Welcome to The Fordyce Letter:

The Fordyce Letter

Straight Talk for the Recruiting Profession


Cold Calling

Cold Calling, For Managers

Sales – The Big Mistake?



jeremy_snell

…only without strategy!

There is a common mistake that I see repeated across the recruitment and staffing industry. From a development and training perspective over 80% of the recruiters I encounter are seeking to develop their sales skills: opening techniques, killer questions, Jedi-like influence skills, and robust closing skills. Each of these is a potentially valid training need. Each an area that I know I can help them to develop, although for some it is a case of putting the cart before the horse.

Let me explain further. Becoming a ‘great’ sales practitioner is clearly the goal of every sales person. Developing the techniques to win more clients is undoubtedly an important focus area for a self-sufficient recruiter. What benefit is there to develop such skills if you are pointing in the wrong direction? Developing the salesmanship of the individual alone is not going to generate more business.

Cold Calling

Impossible Search? Or Are You Skipping a Strategic Step?



MI

We’ve all recruited for tough-to-fill openings, hard-to-please hiring managers, less-than-competitive salaries, and even not-so-favorable company press. But what if you’re recruiting and you simply can’t find qualified talent? The list of must-haves is long, you’ve searched your ATS and external resume databases, posted your jobs on the most compelling sites, and utilized all of the latest social networking tools, but the quality of the candidate pipeline is still lacking.

Cold Calling, Webinars

Webinar: The New Rules for Cold Calling in 2011



WendyWeiss

According to a recent Expertise Marketing Research Report, “of 30 possible marketing tactics… [cold calling] rose to the top as the most effective.”

A Marketing Sherpa survey found 45%-53% of the executives interviewed stated a cold call helped vendors get on the shortlist for purchase.

Cold Calling is Proactive – Productive – Profitable… it gives you instant gratification… and when you know how to do it right it is the most powerful skill in your sales arsenal.

Join Wendy Weiss, The Queen of Cold Calling™, for this webinar and get:

  • IMMEDIATE RESULTS: Take what you see and hear in the webinar and put it to work for you on your very next dial. It’s like flipping the switch “on”… suddenly you are a master at business by phone.
  • 6 NEW RULES: Make your phone the most powerful, most productive, most profitable business tool you own.
  • #1 QUESTION: I’ll tell you the #1 question you must answer and show you how to answer it so your prospects want to hear more.
  • THE NEW REALITY: You can’t afford to let the misconceptions and myths about cold calling lead you to missteps that cause failure. I’ll show you what works and how to get results now.

Date: Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Time: 2:00 pm ET
Duration: 60 minutes
Cost: FREE

Click here to register for this upcoming webinar.

Closing, Cold Calling, Entrepreneurship

Laser Focus Leads to Placements



laser Alejandro Serrano Durán

As demand for our search and placement services started to pick up late last summer, I decided to focus intently on one huge task; increasing the production on my desk.  I established new goals, blocked out all other peripheral responsibilities, and hunkered down to re-create a profitable business. Today I can report that my venture has been a huge success!

Those of you that run a solo practice know we all have the challenging day to day task of managing priorities. We have to determine if we truly have the right searches to fill, once we obtain them, and then must attack each placement opportunity with precision and efficiency. We must qualify diligently and seek immediate results without appearing impatient or testy. This process has required maximum focus, a willingness to learn from the challenges of 2009 and a dedication to what has, and always will, work in this awesome industry of ours.

The attention to detail on each search assignment is where it all starts, but often the other aspects of being a successful practitioner get overlooked. I am here today to say that if and when you put together a string of six months of approximately $50K in billings per as I just have, the resulting financial payoff makes it all okay.

Cold Calling

Fun Friday: Top 10 Recruiter Objections



fordyce-default

For Fun Friday this week, here’s a fun look at some common objections I’m sure you may hear when doing business development! What are some other common — and crazy — objections that you’ve heard over your recruiting career?

