I love getting these now and then. HR Director from a company we’ve had no relationship with in the past called about 2 of our people leaving too many messages for their people. I got a 13-minute lesson on “After you try a certain number of times and get no response you should know they are not interested.”

Huh?

I have 22 years of proof against that notion. We always try until we decide not to. Later attempts include “Call my voicemail after hours and tell me you just don’t want to talk and we’ll stop.” I just can’t count the number of times we made a valuable contact after 7 or 10 attempts. Anyhow, our market is small, but big enough when this happens we put a block on them for a year or so unless we get specific referrals. No reason to antagonize people who might move to a client company when it is not necessary. It WAS fun though when I said ‘besides Brendan…that I know about…who else do you want us to quit calling? Who’s complaining?’ She then rattled off 6 names. 3 of them were brand new entries to our database! Thanks, Michelle!

P.S. To Neil…Great article on selling in the moment. I count myself fortunate that my early trainers taught me well enough about niche-building that my current worries do not include the economic climate. The article is just really good for ANY times.

Mark Lally asked this in a comment on a previous post. Thanks to him, I have something to write about this week.

The key words in the previous post are ‘to our niche.’ Everyone calls it a hard niche but it is really just what the best trainers describe. It is something that is in short enough supply that the demand is always there. There’s a finite amount of these candidates and everyone always wants them.

Look at our own industry. They’re dropping like flies again and I guarantee there’d still be a feeding frenzy if a 300k annual producing recruiter wanted to go to a new company (not all my fantasies are ‘adults only’).

In good economic times it is easy to ‘cheat’ on many aspects of niche-building and making placements. We’d all be silly not to do some of it but that low-hanging fruit makes a lot of us too fat to climb the tree when it is gone. Many people never are taught to climb the tree to start with.

Here’s one of those statements that sometimes gets me into trouble…If you are a good, experienced headhunter, your numbers might be a bit off or they might not. The Pinnacle meeting was about 50/50 last month but none of it was drastic. Nothing has happened in the economy yet that should cause anything but working harder, re-aiming a bit, and maybe actually doing what we tell the clients we do.

Here’s another inflammatory comment. If you use any job board in your practice for ANYTHING other than researching companies…i.e. if you post ads or get candidates…you have no standing to even discuss how the economy affects recruiting because you are not recruiting.

That is not intended to put down the boards or people who use them. It is simply a matter of perspective.

We all ‘sell’ to our clients. “Tell me your need and I will go get you your competitor’s top people.” Just find me one person who does that who also says the current economic climate makes him or her do anything more than maybe concentrate a bit more.

I KNOW how far I am from that model. It varies from time to time. I don’t think most people who are complaining about the economy either know about this as a model or agree with it. I’d love to see some discussion on this.

Thanks again to Mark for the idea. Apologies if it seems anything is attributed to him beyond making me think about ‘the recession.’

I can’t believe I am stopping to write this but if I don’t do it now I may not get to it. I can’t believe how irrelevant all the financial turmoil seems to be to our niche. I am not complaining. At the Pinnacle meeting last week someone actually chided me for not posting more. This isn’t even a rant…been too busy for rants…This is just simple appreciation for a guy who is not even from our industry saying something in a way that just helps focus on what’ll make us money. The title of this entry was spoken in response to some question about the number of calls someone was making as opposed to the number of connects. I just loved it. No problem on the recruiting side but I do obviously walk past the gym a lot.

One more thing…Pedro Silva and I have an idea for an article…it’d help if anyone seeing this could email me, or leave as comments, nominations for “The Top 10 Things All Recruiter Trainers Say” I’d love to get some FROM those trainers if anyone shows this to them. Gotta run…

“No Time to Rant But There’s a Good One Hidden Below” was my title but the new one serves a better purpose.

I already know I am going to have to kill my RantReminder tomorrow because I am backed up and having too much fun headhunting. It just so happens that the posting with “Balancing Trainer Nuggets” has a good discussion thread about email that is not evident in the part that is posted.

Neil and Joel…’er “Sabio” helped clarify that my claim of email having a place in our business that is different than phoning and that neither should displace the other is not the same as saying email can do the same things phoning can do should be a good string for people to evaluate. It’s a lot more informative than the black and white statement I started out with…that I’ll still stand by just because I am obstinate…and correct.

