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.

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!

I’m not just a Phone Jockey; I am the proudest and most happily defiant of us. You may find this hard to believe, but I typically knock out five to six hours of actual connect time every day. Intense phone days for me head past seven hours, and an 8- or 8+ hour day is not unusual for me. Don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean total time working; I mean the time I’m actually connected on the phone. I really am a die-hard ‘Phone Jockey,’ and I always have been – dating back to the mid ‘80’s as a commodity broker, and then in years of contracting and telemarketing, and ultimately in my job of the past 24 years, as a consultant.

As a consultant, though, it took me almost ten years to arrive at my conclusions about phone time for recruiters. My first reaction to recruiters’ numbers identified no positive correlation between phone time and performance. In fact, I actually saw a negative correlation. Back in the 90’s, the best performing recruiters knocked out more placements at higher fees with less phone time than the less successful ones. So, when I heard the famous four-hour rule and then, upon asking for the data, no one had it, I became a true skeptic.

But, those were in the halcyon days of the great Bull Market, and I couldn’t realize back then that I what I was observing was absolutely a Bull Market phenomenon. I had to see the economy shift, and it took me until 2002 to be able to find my first data demonstrating that the recruiters who thrived in challenging conditions had dramatically higher phone time than those who washed out or simply struggled their way through. Thus, it wasn’t until I could sum up my new data in 2003 that I found my initial Bear Market faith in blunt, straight up, raw phone time as, for me, the ultimate measure of a recruiter’s real efforts. Since, I’ve come to believe that no other measure correlates more directly to the creation and sustainability of recruiting success. There are pros and cons to the measure, and I understand that. My position, however, is that when we understand it properly, no other measure is quite as powerful.

I guess that makes me a Phone Jockey twice. Once as a practitioner and then as a teacher and champion of the Old School rule of four hours per day. I prefer to think of it, though, as twenty hours per working week. More minutely, I urge that you master the art of being connected for all of 1,200 minutes per week. Then, returning to hours, I ultimately champion the 260-hour, 13-week quarter. While I’ve heard about the 4-hour rule since I first started serving recruiters, I’m unaware of any who monitor the 20-hour week or the 260-quarter with the same fierce faith and passion.

There’s one other Old School qualifier I must brag about. Up until 2009, I opposed and happily refused to engage in any form of social media. I viewed myself as the last 20^th century man standing, and simply loved being the ultimate holdout against modern technology. I used e-mail extensively, but not without some very real resentment. I do recall back in the ‘90’s before I started using e-mail being on the phone with an industry leader in technology who wrote me off since I had the temerity to ask him how I’d get paid for the time I spent writing to people.

I must share a little bit with you about how I was converted. Not away from being a die-hard Phone Jockey, but rather into the addition of social media to my tool set – really, to my business arsenal of weapons.

My conversion

The context is this: up until the end of 2008, all previous economic downturns had been simply wonderful for my consulting practice. In tough times, people are simply far more ready to hear and pay for the tough pill of real change. It’s easier for people to justify working with me when times are hard, and so my business always thrived in the downturns, until the recent one. Fool that I was, when I saw the turnaround coming, just like everyone else. I was actually happy, thinking this one would be like all the previous Bear Markets, I so enjoyed. Talk about a gut punch! The effects started striking in January of 2009, and it didn’t take me long to discover how wrong I was.

During 2009, I engaged in the longest, strongest series of failure analyses of my career. I essentially rewrote the book of my business methods from the ground up, actually reinventing what I do. Most of this was truly practice-oriented, but I grew ever more aware of my marketing weakness. I’ve lived by the salesman’s arts, and until 2009, I never believed I needed to engage in any marketing outside of my cold call selling strengths. As I rewrote my business, though, my son was gently, yet powerfully, leading me into this new world.

What he finally was able to persuade me to do was this: up until the leveraging power of the Internet made it possible, marketing was always massively expensive and truly only available to great institutions and corporations who could afford it. But the advent of the Internet itself, especially social media, reduced the cost of marketing down to nothing other than sheer time and effort. Where in the past, the dollar cost of marketing was prohibitive, Nicholas challenged me that to choose to reject marketing today was simply a form of denial and laziness. Any person – even just a single individual – could now create their own personal marketing endeavor at no cost other than effort and learning.

Anther part of my son’s genius was this: he knew that with my Old School mindset, I did not believe in complex business plans which, in my judgment, tended to not be worth the paper they were printed on. But, he also knew that in my soul, I’m the truest believer in what I call “real planning” that you’ll ever find. I’m less about formal structure and far, far more about internal dedication and commitment. I bring a martial arts mindset and the infinite journey toward mastery to everything I do.