Cold Calling, Fordyce Forum

Fordyce Forum Presenter Podcasts: Conni LaDouceur



Conni L

Let’s face it, no matter how many times you may pick up your phone on a daily basis, there are always more skills that can be learned when it comes to cold calling. Phone skills are a staple part of every recruiter’s toolkit — without the skills to cold call, phone source, interview, sell, and close, you won’t make it as a recruiter.

At the Fordyce Forum this year, we have invited Conni LaDouceur, Founder and Chief Sourcing Strategist of ExecuQuest Corporation, to lead a break-out session on telephone sourcing. In this podcast, Conni shares some of her philosophy on telephone sourcing, competitive intelligence gathering, and why it is important to be able to do not just one, but both — and often in the same call. We hope you’ll join us in Las Vegas June 1-3 to hear Conni as well as our other presenters at the Fordyce Forum — register before April 22 to receive a $200 discounted price!

Cold Calling

Matching, Pacing, and Rhythm



bank_teller

Last week I went to pay some bills online. I looked at my account and realized there were charges listed that I had never made. I called the bank immediately. We shut down all of my accounts and opened new ones.

I went to the bank ten business days later, and I still did not have a functioning ATM card. That meant that rather than simply go to an ATM for cash, I had to wait in a long, long line at the bank for a teller. Twenty minutes later, by the time I got to the head of the line, I was seriously annoyed. I expressed my annoyance to the teller. Her response? “Calm down, Ma’am.”

So my dear readers, do you think this response calmed me down?

Of course not. It had exactly the opposite effect. I went through the roof. “Don’t tell me to calm down,” I snarled. Where before I had simply been annoyed, now I was really angry.

So why am I sharing my banking woes?

Cold Calling, The Business of Recruiting

“I Want Your Job…”



Sandra McCartt

Thirty six years ago, I was an accountant. Happily or unhappily, as the case may be, putting lots of numbers into lots of big black books. Yes, they were big black books. Edison had invented the light bulb but Microsoft was some kind of fabric that kept small children and big dogs from making a mess on pillows . Being not too long out of a divorce I was focused on talking on the phone to discover what was going on with the rest of the world of newly divorced people — planning where and what time the “young and the restless” were going to solve the problems of the world that night. In a fit of pique, my boss walked by my office and uttered the now infamous words, “Why don’t you go find a job where you can do what you do best…talk on the phone.”

Now if you have ever been divorced or have spent much of your life putting numbers in little boxes, you know the mind set du jour of someone who is newly divorced and doesn’t like what they do for a living, either. I remember saying something like, “That’s a great idea, now if you will excuse me, I am on the phone.” I kissed my life as a bean counter goodbye (as soon as I got plans firmed up for the evening), picked up my purse, and headed to the nearest employment agency.

Cold Calling, Weigh In!

Client or Source: Perspective From the Corporate Recruiters



attraction

In a recent blog post by Jessica Lee, Senior Employment Manager at APCO Worldwide, a privately held, global public affairs and strategic strategic communications firm, she laments about some ‘shady’ business practices she has been seeing as of late from some third-party recruiting professionals:

“…how am I to respond and react to a headhunter/recruiting agency who I know has tried to recruit our company’s talent away who then reaches out to me to try to solicit our business?” 

Cold Calling, How-To, Technology

Phone Sourcing Basics



telephone

How many of us remember the days before Google, LinkedIn, and other social media sites… When sourcing was a primary function of recruiters, who relied on phone sourcing as the primary means of connecting with potential candidates. When recruiters resorted to purchasing phone directories of targeted companies and then figured out how to break through a phone system to reach the desired department, often resulting in many misconnections that somehow lea to the right person.

Phone sourcing has become somewhat of a lost art form – which is interesting considering that we live in a world of connectivity yet have lost the personal touch of picking up the phone and calling, regardless if you are full cycle recruiter, a sourcer, or a researcher.