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.