The increasingly diverse needs of organizations big and small demand a myriad of options in recruiting software solutions. Recent activity—including Salesforce’s acquisition of Rypple—is pumping new energy into this niche market. In the last month, VC funds have been flowing into the human resources software market, with large investments in SmartRecruiters and iCIMS. I’ve taken an in-depth look at how this dynamic software market will be impacted, how vendors will be poised for greater success, as well as how all of this may affect users.

Salesforce’s Social Enterprise growing in HR and Recruiting

Historically, CRM and recruiting have been the first business sectors to adopt new communications tools, and that continues today. Social tools have seen the most widespread adoption in these two markets. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is the greatest evangelist of the social enterprise, and continues to drive deep social integration in business management software. With Sand John Wookey (previously of Oracle and SAP) heading their HCM unit, Salesforce is in a strong position to help HR departments extend social media functionality across their various applications—including recruiting.

Many of the core functions of Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software—from sourcing to screening to interviewing—thrive in the social media arena.Iit makes sense that you’ll see more social capabilities evolving in this area first. Though I can’t speak directly to Salesforce’s plans to build out recruiting applications in their social enterprise, I can say that other vendors focused solely on the recruiting and applicant tracking systems are making strides. There are a few that stand out:

• Bullhorn, a leader in recruiting software, has broken into social with their new product, Bullhorn Reach. Currently in its infancy, I see a lot of potential in this product. Forgive me for throwing out some generic descriptors, but it really is easy to use. Basic features like creating and posting jobs are straightforward and the dashboard presents quick access to key information. The social functions—Radar (which monitors activity in the social sphere, flags potential movers, and notifies you of changes in position) and Engage (a tool for sharing articles and updates across your various social networks)—are very intuitive, and successfully automate two core components of social recruiting: ongoing engagement and information sharing.
• With new VC funding, SmartRecruiters is poised to continue shaking things up with its open platform for social recruiting software. CEO Jerome Ternynck anticipates a lot of growth in the coming year. According to Ternyck’s interview with TalentCulture, SmartRecruiters is going to put “all of the money into product awesomeness,” which makes sense when you have a free product. “We’re building features around a one-click apply and allowing candidates to express interest more easily,” said Ternynck, ticking off features that the SmartRecruiters team is adding while also naming features that were soon to be gone, like the application form.
• Jobvite‘s seamless integration of social functionality into the process of sourcing and recruiting candidates has received accolades left and right. Leveraging employee (or colleague) social networks, Jobvite allows for quick and easy sharing of your open positions. Suddenly, your reach is that much greater, and many users see a serious increase in the number of employee referrals and passive candidates they’re getting. The product continues to wow, and I expect they’re only getting started.

As innovative companies like Salesforce continue to dazzle, driving social tools deeper into business management, recruiting software will be right there leading the charge. In-house and third party recruiters alike would be wise to pay attention to continued movement in the market in the coming months.

For further reading, check out the full analysis and forecast on my blog.

Have your own thoughts? Join the discussion, and leave a comment.

For years employers have been screening candidates based on content on social networking websites. Candidates using poor judgment online may be screened out of the process.  Now employers and recruiters are turning to social media to aid in the selection of knowledgeable and well-connected employees.

Klout measures an individual’s influence across social media entities, such as Twitter.  Data under consideration are network size, amount of content generated, and volume of interaction. That data is processed to produce a Klout score ranging from 1 to 100.  The higher the score, presumably the higher the individual’s social media influence.  Klout scores are categorized into measures, including “True Reach” (size of engaged audience), “Amplification Probability” (rate of action taken on message, such as retweets), and “Network Score” (value of a person’s engaged audience).

Consideration of a candidate’s Klout score is the latest trend in recruitment.  As social media proficiency and influence are becoming more valuable in many occupations, the Klout score is becoming a valued source of knowledge contributing to a hiring decision. It may not be a primary determining factor, but it could help tip the scale in a candidate’s favor.  All things equal, a candidate with a high Klout score may win the day.

However, sometimes a new trend can lead a manager to make a costly hiring mistake. Some managers are eager to hop onto the next great idea, even when it’s not the appropriate method for all job vacancies. In other cases, a hiring manager may place more importance on a Klout score than appropriate. It’s the job of a seasoned recruiter to put the Klout score and other candidate data into perspective to facilitate the decision making process.

For example, is a low Klout score a sign that a candidate is less valuable?  Does it weaken a candidate’s brand?   Not necessarily.  For every individual actively building a social media empire, there are hundreds of candidates reviewing, analyzing, and utilizing the data found on social media sites.

Obviously, in some positions, social media interaction is critical; in others not so much.  A community manager with a low Klout score may want to spend some time on his personal brand to build his clout in his area of expertise to increase the Klout score.  A database administrator with a high Klout True Reach score may be very impressive if she is using her time blogging about her field. However, if she is known in social media as the ultimate authority on the Battlestar Gallactica, it is very impressive but may not give her the edge when interviewing.  There are many instances when a Klout score is not relevant due to the occupation or industry.

There are legal aspects of using social media to make a hiring decision.  As a recruiting professional, it is important to stay abreast of changes in this area of employment law.  One reason it may be a risky addition to a formal hiring plan is that social media provides a glimpse into a candidate’s religion, sexual orientation, marital status, gender, and age.  Because those items are protected by anti-discrimination laws, an employer is forbidden from using that data as a hiring factor.  The line could be blurred unless filtering safeguards are implemented so hiring managers do not receive those details.  Additionally, this is an opportunity for training of both human resource managers as well as hiring managers.

The bottom line is that this is an area to watch.  As a professional recruiter, you can increase your clout with your clients by remaining knowledgeable in this evolving space in the world of employee selection.

Editor’s note: Paul DeBettignies’ article was the 2nd most popular article on The Fordyce Letter in 2011. It originally ran in March.

I know, I know… smile and dial.

More phone calls equal more job orders, candidates and send outs. More send outs equal more placements.

I get it – I really do. But after thirteen years as a sole practitioner, I have learned that I need to get out from behind the desk every now and then, or I fear that the headset will become permanently fixed to my head.

My company recruits information technology professionals. Minneapolis is a very “community” oriented city and we have an abundance of IT user groups and professional associations, so I can get out and be social, learn something new, and do some candidate and client generation while curing my “cabin fever.”

And when I say abundance, it is no joke. In addition to the IT groups I participate in (there are more than 25), there are several professional recruiting associations in which I am involved, including the Minnesota Recruiters group, which I coordinate.

At this point, some of you many be thinking, “How do you manage all of that, and does it distract you from making placements?”

Does it distract me? No. How do I manage all of this? Here’s how:

1. I focus on the groups and events where I know my “targets” are going to be in attendance. Most of the groups in town use Eventbrite, and usually the attendee list is posted, so I will copy and paste the names I do not recognize into LinkedIn and/or Google to see who they are.
2. While I attend a lot of events, I make sure not to hang out with just my friends. I also find the people who look like they do not know anyone and introduce myself. I look to see who has “groupies” hanging around them – as I assume they have to be one of the “cool kids” – and introduce myself. Additionally, I focus on looking for the name tags of those I searched for online. (I write them down on a 3×5 card that I bring with me so as not to forget)
3. If I am attending an event and know no one, I will email the host ahead of time and ask if they will be willing to make some introductions for me. Over a period of time of course I get to know who is who and it makes networking much easier.

Besides being an attendee at events, I am also frequently asked to speak at them. For recruiter and HR groups, topics I am requested to cover range from closing candidates to social media, building talent pools, and so forth. The IT user groups and professional associations typically look for topics on job search, using LinkedIn, find the next consulting gig, and how to find/use recruiters.

So how does this help my business?

For starters, I am not one of those creepy “insurance salesman” networking types who quickly work a room, hand out their business card, and then head for the door. I have a reputation of being “the guy” to go to with a question, and I make it a point to invest time in those with whom I speak – whether they can help me or not. I think a lot of us have forgotten that we are in the people business, and not everyone is an instant means to an end.

Do these activities pay off? Last summer I attended a tech event at Best Buy headquarters and in a small group session of 50 Java developers, the presenter recognized me and said, “Hey, are you the recruiter guy with the blog? Come up here and answer some questions we have about how to ready ourselves for a job search.”

What a great way to be of help to others and allow them to get to know me. The number of emails, calls, and resumes I received over the next week was overwhelming – in a very good way. As a direct result of this opportunity, I was referred to a manager who I later placed. Even now, I am still seeing benefits from this event as several of the technology professionals I met are pursuing contract opportunities with us. Networking events can provide both ‘hunting’ and ‘farming’ opportunities if approached in the right manner.

Right before the holidays, I was invited by a friend to attend an HR event with her. She was surprised to learn that I knew more of those attending than she did. Not only did I know them – they were friends, too. Very rarely do I have to make a true “cold call” on the client generation side of the business.

