I felt during an intensive two-day recruitment training course I attended last week. The course director, experience in recruitment equals my entire 22 years of existence and therefore, his wise words of wisdom were frantically scrawled down at every available opportunity.

There was 8 of us ‘newbies’ attending the course, all of whom came from diverse recruitment backgrounds but all of whom had one thing in common: eagerness to learn. The material we were originally aiming to cover was vast but the trainer did a fantastic job in tailoring his action plan to our individual needs. It was reassuring to discover that others had similar concerns to me and no matter how silly they seemed, we were able to voice them in the safe, classroom environment.

The 3 things I’ve learnt about conducting effective pitches

Over the years I have seen many different approaches to  meetings where people are pitching for business. Some people go for the traditional PowerPoint approach, with a detailed presentation of their offering and why the client should use them. This kind of method usually involves discussing at length a great many features of the product or service on offer and seems to me to be a scattergun approach; “tell the client everything and hopefully something will stick!”.

At the other extreme some sales people go for a pure information gathering technique, where they have a long list of exact predetermined information they are looking for. This style is characterised by a lot of specific questions and some fairly unsubtle, further probing questions. The client can see the “sell” a mile off, although ironically many sales people using this technique don’t get round to actually selling anything and closing at the end of the meeting. Instead they rely on having made a favourable enough impression through NOT appearing too “salesy”.

Neither of these two approaches are consistently that successful. Don’t get me wrong here; they’re not bad – it’s just that they’re not that good either. The problem is that they are both hampered by being dominated by the sales persons agenda, rather than the clients.

The most consistently successful technique that I have seen, is one that flips the meeting on it’s head and approaches the whole thing from the client’s viewpoint.

You can’t have one without the other!

These days it’s almost impossible to become a successful recruiter if you aren’t a wiz at using your social media skills. Over 3 million people in the UK alone use LinkedIn and good recruiters use it as a tool to source candidates and clients. The majority though, don’t know what they don’t know and could be getting so much more from it than they realise.

Even if you are that social media ‘wiz kid’, that’s only half the story. If you don’t have credible, consultative headhunting skills, having the names of top talent is meaningless if you can’t confidently approach them to professionally present an opportunity.

Using these skills together is the key,  so learning them together makes sense.

Lander Associates has teamed up with LinkedIn expert Mark Williams (Mr LinkedIn) to create a unique training programme that combines LinkedIn and traditional headhunting techniques.

LinkedIn skills from setting up that ‘killer’ profile to discovering applications that you should be taking advantage of to really extend your network, go hand in hand with using a headhunting structure that gives professional credibility, managing even the most senior candidates with confidence.