If you struggle with your recruitment cold calls, learn what you may be doing wrong—and how to fix it.
Recruiting is a job like few others. As in any sales, it involves a lot of perseverance. With cold calls especially, it can be challenging to sell your services when you only have a few minutes, and you’ve never even met your audience face-to-face. But recruitment cold calls don’t have to be so intimidating. The first trick is to figure out what it is that’s causing your cold calls to fail. The second, of course, is to fix the problem.
A different kind of sales
Recruitment cold calls are somewhat different from regular sales calls. To begin with, you have two different audiences: candidates and companies. While calling a candidate tends to be more comfortable, you may still find you’re swimming upstream because the best candidates out there get recruitment calls and e-mails all the time. And of course, calling companies brings with it the challenges of any B2B sales, which range from merely getting someone on the phone to showcasing your product in just a few minutes.
That said, recruiting is sales. When you call a company, you’re selling them on your placement services and eventually, on candidates. When you call a candidate, you’re selling them on your connections with top-notch businesses that people are dying to break into. Either way, you have a service, you have prospects, you have a pitch, and most likely, you only have five minutes or less. That, in a nutshell, is sales, and sales is about relationships.
But if you’re still struggling to close on your recruitment cold calls, remember first and foremost that everybody fails from time to time. That doesn’t make you a failure. It just means you need to rethink your approach. Even the best recruiters experience rejection. The difference is that they analyze their strategies and make adjustments to produce more wins. That’s what makes them the best—they recognize that they can always be better.
Motivational speaker and author, Brian Tracy, once said, “There are no limitations to how good you can become or how high you can rise except the limits you put on yourself.” Most of the time, the biggest thing standing in our way is ourselves. It doesn’t need to be that way. Once you identify where you’re going wrong, you have the power to fix it.
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10 reasons your recruitment cold calls may be failing and what you can do to change that
Reason #1: You don’t engage the prospect
If you’re making a lot of calls in a day, which you probably are, it can be difficult to keep up enthusiasm. You have to push through it. Candidates and clients can tell when you’re bored or worn out, and it makes them less interested in your pitch.
Solution: Always think about your tone and your word choice to make sure you’re demonstrating as much enthusiasm for your service as you want your candidates to have.
Reason #2: You ramble instead of pitch
On any sales call, including recruitment cold calls, you need structure and focus. If you go off on a tangent or don’t present cohesive thoughts, you’ll lose your prospect and ultimately the sale.
Solution: Use a cold calling script tailored to your different audiences, and don’t stray from it!
Reason #3: Too much talking, not enough listening
This goes along with the prospect engagement problem. If you’re telling someone how great your service is instead of finding out what their need is, you’re likely to lose their attention.
Solution: Demonstrate a genuine interest in who they are and what problems they need solved from a recruitment standpoint by asking open-ended questions.
Reason #4: Trying to sell instead of establishing rapport
Recruiting, like all sales, is about relationships. You have to forge connections with prospects if you want them to trust you enough to give you their money.
Solution: Take the time to learn about your prospects create a connection. It doesn’t matter if you don’t close the sale. If you build relationships, the recruitment cold calls are successful.
Reason #5: You’re disorganized
If you can’t keep track of your prospects, you’re going to have a hard time turning relationships into sales. There’s little that’s more detrimental to recruitment cold calls than being disorganized.
Solution: Invest in a CRM where you can store prospect information, schedule follow-up calls and e-mails, keep track of what’s working for you and what isn’t, and increase the number of calls you can make in a day.
Reason #6: No follow up
Most closes don’t happen in a single call, making follow up essential for winning new business.
Solution: Persevere and call again! This is another place where a CRM is very helpful since you can schedule follow-ups and automatically send e-mails.
Reason #7: You’re not taking enough notes
With all the recruitment cold calls you have to make, you’re not going to remember much about your prospects unless you take notes.
Solution: Write down as much as you can without diverting your attention from your call.
Reason #8: Giving up too easily
Rejection is a part of this business.
Solution: Again, persevere, and don’t take it personally. They’re not rejecting you. They just weren’t sold on your service.
Reason #9: Not setting goals
If your reason for calling is to win a contract, things probably won’t go well.
Solution: Set other goals, like a quota for conversations, strengthened leads, and open opportunities.
Reason #10: You don’t believe in yourself
If you don’t have confidence in yourself, what makes you think a prospect will?
Solution: No matter how hard it gets, remember that you got into this business for a reason, whether that be enjoying the connections you make or helping someone solve a problem. Never forget the things that first motivated you to become a recruiter, because they most likely still hold true today.
Have confidence in an auto-dialer CRM that was built with you in mind. Check out a demo for a one-on-one demonstration of all of Call Logic’s features.