It is good to remember that there are human beings on the other end of the phone and the other side of the computer screen. Getting out from behind your desk and mixing it up with your target audience helps them to put a face to your name and voice as much as it does the same for you of them. “Smile and dial” is a whole lot easier when the person answering the phone (or email) already knows your name – and what value you have to offer.

This article is from the February 2011 print Fordyce Letter. To subscribe and receive a monthly print issue, please go to our Subscription Services page.

This week we are counting down some of the most popular articles from FordyceLetter.com in 2011. We hope you enjoy revisiting these articles as we look ahead to 2012!

Editor’s note: Jeff Schwartzman’s article was the 3rd most popular article on The Fordyce Letter in 2011. It originally ran in April.

I often run across criticism of the recruiting practice dubbed “Post and Pray,” the method of posting online job ads with the hopes the right candidates apply. This practice comes under fire since it is viewed as the lazy approach to recruiting with little to no control over who applies.

Many of you may be thinking at this point, “I have no need to post jobs! I do everything through cold calling and referrals.” Relax — while that may work for you, it may not be the best approach for everyone else. Recruiting offers no perfect source or method to fill positions. In my opinion, to run a successful recruiting desk, it is important to utilize a combination of multiple recruiting methods, both proactive and reactive.

Posting online job ads have many advantages. Job seekers who apply have the opportunity to read through a job description (hopefully well written!) so they typically are already interested in your job when you receive their resume.

The following job posting strategies, approaches, and techniques will help optimize your job ad exposure resulting in both a higher quantity and quality of online applicants.

Optimize Your Job Title

Go to leading job boards, Indeed, Monster, or CareerBuilder. Too many job descriptions contain generic titles such as “Senior Scientist,” “Business Analyst,” or “Software Developer.” Type in “Sr. Scientist” on Indeed and you will see hundreds of job postings with this exact title. When I see a generic title, the first thing I want to know is what kind of Senior Scientist or Business Analyst is this? What is this position working on? Posting a generic job title will just yield a generic and non targeted set of applicants who respond.

The job title is the first thing job seekers see in their search results. An interesting and specific job title will result in a click on the job ad, the first step. Major job boards also score search results based upon the job title so it’s important to write a keyword rich job title and maximize this space. Monster allows for up to 50 characters so, like a tweet, it’s important to make the most of this space. Think of your job title as SEO for a job posting. Be sure to incorporate keywords associated with technologies, activities, and other specific qualifications.

• Instead of “Senior Scientist,” post “Sr. Scientist, BioPharma Protein Purification Process Development”
• Instead of “Business Analyst,” post “Sr. Business Intelligence Analyst, SAP Business Objects Supply Chain”
• Instead of “Process Engineer,” post “Process Engineer, In Vitro Diagnostic & Medical Device Production”

Refresh Your Jobs

Another SEO-like way to optimize job postings is to regularly refresh every few days to a week. Ideally, you can work with job slots which allow you to update, modify, or redo your job whenever — and for free. Monster and Dice among other boards offer job slots.

You can simply tweak your job ads every few days by making slight modifications to the job titles and the job location. So for example:

• Sr. Scientist, Downstream Purification, Monoclonal Antibodies – San Francisco, CA 94101

refresh to:

• Sr. Purification Scientist, Recombinant Proteins – San Francisco, CA 94105

Refreshing your job ads will ensure your job ads get to the top of the job boards and on page 1 of search results.

Your Job Description

Job descriptions should be well written, interesting, and thorough. They should focus more on the background of the position, projects, and responsibilities and less on the requirements. Basic stuff!

Location

You will generate the most applicants and best results by posting within the major markets. Jobs posted in LA, San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Chicago will yield far more applicants than jobs posted in Anaheim, Sacramento, Providence, Scranton, and Normal, IL. If you have a job in Scranton or small market region, post your job in the closest large market city where you will be able to attract candidates from within the largest talent pool. Just be sure to disclose in your ad that your position is not in the big city listed and that a relocation package may be offered, as is done in the following example – http://hiring.at/5dids.

Receiving Resumes

I highly recommend making use of an Applicant Tracking System which receives resumes from the candidates who apply for your position. Each position should contain its own apply URL so resumes received are automatically added to your ATS and sorted for the correct job.

A well designed ATS will also be able to automatically score how well applicants match up to the job they apply for. This way you can quickly get to the best applicants first. This will save you valuable time if you receive a large response.

Ask a few screening questions when candidates apply. Applicants who are a fit for a position choose to answer questions with complete and thorough answers. Completed questions contain valuable information about an applicant, better than a cover letter, and can be shared with a client.

Tracking and Metrics

Using a short URL, for example, http://hiring.at/lifsw, it is possible to track back each time an applicant clicks your job and each time an applicant applies for the job. You can use this short URL on a multitude of online sources including free job boards Indeed or SimplyHired; major job boards Monster, CareerBuilder, Craigslist, or Dice; social media Sites LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, and even niche job boards 37 Signals, Stack Overflow, TechCrunch, or Biospace.

Choose the Right Boards

You should also be able to measure which job boards are producing the most candidates and even the best candidates. If one board is yielding more applicants or better applicants than another, you know where to best invest your advertising resources. Other metrics to consider are the amount of clicks/applicants. If you get too many views but not enough applicants, you may want to rewrite your job ad.

You should also evaluate which job boards average the highest traffic and unique visitors and compare the traffic against cost per posting. Top boards include Craigslist, Monster, LinkedIn, and Indeed. Job Board Scorecard is a great resource which compares these metrics.

Posting for Placements

Posting optimized job ads is a recruiting practice which should be used in conjunction with passive direct sourcing techniques, networking for referrals, and database searching. It’s nice to know that while you are sourcing through LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and other passive approaches, your job ads are running in the background producing candidates. They even run on the weekend when you are enjoying precious time off!

Continue to work hard and source passive candidates. Then develop an optimized job posting strategy. Determine a comfortable yearly or monthly budget, choose a few top boards, set up the place you will receive incoming resumes (hopefully an ATS), and measure your results. Candidates sourced from job posting response should account for half of your placements. It works for me!

This week we are counting down some of the most popular articles from FordyceLetter.com in 2011. We hope you enjoy revisiting these articles as we look ahead to 2012!

The recruitment industry is a perfect fit for the benefits that cloud computing offers to both users and business owners.

Historically (and still the case) the recruitment sector is highly fragmented. Before the worldwide recession hit in 2008, there were approximately 15,000 recruitment companies out there operating in the UK alone. The next two years saw this drop back by as much as 25% but the last year or so has seen the number swell again. It’s a profession populated with start-ups. Sales-driven consultants with strong client relationships are tempted to strike out on their own and the few barriers to entry encourage this. Anecdotally, something like 95% of these companies have fewer than five employees.

As a sum result, these companies are small and highly agile. In addition, success in recruitment means the likelihood of working outside of the traditional 9-to-5 working day – candidates themselves may be working and so after-work hours may be required to facilitate discussions.

As a profession with a strong sales culture, recruiters may need to be fleet of foot or certainly mobile, and increasingly, remote working is being adopted to further impact fixed overhead. Perhaps paramount of all, the data that everyone has access to with needs to be as current as possible.

Recruitment businesses ideally need recruitment systems that are easy to set up with low upfront cash requirements, perhaps with the added benefit of incurring operational expense rather than capital cost and the tax efficiencies that go along with that. They need data that is available to all and updated for all, accessible 24/7 and from wherever in the country (or world) they happen to be.

And that is a perfect summary of the key benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS), or Cloud Computing as it is more currently labelled.

Of course, Cloud Computing isn’t a new concept. Many of us have had access to a Hotmail or a Yahoo mail account, perhaps for personal use, for many years and we don’t give it a second thought. Many of us get our television services delivered by cable or satellite – a similar concept to cloud. And at an enterprise level, terminal services have been with us for some time (as tortured users can readily testify). It’s just that the benefits of the cloud are now being enjoyed far more by all manner of businesses and whilst those benefits are now being discovered (and enjoyed) at the enterprise level, of course the SME sector have been early adopters – and recruitment is part of the backbone of SME culture.

So, how does it work?

Essentially, the software publishers make their applications available via browser over the Internet. They make all of the investment necessary in delivery infrastructure; servers, routers, backup, administration, connectivity, and so forth. And it is this that represents the big saving in investment for the users.

If I access my software and data this way, I don’t need to spend a certain percentage of my time either being an IT expert or employing one directly. Of course I probably have a reputable IT support company looking after my desktop/laptop/mobile/pad/printer/internet type hardware but I’ve removed a server, the need to maintain (and regularly replace) it and to manage it, and the need to install and manage VPN’s for remote access. And typically, if I am subscribed to a SaaS service then instead of paying for software licences upfront and outright, I am paying a monthly subscription. At this point in the economic cycle, anything that keeps cash in the business a bit longer has got to be a good thing!