One good thing about the rare anonymous jerks who complain about what I write here is that I no longer write everything. That and being busy have made me a bit more choosy about what I want to invest the time in, live with, and defend here.

There are two classic trainer lines I keep hearing that just bug me when they are not balanced or explained and usually they are not. First is the edict to all recruiters in the TFL reader industry… “You must make X ‘marketing’ calls a day.”

At this moment we have more ‘active deals’ on our board than I can remember. And that’s on a per capita basis. I have deleted the last 3 or 4 weekly blog posting reminders just because there’s so much going on. I have often said that I’ve never seen a better,simpler blueprint for starting a desk from scratch than Steve Finkel’s Breakthrough. I point that out because what I’ll say next is NOT a criticism of Steve or anything he or others have said about the economic conditions here,coming, or past. I believe the simple fact is that recessions hurt lots of recruiters because they don’t follow Steve,Danny’s or Pete’s plan to begin with and most of the time actually doing one of those is all that’s needed.  I guess Steve would get bored if he simply said to anyone who was asking how to get through the recession… “Can you show me your 300 companies and what you have done with them?” I am not complaining here… It just feels like sometimes these things are used as crutches. I guess the bottom line here is that all the articles about ‘fine-tuning’ (remember THAT term from before locked in stations?) for recessions can’t help people who aren’t doing it right to begin with…And I believe I could support through examination the statement that very few people are. Like me, posting blather at 9:30 in the middle of prime time… I am going to spank myself and get back on the phone.

Wow, this is fun. I can’t remember the last time (probably a few months ago) that I had so much to do that I didn’t stop to look at this site or RB.com or TFL network or any of my other plants in the Garden of Distraction I spend so much of my life cultivating. Yesterday I said I would force myself to come here and play a bit because it is Friday which has been ‘optional early retirement day’ for many years anyhow. THIS Friday I can’t wait to get back but there are a couple things I wanted to mention.

First, thanks to RSS feeds I got to read a whole week’s worth of comments on TFL at once. The only thing that really struck me is a general trend toward naked abuse of the comments function for advertising. I know I both endorse and criticize products all the time. I see that as a bit different than…”Nice article, you can avoid that problem by using my brand of soap” It’s a small enough crime that I’ll stop there. Also, I am only talking about comments…not articles.

The other thing was interesting. Some feedback from a recent Pinnacle Panel was something like “Why don’t you have people who just do local IT or Accountants instead of that guy who does the people with clearances who doesn’t have to make marketing calls and doesn’t have to worry much about reference checks etc etc and has candidates he has known for 20 years?.”  I just thought it was kind of sad that the person was saying they’d like to see something else instead of asking for a program on how to put oneself in a situation to perform the same way. By the way…I ,personally, don’t sell anything… I give it away.

I’ll stop with this..And no equivocation here…Anyone in this business for more than 15 years who has a list of 50 companies to make calls to for cold call marketing/sales purposes has been doing it wrong.

And I’d love to hear Jeff Skrentny’s take on this if he’d quit rooting for the Cubs long enough to let the Cardinals catch up. I am expecting to walk into a public restroom soon and find some guy passing out DVDs to use for the ‘clean-up’ process. I have nothing against any of these people trying to bring us the future but it needs to make sense and whatever new offering they have must do something BETTER than it is already being done. I don’t even need to debate the utility of a video resume here. Many of us could easily argue both sides but plain old resumes do the job so well that Rokos is likely to be irrelevant for a long time. Who remembers CD Business Cards that we were to stick into our computer drives from about 5 years ago? I’d like anyone to set a reminder in their software to email me 1 year from now so I can either gloat or flog myself when we see how FutureResume is doing.

I can barely stop to write this one because it seems every 5 minutes something else gets hotter. This is not a complaint about what’s going on but I think the question alone will generate some interesting comments. It feels like RIGHT NOW would be a good time to make these profiles portable. Especially on Ning. Whaddaya think?

I tried to post as a comment on Cheezhead’s blog but it wouldn’t upload so here’s my 3rd (com)post of the week. It’s about the notion that the new Fordyce Letter Network and RecruitingBlogs need to be seen as opposing each other.

I like Jason. I like David. I provide content to both. Like some others I think a win/lose aspect is less relevant than what these two or any others can accomplish individually. I meet with other recruiters a lot some make a lot more than I do. Most make a lot less. None of that is win/lose and I NEVER run into any of them in the market I work and I really don’t compete against specific people for any given dollar either.