The ‘New School Masteries’

So, Nicholas created and presented our business plan in that manner. It was actually an interlocked set of four separate New School Masteries he presented to me as challenges.

Not only that, he assured me that each Mastery was sufficiently advanced as a technology and that all I would need to do would be to learn the skills of a user. I would NOT have to become proficient in computers themselves, any more so than I was as a user of word-processing or e-mail. It was just a new set of skills, not a transformation of my relationship to computers or technology itself.

Lastly, he of course was there to coach me at every turn. With every mind-breaking frustration, seemingly illogical action or incomprehensible error message (or just personal blindness and impatience to simply read what was on the screen), Nico held my hand and slowly, carefully, and gently explained the same thing as many times as I needed until the stroke of comprehension finally struck.

What were these four masteries?

1. LinkedIn
2. Blogging
3. Email Newsletter Marketing
4. Facebook

…You may be wondering, “Why NOT such social powerhouses as Twitter or YouTube, etc.?”

Of course, you cannot pursue every new technology, nor would I or anyone else expect you to. Please refer to the P.O.S.T. Planning article by Amybeth Hale from earlier this summer for further explanation. Only do what you understand, and only invest into what makes most sense to you. For me, Twitter’s time frames just don’t work yet. I may well cross that line, even here in 2011. But, I haven’t made that decision yet and I’m very happy to NOT be doing it at this point. On the other hand, I really do wish I were farther along in using You Tube. Its power is gigantic. But again, the demands of mastering recording video and the time investment required even just to spend time watching videos does NOT yet fit into my work schedule. So, in spite of being quite attracted to video power, I haven’t crossed that line yet, either.

The same freedom is absolutely yours. Don’t invest into anything that doesn’t compel your investment with clear rewards that are richer than the price of playing. The four media we’ll be discussing in the coming months are those that fit the criteria for me. In each case I hope to offer you the right way to think about the medium as a means of empowering greater performance on the phone. I’m happy for you to say, “Not yet,” of course. But if you’re intrigued by the possibilities, I intend to help you approach their usage in a way that fits into your Old School, die-hard Phone Jockey mindset.

In the coming parts of this series, in exactly the same way Nico taught them to me, I will introduce you to each one individually. That’s worth emphasizing.

One thing at a time

There is a great ongoing convergence driving all social media, today, as well as all our technology-driven personal marketing tools. But, if you let them all merge together in your mind the whole will be too overwhelming for an Old School soul to handle. You really do have to take them one at a time and dedicate yourself to them in a serial manner. At least if you’re like me you do. Then, the convergence can mature on its own as you get there. First, pick just one and make the plunge. Then, if you’re ready, you add a second. Do NOT try to go too fast, you will regret it.

Our purpose in this series will not be to get you all the way to the point of convergence. Rather, I hope to help you use an Old School mindset to understand the power of just the four New School instruments I’ve personally tackled as I’ve made the plunge myself. After this, we will bring everything back together, giving you a Recruiting Phone Jockey’s map to the four that I personally employ, and hopefully empowering you to move forward…gently.

Enhance your telephone activities

As you contemplate these new tools for your recruiting practice, do keep this in mind: when a tool is working, it truly will empower your telephone conversations. In fact, allow me one specific example to make the point.:

For all the previous years of my career, I truly did have to fight for credibility with each and every prospect. That fight was both tremendously time-consuming and highly challenging. From the moment I started collecting testimonials in the form of recommendations for my LinkedIn profile, that battle changed instantly. I found that what I attempted to say on my own behalf simply did not carry one tenth the amount of credibility that reading what my clients said held. I’d collected testimonials before, but they’d never been organized, easy to access, and easy to check out on your own the way my LinkedIn profile made possible.

A key point has to be emphasized here. LinkedIn creates its own credibility, or perhaps I should call it a credibility premium. When your LinkedIn profile is invested into by those you serve, others who use LinkedIn are more powerfully affected by this than by the exact same testimonials in another format, such as your own website or more traditional marketing materials. That premium is something you simply MUST put to work for yourself, which is why I urge LinkedIn for every recruiter, even if you’re not going to engage in any other social media.

As we’ll tie down in our next article, the testimonial portion of your LinkedIn profile is the single most positively leveraged New School investment you’ll ever make.

I can assure you, the moment my faith in what my son was selling to me began to explode west the exact moment I noticed that I did not have to fight so hard for credibility on the phone. My Linked profile page was absolutely and undeniably the thing that made all that difference. That’s how I got hooked.

LinkedIn is the most powerful, but it’s just one example. Each of our four media demonstrates its own unique power and benefits for recruiters. In the coming articles to be shared over the next several weeks, after I introduce each medium and its tactical use, I will tie the benefit of getting it right straight back to your work, as I know you are the same kind of die-hard Phone Jockeys that I am.