However, Cloud Computing is a description that covers all manner of different methods of delivery. From the relatively simple concept of a hosted application that sits on a server in a data centre and is accessible remotely to the more robust dedicated infrastructure platforms with sophisticated multi-tenancy (groups of servers) handling separate application tasks – all provide a means to access data from the cloud.

Who are the experts?

Two of the biggest players in SaaS (although not specifically recruitment related) are Salesforce and Google. Both use a multi-tenant platform that guarantees high levels of availability and uptime – an essential requirement for businesses using their applications in a business critical manner.

As an example of UK-based Recruitment Software there are now several providers supporting a cloud-based service (e.g. evolve™, Eploy, Bullhorn, ITRIS, etc) and for most recruiters, use of the software is likely to be business critical. Apart from the benefits highlighted above, recruiters using cloud based services find that they can open new offices quickly and easily (perhaps expanding geographically) and they can recover rapidly from potentially business-threatening situations such as theft or loss/failure of critical hardware. The key descriptor here is agility.

Why would I want it?

Of course there are other  considerations that users need to take into account when considering a move to cloud based services;

• How secure is the service?
• Do I now need an internet disaster recovery or backup plan?
• Is the supplier going to be around for the long term?
• Can I get access to my data if I want to move elsewhere?

Also worth considering is whether the service provider is working on maintaining a single code base or whether each instance is client specific.

A single code base has the substantial benefit of giving all users access to most of the improvements that are made to the application over time without necessarily being charged for an upgrade. This ensures that the application is likely to be up to date on an ongoing basis and the service provider only has to support one system rather than several semi-bespoke versions. Of course the corollary to this is that you may have greater restriction on any customisation that you can do and you will inevitably find functionality in the application that you just won’t use.

By contrast, service providers simply hosting individual instances of the application for each individual client may be faced with a much broader support challenge and a more tiered investment need in their server array (as each server fills, there is a need to invest in more on a step function basis). And whilst the ability to customise may be greater, any upgrade plan is fraught with the need to reconcile many different versions of the application.

Bottom line however is that there is no reason to consider cloud based services any differently to on-premise installations. When all is said and done, the decision to use a particular application or service is determined primarily on the business benefits that it brings versus other solutions, not just how sexy the technology might be It’s just that cloud has many advantages that are really worth looking into.

Although it is a relative no-brainer decision for a start-up company or for smaller companies, it is rapidly being considered by medium and large sized businesses as well and the uptake of cloud based solutions continues to outperform versus on-premise software installation.

This is the sixth and final installment of our Die-hard Phone Jockey’s Guide to Social Media series. We will now review the conclusions we’ve drawn on the way here, both about the four media we’ve discussed and about the subject of Social Media for Recruiting Power and Performance in general. We’ll do more, though; our analysis will cover four commands that will enable you to remember what we’ve discussed, and they will be your plan for conquest in the twenty-first century. Let’s dive in now!

The Essence of Recruiting, or Life Before Social Media

Have you ever asked yourself what is the essence of your work as a recruiter? Think about it for a moment. If I say that your job is to connect and provide connections, each in a different way, can you guess where I’m leading you? First, it is your job to connect with people directly, yourself. You must connect with candidates and prospective clients. The stronger the connection, the faster and more frequently you can make use of it; and the more consistent you are in doing so, the better your performance will be. But you will never close deals by connecting with people all by yourself in one-to-one relationships. A second connection must be built. You must facilitate the connection of Candidate to Hiring Manager.

Your candidates will ultimately shout, “I QUIT; I AM SOOOO OUT OF HERE!” They will do this even if they were very happy in their previous job — and often, happiness is not what they’re leaving behind. In either case, a new connection is now driving their world.

Your hiring managers emphatically say to your candidates, “You’re hired; when can you get started?” Even if only subconsciously, your Hiring Managers are filled with visions of new progress and better sleep at night, knowing that your Superhero-Candidate has flown in to save the day.

The essence of your work is therefore to connect and provide connections.

But how do you do this? As a die-hard Phone Jockey, the obvious answer is over the telephone. You are a sophisticated business-to-business service provider and a true sales professional of the highest caliber. And in the great old days before voice mail, we could have just given you a local phonebook with business listings and cut you loose. Of course, we also had to be able to provide you with the highest possible caliber of candidates, but there were old-school ways of doing that, too. Perhaps one of the greatest advantages of the pre-new-technology Great Old Days was the manual planning we invested so much effort in. There was no way to manage your day without intense planning. I could make the case that we’ve never replaced the advantages that manual planning provided us, but that is for another day.

Time has left that Great Old World in the dust. While we Old-timers may pine for all we’ve lost, this brave new world is here and demands that we embrace it as professionals. In fact, both the strategy of recruiting success and our daily tactics of execution demand that we build a new mindset, and perhaps even new minds, in order to gain all the power for performance we can right now.

Your Four Great Commands: One from Each Medium

Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, the Medium IS the Message, has become a cliché, but we dismiss it at our peril. Each medium in our new world not only offers its own essence, it does so in very specific ways as regards recruiting success today. Please understand, please do not forget, the essence of recruiting, to connect and connect, has not changed one iota, and it never will. Consider: there have not always been banks. At some point, banking had to be invented. But from that day forward, there have always been bankers, and there always will be. We can say exactly the same thing about recruiting. Until the innovation of the employer-paid fee, there was no recruiting industry. Since then, there have been and always will be recruiters, just as there will always be bankers. We will always serve the needs of connection. Always.

Social Media, however, have transformed our playing field. They offer the new essence of personal marketing at zero dollar cost. This surely changes the economy of the entire world, not just the recruiting industry. But the fact that it changes our playing field is something we must both face and embrace. The way to do that is, on the one hand, to understand the essences of the various media available to us, and on the other, to understand the essence of their reality in sum. We’ll take them in that order, each medium first, and then we’ll close by looking at their high-order impact on recruiting.

1. LinkedIn: Make Your Stand

When we analyzed LinkedIn, the most compelling opportunity we found was this: You can create a new kind of trust in the minds and hearts of those you reach out to by utilizing the power of your LinkedIn Recommendations. During the course of your school and business life (if you’re a brand new recruiter), or over the course of your service to Clients and Candidates alike (as a veteran recruiter), you have built up a cadre of raving fans. These fans need to voice the reasons why they believe in you, and they need to express their gratitude to you for all you’ve done for them. By employing LinkedIn’s most powerful feature, the recommendations you collect are the stand you make. They say, “Look at me! I build value. I build the kind of value you need, and I can validate that claim here!” Your recommendations are the stand you make. They are your platform for calling the world’s attention to your accomplishments. By building your collection, you are — one recommendation at a time — making your stand in the business world.

2. Blogging: Prove Yourself

Today’s term for the asset you need to win your marketing wars is “Domain Expert.” To make your stand, as you do at LinkedIn, is the first step. Blogging empowers a very different point of progress. While I may be utterly blown away by what others say about you, I may still need to understand what you do and how you do it before I can truly believe in your powers. I may need you to prove yourself to me before I can believe what others say about you. Of course, if I’m not impressed by what others say, I’m far, far less likely to care. Once I’ve seen that you have a reputation, though, and if I’m the sort that wants to test you, your performance mastery as shown by your blog is exactly what I’ll be looking for. At your blog, I can see how you prove your knowledge, your savvy, your analysis, the depth and creativity of your insight, and your generosity and good will in sharing. I can see your confidence in your powers of performance. All this reinforces my desire to procure the value that you alone can afford me. Your supreme confidence proves you to me. When you’re ready to prove yourself, blog.

3. E-mail Marketing: Step Forward

When I want to check you out, I will go find your blog. But what if I haven’t heard of you? My hearing of you used to be a telephone sales call away, and if you’re dedicated enough and good enough at it, cold-call selling can still be useful. But today’s marketing is free of charge, so there’s no excuse for you not to grab hold of all this leverage. Why wouldn’t you want me to know you before you call, when it’s free? In the old days, only institutions could afford marketing. Today we have to consider that total conquest essentially demands that we master the art. If we don’t, we will fail to step forward.

4. Facebook: Bond Intimately

That technology dehumanizes is conventional wisdom. Everyone knows this. That technology can humanize is not only counter-intuitive, but quite shocking for us Old Timers. What we discover at Facebook is that daily, detailed connection over tiny bits of information is the actual ‘warp and woof’ of human connection in the real world. Think about family dinner. Everyone shares all kinds of stuff about the day. None of it may be that important, but if you miss too many such moments, you end up breaking the bond of human connection. Sadly, too often we simply assume connection. Even more sadly, we are very often utterly wrong in this assumption. To be tied in intimate connection is to bond. This bond, the tie that binds, is the single most important part of human life — love. In business we’re shy and uncomfortable with this word, just like teenagers who “like” each other. As recruiters, though, we must go beyond normal business-speak. When we make the leap to become “Facebook friends” with our Candidates and Clients, we end up transforming the very basis upon which we bond, and we transform the very tie of intimacy connecting us to those we serve.

