Nude Sunbathing

Now nude sunbathing is not a subject I know very much about, so let me talk to you about a subject I can tell you about with confidence - compelling opening lines and statements - ones that grab the recipient’s attention. Just like this one that grabbed yours.

Imagine for a moment that you are either an HR Director or Line Manager/hiring authority in a manufacturing company.  In this role you have 43 recruitment agencies in your immediate catchment area and another 67 within a 40 mile radius.  Every one of them wants your business and, if they can, will call you once a month.  That's 100 calls a month or 25 a week.  Assuming that they all get through (and that’s a skill in itself), that’s 5 calls from recruiters every single day.

Now put your recruitment consultant hat back on again.  If you look at the downside of this scenario you have a 1 in 100 chance of getting an exclusive piece of business.  If our manufacturing hiring authority wishes to share that assignment with a few, then your odds come down but they are still not great.  So what can you do to increase your chances of success?

First of all avoid the two traps that 50% of your competitors will fall into:

1. Asking for a visit when they barely know the contact.
2. Asking the immortal line "Have you any vacancies?"

If our target contact (and let's call her Brenda) hears those requests one more time she'll go nuts!  So that’s knocked out 50% of your competitors.

Next - 30% of recruiters who can’t get through or their target is not in, or simply can’t be bothered picking up the phone, will send an email – that’s an unsolicited email and will be deleted pretty quickly, so there’s another 15 of our remaining competitors we don’t need to worry about!

So our odds of securing a piece of business are staring to look a lot better now.  

It’s now starting to be a focus on developing compelling opening lines and grabbing your contact’s attention.  And that’s a project for you right now… work hard on coming up with those, and involve your colleagues in the project as well.  If it takes you half a day to come up with one or two openings that you can use consistently when calling a stranger, that’s time well spent. After all, in this current climate you should be spending 20 - 40% of your time on business development – time wasted unless you grab your recipient’s attention.