Over on SourceCon.com, I’ve written a little dissertation on my journey through the nooks and crannies of Google+. I’m not going to bore all of you with a recount of what I found and my personal opinions on Google’s latest foray into the social networking world — I know none of you have time to read it.

What I do want to do, however, is show you a very easy way to search for prospects on Google+. My hope is that by the end of this article, even the most skeptical recruiter will see the value in using this new resource to unearth potential placements.

I recently asked the following question of two of my Google+ Circles (Sourcing and Recruiting):

What, if anything, are you doing with Google+ from a recruiting standpoint?

Some of the recruiter responses I’ve received have been:

Just building my network for the time when it becomes useful.

I’ve added previous candidate contacts from my past recruitment gigs who are on Google plus.

Started searches of profiles of people I typically source for and started added them in appropriate circles. No direct recruiting yet.

Just posted to Twitter how there has certainly been a lot of “joining” on G+, but not a lot of activity…thus far…

Naturally, the sourcers are poking at it with a stick to see what more can be done through back-door searches. But in order for Google+ to really impress me — and I suspect you as well — there had to be much more.

A Cool Way to Find Candidates Using Google+

In poking around Google+’s own ‘Find People’ search, I discovered something cool. I didn’t realize just how cool it was though until I looked deep into it. Check this out:

• If you run an easy search from ‘Find People’ — “product manager” — you will be kicked out to a regular Google search, but you’ll only be returned profile results. I opened up Advanced Options to see how this was being done, and I didn’t see anything added to my terms. Then, I decided to check out the URL of the search results to see if there was a clue: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22product+manager%22&hl=en&tbs=prfl:e&authuser=0&tok=MYjJXYXyGb2EVkv2zaw-CQ
• Notice the bolded portion of the URL — &tbs=prfl:e — If you pull this out of the search and then run it again, what you get is a regular old search for a “product manager.” See the search results here.
• That tells us that &tbs=prfl:e is the magic key for profile search within Google+. I wanted to see if it would work outside of the Google+ ‘Find People’ search, so I tested it out with a few additional searches. I plugged the following search phrases into a regular Google search — first without the key, and then attaching it to the end of the search results URL:

“.NET Developer”

Just in case you don’t work in a tech field, here is a search for “financial analyst”

And just for good measure, how about a search for “bartender Valdosta” (that’s Valdosta, GA, population approx. 54,000) — just for the ‘wow’ factor

So the simple steps for doing this are the following:

• Open up a web browser and go to www.google.com.
• Do a search for anything you want. You don’t have to know any Boolean; just type in the words you’re looking for.
• Once you reach the search results page, copy the following profile key — &tbs=prfl:e — and add it to the end of the URL (NOT the search box where you typed in your keywords).
• Watch Google+ profile populate your screen!

For those who may be asking, “Why not just use ‘Find People’ — it works the same,” the beauty of this key is that you don’t have to have a Google+ account — or a Google or Gmail account for that matter — in order to use it and find these profiles. You can just tack it on to the end of any Google search result URL to find people. And according to this article by Ilia Draznin you can set up a Profiles search using this key directly from your FireFox awesome bar. I think that’s why I find it so interesting.

Granted — this magic key only works with Google so it’s not a universal search tool like the site: searches Glen Cathey shared, but these search results kind of blew me away.

Hope you find this helpful. Happy Hunting!

The book Groundswell by Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li was written in 2008 for the purpose of unpacking business relevance and use of social media in modern times. There is a concept outlined in the book that is designed to assist in developing a marketing plan for businesses. This concept, called the P.O.S.T. method, can be translated quite easily into a business goal development and planning tool for you.

P.O.S.T. was designed for traditional and digital marketers to help them create a roadmap for relevant communication with their target audience using social media tools. While the original intent of this marketing planning tool may not sound like something that would be relevant to you, it can really help you, as an external recruiting professional, put some thought into your personal business plan and your company’s business, marketing, and outreach goals. This is especially helpful for those of you who are either brand new to recruiting or who are transitioning into a new industry.