The Meaning and Significance of Social Media for Recruiters…Today AND Tomorrow

Did you notice as you read through the essence of each medium we’ve analyzed that these commands make for a great program for success in any endeavor? As I’ve meditated upon the significance of these commands, I’ve found they empower three levels of transformation. In conclusion, we’ll examine each of these transformations.

1. Grow More Powerful
2. Get Ready to Lead
3. Become a Better Person

1. I. Grow More Powerful

At the big picture level, you must realize that collecting and publishing rave reviews of your performance on LinkedIn is a step toward growing greater power. The power of reputation and credibility, validated in public, is incredible. But the other media we’ve analyzed cry out for the same big-picture transformation. Proving yourself, stepping forward, and bonding intimately all demand that you grow your power. Perhaps the greatest challenge here is presented by Facebook. There, it is your very life that people come to see, in public. The vulnerabilities entailed actually demand greater power and greater self-confidence. Business men and women are famously risk-averse. Facebook especially is a dangerous place, where errors and foolishness are published and amplified. So also with email marketing and blogging. In all cases you’re putting it out there, and in order to pull that off, you must grow more powerful.

In a way this is just like life, though. The truth is we’re all either growing or dying. There are no other options. Today’s social media, when employed by a recruiter, demands that you come to terms with this truth.

2. Get Ready to Lead

While your email marketing, as the means by which you step forward most aggressively, may seem natural for your new level of leadership, it is really your blog that wins that honor. Think about politics for a moment. Is it not sad that our chosen representatives and leaders so rarely live up to even our so-low-level, cynical expectations of them, let alone their promises? The problem is that they really don’t have to prove themselves. So also in business. So often leadership positions are won, if not by corrupt practices, then more by the luck of the draw than any proven ability to lead. Worse is “The Peter Principle” (if you don’t know it, you should look it up) under which great performers are “rewarded” by being taken away from their best venue and “promoted” into leadership positions where they are unproven. What do people without skills do when put under pressure? Some of them learn and rise to the challenges before them. Most don’t, however. Most either turn nasty or are always running to cover their mistakes.

The world has always been an empty stage with a live microphone, waiting for a leader to arise. Today’s Social Media is an empty dais with a live microphone, waiting for you to take command. It may seem a bit passive, just sitting there on the Web waiting for people to come find you, but if you build your blog, they will come. So also in all other media today. By readying yourself to lead, by proving yourself and stepping forward, you become the voice that the waiting audience allows into its mind, heart, and soul. Prepare yourself.

3. Become a Better Person

Sadly, anyone with a loud mouth can lead. The mob adores nothing more than simple stimulus that rouses its worst passions into heated action. If you follow the above demands to grow more powerful and ready yourself to lead, will you be doing a good or a bad thing; a righteous or an evil thing? It all depends on you. To know that your contribution is good, you must be good yourself.

But what does that have to do with recruiting? There is no more powerful platform for either performance or profit, for contribution and impact on the entire field of business opportunity. No profession has so great a reach. No profession bears quite so heavy a burden. Will we rise to the challenge? Not all of us will — that’s certain. We have our share of charlatans, tricksters, cheats, and misfits. We are not always good business citizens, and we do not police ourselves well. I’m not saying we could or should. But let’s be clear—we don’t.

You must not fall into these traps. You must become a better person, now and for as long as you recruit. The longer you’re in, the more powerful you will become. As the spoils of your victories flow, the quality of your character must also grow. As we either grow or die, so also we become better or worse.

The natural resting spot for this mandate is your email marketing. When you step forward, when you reach out and intrude with your written message upon an unsuspecting readership, you must provide them with the means to improve their own performance. But there is much more, and there are many additional layers you can drop down as you tread your writer’s path. First, of course, you must speak to and serve the business life of those to whom you write. But as you do, you must remember that they are people too, NOT just business-people. Your ability to serve them both as business people AND as humans demands that you access the very best part of yourself. Here is where you make your stand as a human, demonstrating and proving yourself through your articulated message. And as you bond with your readers, it will be the better you that succeeds best in this mission.

I hope you have enjoyed The Die-Hard Phone Jockey’s Guide series and that you have learned that while this is a phone business, it is always good to take advantage of technical communications channels to whatever capacity you are able. When used properly, they will help lead to more placements over time.

Before I persuade you that Facebook is the most amazingly powerful medium with which to transform your recruiting practice, let’s review what we’ve worked on so far in this series.

First, we established that improving recruiting performance is our only goal. If social media can help us do that, then we’re interested.

With that in mind, there can be no question; LinkedIn is the leader of the business pack. And, even if a recruiter uses it for nothing else than to collect stunning recommendations from raving fans, we’ve made progress. If you’re only going to invest in one form of social media, LinkedIn is it.

Blogging comes next. If I want to know you, I should be able to fill that need by reading your blog. Even the smallest, most random investment in writing a blog can be an awesome source of progress. And, if you have the dominant blog in your space, you’ll win business that you can’t win in any other way.

Our last lesson was about email marketing and the power this gives you to reach out and win the treasured status of domain expert in your space. Your newsletter will help your prospects come to know you, and this awareness of you will warm up your cold calls. Your newsletters make doing business with you easy, and comfortable.

And that brings us to this week’s medium, Facebook.

First, let me acknowledge the reasons floating around in your head telling you that you shouldn’t be on Facebook, or that it holds no power for your recruiting practice.

• It’s just personal; it’s not for business.
• It was built for college kids.
• Why do you want to hook back up with all the “friends” you left behind and hoped never to see again?
• Your family will get involved, and then how do you separate work from life and keep your family from embarrassing you at work?

In honor of those reasons, I have to say, yes, Facebook is by all means the medium you can most easily reject. And if you do, no problem. You’ll still want to read this lesson though, because one day Facebook will break into your professional life and you want to be prepared! If, however, you can keep your mind open, my hope is actually to persuade you that this is the most powerful of all the media available today — which is why it is the largest and most successful by far!

My own Facebook love story

On that note, let me share a bit more of my own story with you. You may recall that without my son, Nico, I’d never have entered this world of social media. When he finally brought me out of the last century, the two I started out with were our blog and our newsletter. They seemed a bit more like 20th century writing/marketing to me and so that was a bit easier for my 20th Century brain to tolerate. Rapidly though, I knew I had to dig into the “real deal,” and so it was only a few weeks before I dived into LinkedIn and Facebook.

Considering that I promote LinkedIn as the single most important medium for business, it may seem strange to you that when I got started with it, I found that I instinctively disliked both its interface and its look and feel.  For all that, I absolutely saw its power, immediately and gave myself completely over to working on my profile and collecting my testimonials.

But Facebook, well, it’s embarrassing, but I loved it from day one. I found it easy to use. (It’s less easy now, they’re always changing stuff there and that’s a bad thing in my opinion.) There is a story of reunion I could tell, and I do have to warn any non-users, your old fiends (FRIENDS?) will find you, for sure. But, I did have the advantage of approaching Facebook as a business strategy from day one, and that is a point worth emphasizing.

The very first epiphany about Facebook’s impact on my business will likely surprise you. It humanized me. That’s a very big statement.

My work is done over the phone. I meet with my clients for 80 minute sessions, most typically every other week or so. In our work, we go everywhere. There are no “lines” and we work on family and golf and life as much as we work on making placements, hiring and firing and replacing recruiters, etc. So, when I discovered that Facebook humanized me for my clients I was shocked.

Here’s what happened. The very moment my clients could see my face, on Facebook, I instantly felt a shift for the better in our relationships…across the boards. It didn’t matter if it was a new client or an old one. The fact of seeing my face made me more human to them. I protest that it didn’t work the other way around, as I believe my own emotions were absolutely unchanged – but I might surely be wrong about that. Whether I am or not, I can tell you, the change was so significant that I was hooked on Facebook as a tool for my business, instantly, and I would NEVER want to go back to the bad old days when I was dehumanized for lack of technical presence.

Try to picture that with me. I thought of technology as dehumanizing, for my entire life, until Facebook showed me how technology could be a key to becoming more human, not less.

You need a strategy

And that is why I so strongly recommend it for your consideration. Now, you do need a strategy, but it doesn’t have to be complex. Let’s say you simply put up a single picture of yourself at work, and you let your clients know it’s there. Here’s a tactical example of what this can do for you:

When your clients are traveling, this so often brings your hiring process to a screeching halt. But, if your client is in communication with you via Facebook, you can simply let them know you want to see pictures of their trip. Everybody posts pictures of their trips now. This information is rich and ?? helps you, and helps you hugely. More, you really DO want to see pictures of the trip. It is precisely this sort of connection that bonds you into your clients’ world in a way you’ve never been connected – in general – until now.

Simply knowing when they’re leaving, when they will return, and being able to talk about the pictures (or even the fact that they’re behind the curve and didn’t post any) is exactly the kind of real world connection we so rarely enjoy as recruiters. And, do you instantly see how this feeds into your search process and in tying the communication cycle down? It’s awesome!