The P.O.S.T. method consists of four progressive steps that can be formed into questions to ask yourself as you move forward:

1. People. Who is your target audience? What group(s) of people are you trying to reach? If you do not know whom you are trying to communicate with, then nothing else really matters. In your business planning, this might mean evaluating your industry – will you continue to work within your niche, or will you explore other industries?
2. Objectives. These are your goals. Why are you trying to reach your target audience? Why do you want to bill that specific dollar amount? Do you have specific things in mind when thinking about the objectives you are looking to achieve? Being specific in this part of P.O.S.T. is important, because it will help you define the components of the next step, which is…
3. Strategy. These are the steps you will take to reach your objectives, which will put you in touch with your target audience. These too need to be specific progressive items that will help lead to the achievement of your goals, which will ultimately get you connected with your audience. Simply putting “Create an e-newsletter for clients” won’t do. At what frequency? How many articles will be included? What topics will be covered? How many contacts will receive it? Think about specific points that are quantifiable – this will help keep you on track to achieve your goals.
4. Technology (or Tools). What resources will you need to use or invest in to work your strategy in order to achieve your objectives? Often, this is the first stop for people when planning – but it should be the last! Think of it this way – no matter how much you try, you cannot open a can of tuna with a spoon. Even if that spoon is your favorite utensil in the kitchen, it is an inefficient way to open a can. You instead need a can opener. Tools – including computers, telephones, paper directories, online resources, etc. – should be the last component in your P.O.S.T.  planning because by their very definition, they are devices used to assist in carrying out a specific function. In this case, your strategies.

What I’ve found works best for me is to take a plain piece of paper, divide it into four squares, and label clock-wise, starting from the top left, with the letters P, O, S, and T. In each box, I add details outlining the plan for the corresponding letter. This will eventually provide me with a quick reference visual aid to keep my plan at the forefront of my thoughts as I move through my daily routine. And as a list-maker, it gives me the opportunity to cross things off of my P.O.S.T. plan as I achieve them!

By following these simple steps, you should be well on your way to developing a working plan for effectively tackling your recruiting activities and keeping you focused each day.

Good Luck!

Just before lunchtime in New York City, LinkedIn announced it is offering employers a button to include on all their job postings enabling candidates to use their LinkedIn profiles to apply for the position.

This “Apply With LinkedIn” feature wraps up the candidate profile in a tidy package that feeds directly into any one of the several tracking systems it has or will partner with. No ATS? No problem. LinkedIn will email the profile to you.

This portable feature can be used on any job, anywhere, on any site, including any job board.

Five ATS providers — Peoplefluent, Jobvite, SmartRecruiters, Bullhorn, and Jobscience — turned on the automatic feature this morning. Taleo, Lumesse, and Kenexa will have it enabled in a matter of months.

However, as LinkedIn’s VP of product management, Adam Nash, explained, the company designed the “apply” feature to be used by small, as well as large employers. It’s “really trivial” for a hiring manager at even the smallest of firms to add the button to a job posting, and specify how and where the resume is to be received.

Even candidates with resumes already on file with a job board may find the LinkedIn apply feature of more use, since it allows them to update their LinkedIn profile before submitting it, and also tells them who in their network works or knows someone at the company.

Those who click the link without having a profile — a not-too-common occurrence given the 100 million members LinkedIn has — will be given an opportunity to join.

Candidates can always opt to use some other source for their resume submission, Nash said. “This won’t be the only option there,” he said. If, though, recruiters begin to use the “apply” button in numbers, job seekers will find it easier to keep one profile updated, than the 12.6 LinkedIn says the average seeker has.

“Users,” he added, “will vote with their clicks.”

Its one major drawback is that it doesn’t yet work with smartphones. It will with some portable devices such as an iPad. Full mobile compatibility is coming, Nash promised.

“Apply With LinkedIn” has very definite consequences for job boards, which derive a third or more of their revenue from resume searching. Almost two months ago Dan Schawbel wrote about the feature, still then under wraps. Touting the advantages of the plug-in, he said, “Job boards and traditional resumes are going to fade faster than I even predicted!”

This morning, I emailed three of the largest job boards for their reaction. I haven’t yet heard from any of them, but I can’t imagine this is a development they’re welcoming. Corporate career sites, search engines, and social media all have impacted the pay-to-post business of job boards. Now LinkedIn is making a frontal assault on resume search.

Earlier this month, it shut down access to its network for sites like Monster’s BeKnown and BranchOut. Those services leveraged information on social networks, including LinkedIn’s, to build profiles for their members. Now, in a bit of a turnabout, LinkedIn hopes to leverage job postings to increase its own recruitment value. Whether it succeeds will depend on convincing recruiters and employers to adopt the plug-in and use it on every job posting. Netflix, LivingSocial, and Photobucket are among the initial users.

“Like everything transformative, you can argue both sides of the equation,” Nash said, when I asked him what reception LinkedIn expected from the job boards.

In the last three years especially, LinkedIn has been encroaching ever more aggressively into job board territory, offering premium search tools for recruiters, job postings, experimenting with career tools, adding a resume-maker for candidates, and now the apply button.

There’s no mystery why LinkedIn is transforming its business network into what Gerry Crispin called a “job board for the 21st century.” In 2010, recruitment products accounted for 42 percent of LinkedIn’s total revenue. In 2008, it was 22 percent, third behind marketing solutions and premium subscriptions.