Building on your basic strategy, you need your professional photo up, and you need to get your clients to become friends with you. The only other thing you require for your basic strategy is a status update plan. Your status, at Facebook, is simply your short answer to this question: “What’s on your mind?”

As you’d expect, I update my status every working day. You, however, don’t need to do so. You can, and it isn’t difficult. But, you don’t have to. Once or twice a week will be plenty often enough. The simplest method is simply to actually answer the question. I also recommend this slight alteration: “What’s on your heart?”

And what topics will you post about? Myself, I’ve learned to incorporate a strong flow of information from my real life, since my clients and friends are actually interested. My first strategy, though, was to build a set of four themes that guide everything I do at Facebook. My themes are:

1. Dream, 2. Daily Line FOR Your Dream, 3. Thrill, 4. Agony

You’d be amazed at how much real content such themes can generate. A set of such themes you might use could be:

1. Team Building, 2. Career Building, 3. Change, 4. Conquest.

That’s just one example. You’ll find that having a set of themes gives you a fresh perspective and empowers great postings on a regular basis.

Here’s another way to build a posting strategy. As a recruiter, what do you think about every day? The first answer is really easy – PLACEMENTS! So, at your Facebook page, talk about that!

• Talk about the placement you just closed, and whoop it up a little.
• Talk about the search you’re working on, and give people an idea of what your work really is.
• Talk about the features of great companies and great management.
• Talk about the features of great performers and the contributions they make.

The one thing you should NEVER do

There is a single law, though, which you must NEVER break. Regular folks, that is, non-professional users, can be negative. You must NEVER be negative. They can whine, get all heated up about the current political situation, scream about their local sports franchises, etc. I’m not saying you can’t talk about politics or religion; you can, but not too much. Me, I almost never do. But, I am saying whatever you post MUST BE POSITIVE. In your communications at Facebook, you must never forget for a moment that you are a professional and as such, people are following what you do. You must seek to inspire and inform, to serve and to help, and most of all to simply be a positive part of their day.

Managing your Facebook time

So then, what about recruiting brass tacks, and how will you justify the time spent at Facebook? Here, it isn’t a law, but it is a rule, you do need to honor prime time. Your calling hours need to be executed on the phone, not spent prowling or updating your Facebook. Ah, but even here, when you do become friends with your clients you will find yourself checking out their Facebook page right while you speak to them. You may be surprised, but I support this 100%. More, I am happy to encourage you to let your client know you’re looking at his or her Facebook as you speak to them, real time.

Other than that, keep Facebook off while you work in prime time. Be it morning or evening – I do mine each morning as part of my professional warm-ups each day – pick a non-prime time moment to check out or update your Facebook, keeping a special eye to those partners of yours who are your friends on Facebook and who are involved in deals in progress. This one task will be so profitable to you that you’ll be addicted like me before you know it — that is, if you get it right. Get it right? Yes, who are the people with whom you’re working? Who are they really? What is their real life? How does the deal you’re working “fit” into the rest of their life and world? When you’re using Facebook for those purposes, you will definitely be getting it right.

The grand purpose of Facebook, for you as a recruiter, is to empower you to humanize your relationships at a deeper level. When you do this, you will stop being “just a recruiter” or worse, “just another recruiter” and become a real person in their real life. It may not be quite as black and white for you as it was for me. But, the general impact will be immediately noticeable, and the longer you work at it and the better you become, the higher your skills rise, the more power and benefit you’ll receive, and the stronger you’ll be in serving on the phone.

Now that we’ve considered our four examples individually, LinkedIn, Blogging, Email Marketing, and Facebook for Die-hard Phone Jockeys, in our next lesson – the last of this series – we’ll pull all four back together again in summation.  But more, we’ll consider what an investment into all four might look like as well as consider the gains and losses of opting against all four, which IS, I propose, still an option, but a decreasingly attractive option as our business continues to move forward.

Stay tuned for the final installment of the Die-hard Phone Jockey series next week…

Most Die-hard Phone Jockeys will deny the following fact, but they’re wrong! If you have mastered the art of voicemail, then you’ve mastered the most important skills necessary to engage the full power of Email Marketing to improve your placements performance. Yes, there is a difference in medium, from spoken to written and in communicating with many as opposed to just one person at a time. But these differences can each be accomplished in small, easy steps, and when you approach it that way, the skills for mighty Email Marketing are truly just an extension of your basic voicemail skills.

In this week’s lesson, we’ll cover voicemail first, to lay our foundation, and then turn to Email Marketing. We’ll address the use of Email Marketing as a part of your sales cycle one-on-one, first. Then we’ll map out the power of Email Marketing to warm up your cold calls and, most important of all, to draw those you’re already serving closer to you. Our only goal is to increase your placements.

Voicemail: The Simple Basics

Preparing a great voicemail requires that you answer two questions:

1. What is your core message?
2. How do you express this message with force and compelling, appealing, attractive, fresh power?

Done right, the real power of voicemail is to build name and service recognition. To accomplish this, you must leave advertisement-grade messages. Be upbeat, be memorable, use modulation, DO NOT BE BORING, and look only to leave a positive and somewhat memorable message. It’s beyond our scope to discuss callbacks. I simply have to share, though, that callbacks are not the objective I recommend for voicemail. I exclusively recommend that voicemail can warm up your prospect and increase your likelihood of call acceptance when you call again.

From Voicemail To Email

The first step is to send an email following each voicemail. This doubling of your message is definitely worth the extra effort. And, you should let people know in your voicemail that an email is coming as well.

The immediate questions that arise are:

1. Unique vs. Boilerplate Construction
2. Time Investment
3. Length of Message

While you really will have to use pre-prepared or Boilerplate forms, any time you need to customize them you can, easily and rapidly. Still, you surely must minimize your time investment and an important part of the answer is to write short emails for the vast majority of your emails.

On the other hand, when a serious communication in writing can move your deal forward, it truly IS worth the time and effort. The deal itself is your guide. If you find yourself writing long, time consuming emails as a part of deals that DO NOT close, then you’re on the wrong track. Done right, which typically means rarely, and always aiming for shorter versus longer, you might be amazed that this can be a great tool in your kit.

One last point: be sure to be logical and clear in your communication, but do NOT leave your message only at the intellectual level. You must speak to and trigger the emotions of your recipient.

Written vs. Spoken

While many recruiters avoid public speaking like the plague, most recruiters know that they’re very good at speaking one-on-one. Scratch a big biller though, and what you find underneath is a public speaker, too. Many of the best recruiters discover that speaking to many people at once is easy and fun, believe it or not! Imagine, if you can take your one-on-one sales skills onto the stage, you may very well make your greatest strategic leap toward becoming a true power broker in your industry. But perhaps we’ve placed the cart in front of horse here; whether you have the courage to speak in public or not, the power of Email Marketing is something you must consider.

What most recruiters don’t realize is that if you can speak, you can write. Actually both forms of communication are simply good, clear thinking expressed one way or another. As a professional salesperson, I promise you have the power of the written word in you, if you simply practice it.

Email Marketing is nothing more than an electronic means of getting your message across to many people, at virtually no dollar cost, all at once. The goal is to begin to build a relationship so that the individual you’re calling already “knows” you. Here, a word about Cold Calling comes into play.

The question is, can there be degrees of “cold” in a cold call? By all means! That’s what your Email Marketing is for. With its power working for you, when you reach out to your market, the person you’re calling will know who you are. No, they won’t know you well, but here we have a classic black and white switch at play. Knowing you at all, or even just having the feeling of knowing you, is the reward that makes Email Marketing so irresistible for a Diehard Phone Jockey.

Composition

The most important part of Email Marketing is of course the writing and composition. Your best messages are constructed around the transformations your prospects must execute. The formula I recommend has these six steps:

1. Find a desired change, in the form of tangible, new outcomes that will compel your prospect.
2. Work through the obstacles preventing those desired outcomes from occurring.
3. Teach how to overcome those obstacles.
4. Work with basics and fundamentals that prospects can remember and use instantly.
5. Help them accomplish this change without you, all on their own.
6. Teach them how to know when they have succeeded, and don’t forget to celebrate!

When composing your message, picture a single friend as your audience. Help him hit his goals and overcome his obstacles and slay his dragons. If you simply step back and look at the people you serve, you will find that you really do have a unique message to give them. And, you’ll find you have the ability to guide them that no other person in your niche can match.

You, Irreplaceable You!

As the expert in your field those who want the best results are absolutely going to want — no, NEED — to work with you. When people first trust you with representing them or their job openings, they unconsciously hope that you’re the BEST IN THE FIELD. This trust is yours to lose, whether you realize it or not. When you create a powerful Email Marketing practice, the outcome is that it draws the people with whom you’re already speaking to you in ways that no other medium can equal. It helps them CONFIRM that you ARE the best in the field!

Let’s picture a couple of examples. You’ve found a fantastic candidate who isn’t sure she’s ready to leave her current position yet. You write a powerful email article about the signs that it’s time to go, and the joys and pleasures of starting out in a new challenge. Honestly, you could write that article as if it were to your one targeted candidate alone. But, in sending it out to your entire email list (Blind-Carbon-Copying it, of course) your candidate will not have the same resistance to your message. In fact, people have the opposite reaction. They love it when they feel as if you are actually writing to them. There’s something magical about it.

Or, you’ve got a hiring manager you like, but he’s not been in good communication with you lately. You write an article about the delicacy of timing in the hiring mission. In it, you emphasize not only timely communications and decisions, but you also walk though the coolness curve that everyone goes through as communication ages into silence. Can you begin to see the tactical and strategic options this method grants you? The power is simply vast.

Getting Started

For you technical types, if you have the chops to do it yourself, let it rip. I have no counsel for you. Or, for those of you with awesome support from your firm, you might be amazed at how excited your support team will be once they realize you’re actually aggressively taking this opportunity on. They will help you and your star power in the office will absolutely rise. Besides, what could be more fun than showing all the naysayers how much money you’re making as a result?

But what if you’re essentially a 20^th Century guy or gal just like me, and have no clue? Two words: HIRE OUT! Here’s why. First of all, you’re going to have to have some sort of website presence where people can sign up for your email newsletter. My own is a great example for you. Go check it out at: www.RecruitingPrinciples.com and of course, sign up to get your free copy of my main article, The Switch, and start receiving my free Recruiting Tactics & Strategy Newsletter!

Shameless advertisement complete, I could NEVER have generated that simple website on my own. If I didn’t have a partner who is fantastically gifted at these things, I’d have had to find a firm to do it for me. And that is ABSOLUTELY what I urge you to do. Finding the talented people out there – and they are there – may be one of the more challenging parts of your mission.

A word about timing is needed. You must commit to your rhythm. Once per month is fine. You might get way with once every six weeks, even. But there really is power in the rhythm. I can assure you that if you follow the methods outlined above, you will NOT wear out your readership. By any timing, though, any newsletter at all is vastly superior to none. So, if you don’t at first have a rhythm, it really is okay. I can tell you from my own experience that the power to close that your newsletter will give you is worth every ounce of energy you must invest.

Some examples of content you could create for your newsletter include (the first two are mentioned above):

1. The signs that it’s time to go, and the joys and pleasures of starting out in a new challenge.
2. The delicacy of timing in the hiring mission.
3. A “man-behind-the-curtain” look at what you actually do as a recruiter to help your prospects understand the value you bring to the table.
4. How candidates can determine how truly valuable they are in their field.
5. “Drugs are bad; so are resumes.” – Why hiring managers shouldn’t rely on resumes and what their actual place is in the hiring process.
6. “Hire well today; sleep great tonight.” – How hiring managers don’t realize their current problems originate in bad staff, and how to fix that situation.
7. “There’s gold in them thar hills.” – Describe how your clients are thriving today as a result of what you’ve done for them.

But, in closing, what if you decide not to invest so heavily, or that you’re just not ready?

Readiness and Commitment

Wait…what about writing quality? What if you’re an ABYSMAL writer? Oh, it is YOU that I hope to persuade the most. The answer to poor writing quality is high thinking quality. Take your time. Never rush. Find a message in which you utterly believe. Work out the logic. Make each step as small as you can. Put the pieces into the easiest, simplest order possible, even if you have to force or even fake the order a little, that’s okay. Simply work on your message until it is as clear and clean and simple and direct as can be. And then, PUT IT OUT THERE!

Yes, there will be naysayers. You have to be ready for them. Here’s the answer that has saved my own writing career. Once I’ve completed a writing project, I know that I may not have expressed my message well. I may have made mistakes. It may be too long, or the style of writing may not sparkle the way I hope. But, I stand behind the message itself. You may not like the way I said it, and you may be right. But, you can only reject the substance of my message at your own loss. That confidence has carried me through all the attack and the opposition, and if you invest into your message, it will be your shield as it has been my own!

So again, you may not be ready, and if not, follow the sequence of the lessons in this Diehard Phone Jockey’s Guide to Social Media series:

1. Surely you must have a LinkedIn profile and you must work on getting the strongest, rave reviews you can.
2. Once you’re happy at LinkedIn, and ready, then build your blog.
3. Once you’re happy there, and wish to embrace the kind of power that Email Marketing gives, it is the third step to take.

And if you’re ready to accept my counsel today, then I can promise you this. Following the methods outlined here, your closing power will rise. My own has, and I see the same thing happening for those I serve. Be confident; you do have a message. You do have a voice to discover, uncover, and share with the world. And, I’m telling you, your market is waiting. It really does want the truth. It wants wisdom. It wants to be guided to a better way. You have that knowledge. I say, go share it.

In the next article of the “Die-hard Phone Jockey” series, we’ll be discussing Facebook. Great recruiting goes beyond just business relationships. Successful recruiters know that great recruiting is all about powerful, personal relationships. Facebook is the number one social medium in the world today because it actually humanizes its users for each other in ways not previously possible at a distance. Your clients and candidates will bond with you at deeper levels than ever before, giving them the opportunity to know you, like you, and trust you like they would if you were a true business partner — not just a vendor.

Stay tuned for the next installment, coming next week…

In our last lesson, we discussed the credibility power that LinkedIn gives you on the phone, especially from your raving fans’ strong recommendations. We can summarize that power by its ability to credibly convey to your prospects exactly what you do and what benefits your clients and candidates receive by working with you. This month, we’re going to consider the second medium that will empower your telephone selling success: blogging.

I’ll introduce blogging to you first, in precisely the same way it was introduced to me. Then, we’ll walk through the steps you must take if you’re going to ensure a powerful return on investment.

Converting Pasquale – Or, the Irresistible Desire to be a DOMAIN EXPERT

If you’ve followed this series, you already know about my son Nico’s role in converting me into the use of social media to empower my own Diehard Phone Jockey practice. There were several others along the way who helped greatly. When it comes to blogging, though, it was my client and friend Pete Rouillard who pushed me over the line. Pete is a seasoned technology executive, and as a recruiter, it is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professionals he places. With his long experience and exhaustive vistas overlooking the technology and media worlds, Pete hit me most strongly with this one concept: Domain Expert.

Old school soul that I am, when I hear new buzz words like that, my first reaction is to close my mind. I’d heard those words for years before Pete explained their power to me, and that’s exactly what I’d done, closed my mind. Pete simply laughed at me, and told me that in everything I do I’m always seeking – whether I like the words or not – the reality of being granted “Domain Expert” status. Pete explained that I didn’t have to like the words, I simply had to face the truth. That’s the kind of argument that always gets my attention.

He forced me to break the two words apart. What is a “Domain?” In old school terms, it’s just a market. And, when you’re on the phone attempting to sell just one person, that one person is your current “Domain.” But, if you follow classical marketing definitions, we all know that even just one person is always tied to others and influenced by their perceptions and by the scuttlebutt about what’s hot and what’s not, etc. So, who does the prospect you’re speaking to listen to? Whom is he or she connected to and influenced by? These people are your domain.

Also, from traditional marketing, we know that we must always build our UVP (Unique Value Proposition). The word “Expert” is just a shorter term for the same thing. What is unique about you that would inform a prospect working with you as opposed to anyone else? What unique value do you bring to play? Or, in today’s world, just what qualifies you as an Expert?

What Pete closed me on was this: a Domain Expert is PRECISELY the person a prospect wants to, no, NEEDS to do business with. I realized that I had to open up my mind.

A Blog is Where You Say What You’ve Got To Say

This is exactly what a blog is all about. Look back at those LinkedIn recommendations. What was their key? They were credible, and written by others who are easily found and connected with for verification. Your credibility is built by what others say about you, more than your claims made in a brief encounter. But, there is absolutely a place for you to win the trust and desire to work with you, by your own words. Think of it this way…

A blog is where you say what you have to say.

What’s your message? What’s your position? Where do you stand? To flesh this out, we need one more new term: Cyberspace.

I know, it’s not the hottest of the techno-buzzwords right now, but it’s so helpful in coming to understand your blog. Cyberspace may be electronic space, online, but it is still SPACE. That is, if I want to know who you are, really, and what your position is, WHERE do I go to find that out? Again, the answer is your blog.

It is a common formula that people do business with those that they:

Know, Like, and Trust.

Your blog is where they’re going to come to know you.

What Will You Write About?

So what will you write about? How often must you do so? How will you find the ultimate message you must convey? Let’s take those questions one at a time.

When considering your content, the very first place to go is victory. Not your own, your clients and candidates. What do they need to know to win? One of the easiest and best ways to access this knowledge within yourself is simply to pay attention to all the defeats your clients and candidates suffer. Be simple. A defeat is anytime anything happens other than what they wanted, or what would have been best for them. As you note these defeats, you’ll rapidly realize you have very significant knowledge about how to overcome them.

Think of all the times you’ve said to yourself, “If they’d only do what I told them…” At your blog, you can now take advantage of every such thought you’ve ever had, and I promise, people will now begin to listen as they never have before. Why is that? One of the greatest and most powerful reasons is this: when you encounter people, you do so in real time. Live interaction has its own rhythm and pace, and there’s really no changing that. But, that pace is vastly FASTER than most people can absorb or retain. They hear you, and some of what you say sticks. But, anything that they’d actually have to think about – that is, anything that is truly serious – has a vanishingly small chance of being processed in the time available.

This time parameter is one of the main reasons why we complain about meetings and meetings and meetings, but no action. We’re there in the meeting, but we don’t really have the mental chops to absorb all we require, real time, and must invest time afterwards in real processing if anything is going to change in our real comprehension.

Your blog corrects for every one of these challenges. It gives people not only all the time in the world to study what you have to say, it also lets them go over the material again and again if they’re truly serious about learning what you have to teach.

The easy thing, as we’ve considered, is finding simple defeats and educating others as to how to overcome them. A positive message about how to win is a bit more challenging. But, you can find it if you just look. Consider all the people you’ve served who have won, who have made significant change for the better with your help. How did you help them? What did they do for themselves? Search out and find the core principles driving that success and you’ll have a mighty message indeed.

We need to take that point one step further. What is your dream? I know most people kind of seize up when I ask them that. You may, like so many others, just kind of go blank never having really attempted to tie it down or express it. The truth is you do have a dream, but, exactly as your dreams at night evaporate in the morning, it is often very difficult to access your dream. A simple step you can take is just this. Just ask once, twice, three times: how SHOULD things really be? Only think of the smallest, easiest things. Look for the very simplest points of progress you can. If you find three of these, you’ve already got the basis of a dream. You’ll see, they build on each other and if all three of these simple things came true, the world you live and work in would be quite different.

Let’s assume that you have found a dream. At your blog, you absolutely MUST share your dream! No, you don’t have to call it that. You can use any terms that your audience will relate to. But, as people come to your blog and come to know who you are, they’re going to want to learn what your vision is. They’re going to want to know where you are leading them. Your dream is a kind of contribution that you can be sure they won’t find anywhere else. Your vision for the future is one of the greatest gifts of truth you can give your audience.

How Often Will You Blog?

There is a hard school of blogging that basically demands you post something every day. In my own blog, I do something like that. I post a 700-word essay every morning, four days per week, 39 weeks per year, for a minimum of 156 postings per year. The thing is, I can tell you, that is a huge amount of work. I have my reasons. But, I’m NOT going to recommend that pace for you. If you have the motivation, you’ll find it a life changing practice. So, I’m happy to encourage you to consider such a pace. That said, you absolutely do NOT need to post that much.

When you’re getting started, once per month, or perhaps at most, once per week is absolutely sufficient. If you shoot for the more frequent posting per week, you don’t have to actually do so every single week. But, if you opt for a once per month strategy, then by all means, make your posting EVERY month. That leads us to the real answer. Blogging is not so much about how often, as it is about the consistency of your rhythm.

And that brings us back to your phone work! If you did make the commitment to posting once per week, does your telephone mind instantly see what that gives you for your conversations? It isn’t just an icebreaker either. It is a substantive topic of conversation. And, you’re never dependent upon your prospects having been to your blog before, either. You can always send them an e-mail link and have them simply click on the link right while they’re on the phone with you. In fact, this is a powerful thing to do relative to those people you don’t reach on the phone, directly.

My own practice is that I almost never leave a voice mail message, anymore, without also shooting off an e-mail as well. And, in my e-mails, I of course invite them to check me out at LinkedIn, consider joining my LinkedIn Discussion group, the Recruiting Tactics and Strategy Group, and absolutely to check out my blog, The Recruiting Manifesto.

These multiple avenues of contact leverage every step of your marketing and connection process.

What Is Your Ultimate Message?

We discussed the steps of noting your clients’ and candidates’ defeats, the steps you recommend for their victory, positively, and your dream. Still, the question of your ultimate message requires just one more element for our consideration. That is, your themes. You can think of these as topics, or as positions, even models if you will. Here’s an example of the theme that drives all of my work at my blog:

1. Bold Vision
2. Relentless Execution
3. Penetrating Analysis
4. Reinvention, and Repeat

I call that theme “The Cornerstones of Business Excellence.” If you head over to my blog, www.TheRecruitingManifesto.com, you’ll find I’ve written up a series of posts there exploring this theme from just about every angle. But, at a deeper level, if you explore my blog you’ll find that this theme actually informs every single thing I write about. I didn’t find that theme instantly, as soon as I started blogging. But, I rapidly found that I needed a way to think of my work there. And, as soon as I did find this theme, my blogging experience came into clear focus and simply became ever so much easier to do. Without it, I would not be able to keep up my grueling pace.

I repeat, there’s no need for you, as a Diehard Phone Jockey, to set the kind of writing pace I live by. But, at any pace, finding your own theme, where you truly stand, will be a great line in your process. Once you find it, you’ll be hooked!

Where do you get your ROI on the phone from all this work? Pete Rouillard gives us the answer. As you build your blog’s recognition and the strength of your message, people will begin to speak about the things you have to say. In a word, this is called winning. Your blog has a very clear victory or defeat line. You do want people to come, to read and most of all, to speak!

Are you familiar with the old industry term “Power Broker?” I will always associate that term with Bob Marshall and his two great training sessions, Your Desk as a Manufacturing Plant and most especially, The Concept of the Inverted Cones. Those two videos, first recorded back in the late ’80s, were two of the most impactful sources of learning I’ve ever enjoyed. In them, the goal of becoming a Power Broker is mapped out to perfection. Bob teaches us that a Power Broker is the “Go To” guy or gal in an industry. If you want the best talent, you simply have to call this person. Pete Rouillard is not quite as old school as me, and I’m not sure that the term resonates for him the way it does for me. Expert status, or as Pete says, winning the battle to be THE Domain Expert – this is what we have always been searching for.

Winning Power Broker Status

In closing, let me tempt you in this way. Most of today’s Power Brokers did not come up in the New School of highly leveraged, empowering Social Media. To me, that means they’re vulnerable. How so? Whoever wins the war for the most powerful, most beneficial, best blog in any space is the person who has the greatest leg up on winning Domain Expert status in that space. If you’re not a Power Broker yet, and if you look around, find those who are in your space, and discover either that they don’t have a blog, yet, or if they do, if it’s a blog that doesn’t impress you…then you have a shot to step up to the front of the class.

If you do, the rewards, and the return on investment will surely be fantastic. But, do be clear, you don’t have to be shooting for the most powerful spot in your entire industry. You simply have to desire to give your clients and candidates the benefit of your wisdom, your tactical and pragmatic learning, and your best thinking. If you give them that, then your blog will empower your telephone success.

Stay tuned next week for more from the Die-Hard Phone Jockey series…

If there was a LinkedIn war for dominance who would win? I believe that the greatest of the “Cold Call Sellers,” the most “Old School” and yes the die-hard Phone Jockeys are the ones with the greatest edge. We are the ones who have the most to gain from staking a claim in the rich land that LinkedIn has created in cyberspace.

I propose that LinkedIn is actually the current ultimate source of unstoppable leverage for cold call selling. This leverage comes from LinkedIn’s unique, revolutionary method of organizing and presenting your most rabidly raving fans’ boldest recommendations. We will also discuss the power of the small, free step of connection when building relationship to your prospects, and also the power of your LinkedIn profile as your most important marketing document (and most definitely NOT merely an online resume!). But our main focus will be unleashing LinkedIn’s power to build instant, overwhelming credibility to enhance our cold call selling success.

LinkedIn Recommendations as an Irresistible Sales Asset

How do LinkedIn recommendations improve telephone selling? Once we’ve broken through the resistance we always meet, connected with our prospect, and succeeded at opening up a new conversation, we must immediately face and overcome the great challenge of building trust and credibility. In overcoming this hurdle, LinkedIn changes the game like no other instrument a cold call seller has ever had at his or her disposal. We’ve always attempted to marshal the power of testimonials and recommendations in order to help us overcome this barrier. But any other form of recommendation cannot hold the same power for credibility that LinkedIn recommendations enjoy.

At LinkedIn you can follow the trail of connection instantly. When anyone posts a recommendation there, they know that they can be contacted for verification. The ease of this means of checking naturally results in the fact that most people never check. Thus, the reader experiences a type of immediate credibility that is truly new in the world of normal, everyday business.

The exact same testimonial published at your company website holds NO such ease of verification. Until now, no written testimonial held the instant emotional force of complete, easy verifiability. In some ways, LinkedIn’s power of recommendation is exactly what Ronald Reagan used to push for as he and Mikhail Gorbachev negotiated over nuclear arms issues. Reagan used to hammer away, “Trust, but verify,” in every meeting. This exact capacity – trust with verification – is precisely what your prospects enjoy when learning about you at LinkedIn.

So what must you do in order to tap into this incredible source of leverage? And, how does this flow back into your tactical telephone work?

Recommendations for Beginning Recruiters

Let’s take the hardest case of all: you’re just getting started as a recruiter and have no clients or candidates who even know you, let alone can rave about you. LinkedIn gives you incredible power to get started even here. First, think back over the things you’ve done in your life that would count as successes by any definition you care to employ. I’m not kidding. Old blue ribbons from art class in elementary school may be too much of a stretch, but your high school debate club instructor is as appropriate to validate your business abilities as you need to come. And hey, one of the most credible sources of reference in the business world is any athletic endeavor in which you excelled. If you were on a varsity team, and if your coach is on LinkedIn – or willing to join on your behalf – then you have a fantastic recommendation waiting for nothing more than your well-executed request.

One of the great powers of all social media is that it gives you a basis to reconnect. If you look at my profile, you’ll find a perfect example. One of the recommendations I enjoy and am most proud of is from my first boss in life, a fellow named Norman Hallett. Previous to my time as a commodity broker, I’d been self-employed. I have been self-employed ever since. So, Norman is actually the only “real” boss I’ve ever had — and he taught me so much! But when I joined LinkedIn, he and I had not spoken in 22 years.

You can imagine that finding him after all these years and winning a glowing recommendation from him was a profoundly emotional moment for me as a new LinkedIn user. Customers top the list of desired recommenders, but the very next group is your former bosses. Actually, they may be the favored group of “customers” considering the fact that your bosses likely paid you more money for your work than any other group of people. The key is the conversion of paid-for effort into profitable, dramatic return-on-investment and pleasurable benefits that are fun to recall and a delight to share with others. Every value you’ve ever created is the basis of a potentially powerful recommendation.

I hope I’ve persuaded you that even the newest player to the field can get started. But if you’ve been a successful recruiter for any period of time at all, then investment into your profile and most importantly your raving, worshipful fan testimonials is the most powerful marketing step you can make here in 2011.

Discovering Your Own Greatest Values

How well do you think you can define and communicate what you actually do, and why someone would be a fool to NOT use your services? I hope you’re not still using those ancient, boring, “Our 57-step search process is the most thorough…blah, blah, blah” statements of value! If you’re like me, identifying my greatest values and most compelling sales arguments is one of the most difficult parts of your selling practice. Funny thing is, guess who often has no difficulty identifying your most powerful benefits? Your delighted and satisfied customers are able to identify these values and are often thrilled to do so.

The difficulty is one of perspective. When thinking about your work, your mind can’t escape going through the comprehensive list of all the steps and actions you take. Often it’s the tasks you hate that you think about the most. But, those who benefit from your work have a totally different point of view. They just see and feel the magic. It is virtually impossible for you to step into their shoes and fully feel the power of what you do for them. The only way to even discover this is to ask. But if you’re just in a conversation and ask, they may stutter and stumble. It takes time and effort to express it. Even to think about it takes time; not much, but some.

LinkedIn provides the needed context like no other medium. Simply connect with your customer and then shoot them a recommendation request. Go to their profile you’ll see the link offering this action. LinkedIn fills in a simple, basic message for you. Typically, I recommend against using the default message. The smallest effort in personalizing your message makes such a tremendous difference. Better yet, you really should SPEAK ON THE PHONE.

What is needed is a warm, personal connection. You are asking for a favor. Do not be boring. Do not be assumptive. If you are, your recommendations will have no spark or fire to them. No, what you want is to have a conversation in which you ask for your customer’s help, and then, only if they are true “raving fans”. Remember, this is no small tactical maneuver, quickly done and then over. This is a strategic investment of the highest order.

You are requesting the thought and effort to express your greatest values boldly, in public, and as a permanent record. Imagine how much this really means. I propose that no other effort offers the same return. Approach this with respect and, yes, love, even if you don’t call it that. Ask kindly without expectation, only desire. Always be ready to let someone say no, too. You only want recommendations from those who will feel happy to have written them, and even happier to be called upon to stand as a witness to your glories and amazing powers.

Telephone Power

How does this translate back to the telephone work you do all day every day?

You will surely want and need to connect with your prospects at LinkedIn. This brings an additional and positive dynamic to your call. Understand that the more ways by which you connect with your prospects, the better. This must be emphasized. One of the great principles of cold call selling is the dynamic of permission-based interaction. At first, you’re interrupting and have no permission to do so. The sooner you get permission the better. And, the simpler, smaller, and less costly any choice to be connected is, the better.

When you speak to a new prospect, and then that person decides to connect to you on LinkedIn, this is a virtually pain free and absolutely cost free step. This new element to your cold call is so perfectly constructed we should have figured out some such equivalent decades prior to the Internet. Actually, if you’re old school enough, you might remember lead cards we published in magazines. When someone filled out a lead card, they were giving us permission to contact them. It isn’t the same, but it holds some of the same force.

A LinkedIn connection, though, is the perfect form of permission to win, even in a very first cold call contact. This is worth much meditation on your part as you envision your evolving practice.

Your Profile as Your Mightiest Marketing Tool

Once connected — or even if you’re not connected — you will surely want to recommend that everyone you speak to go read about your magical powers and amazing prowess at making money and building success for your customers.

Which brings us to our last point. For all the power of your recommendations (and nothing else matters so much) you do still have to think carefully about your profile itself. Let me tell you what it is NOT:

Your LinkedIn profile is NOT merely a boring online resume.

Now let me tell you what it is, or actually what you must make it to be:

THE MOST POWERFUL MARKETING DOCUMENT YOU’RE ABLE TO CREATE.

Here, you really can think about it exactly as if it were going to be a simple, old-fashioned, typewritten document. LinkedIn is becoming more visual, bit by bit. Soon, we will surely hire graphic designers and artists and people with visual design backgrounds to help us improve our profiles, and wisely so. But, the technology base is not quite there yet. So for now, you really can think of your profile mostly in terms of the written word.

By the way, you don’t have to become a great writer. You do, however, need to build your business sense. What is it that impresses prospects? What values will drive their decision to work with you? Solid business claims of verifiable value; these are the hallmark of your profile. It is an advertisement. This means that you must never forget your target market and their values for a moment. Here, the more you invest in to your recommendations, the more they will help you and guide you toward crafting the mightiest, most powerful message you can with the rest of the profile itself.

One small design element I’m happy to clue you in on is this. The sections of your profile can easily be moved. Most users don’t realize this yet. As you might imagine, I strongly recommend moving your recommendations as high up and close to the top of your profile as you can. Your recommendations are far more important than your own statements of your background or job history, etc. You really do want them front and center, and LinkedIn makes that very easy to do…but not obviously so.

LinkedIn Black Belts

Before we conclude our LinkedIn exploration, let me say a word about all the many powers and directions that LinkedIn mastery will take you. There are scores of powers to be won. The best way to think about this is as if you were going to learn a martial art — or any art form, for that matter. If you decide to take up oil painting, you won’t likely be competing with Rubens or Da Vinci in a matter of days or weeks. In Taekwondo you will not master a perfect roundhouse kick overnight. So also with LinkedIn and all social media investments. You want to find the smallest steps you can, and work to master those as well as you can, and then move forward gently.

And on that note, I must say a word about all the powers of LinkedIn that we’re NOT discussing in this article. If you search for it, you’ll find a seemingly infinite set of guides out there all offering to teach you how to extract maximum value from this amazing technology. My focus, as you’ve noticed is a bit different. I want to help you capitalize on LinkedIn’s powers while you improve your telephone performance and enhance your ability to hit your objective goals. The most important value to go get, right now, is the power of credibility that will immediately transform your cold call selling success.

Conclusion

If you’ll execute the steps we’ve discussed, you’ll rapidly discover your own new strength in each and every call you make. I can honestly testify that for me, the ability to confidently direct prospects’ attention to my profile was nothing short of a stunning new ability. The truth is that my clients and I have fought dragons together, and we’ve lived to tell the story. Now, LinkedIn empowers us to share in the telling like never before. My prospects don’t have to connect with me in order to see these testimonials, but closing on that connection is a wonderful, easy, resistance-free action they can take. That too makes me bolder, on the one hand, but more comfortable in my selling steps on the other. I don’t know that my profile is the best marketing document I’ve ever created for my practice, but I can easily attest that it is, by far, the most successful such marketing instrument I’ve ever invested into.

My strongest counsel to you is simply this: put the power of your most raving fans’ witness to work for you at LinkedIn as soon as you can. If you have a few recommendations already, go get a few more. If you have none, get some right now. You will immediately empower your telephone work more in this way than by any other single step you’ll take.

Next week we’ll bring you another installment of the Die-Hard Phone Jockey’s Guide series. Stay tuned!