Jordan Greenberg’s average fee collected in 2009 was down 53% from 2008. He had had a good life, home, and education for his kids — but things sure turned awful, he told the Fordyce Forum today.

He made sure things wouldn’t stay that way. In short, here’s what he did:

One of Shannon Myers‘ favorite tools is one you’re also likely to find valuable in your recruiting and contact management.

Myers, speaking at the Fordyce Forum in Las Vegas, suggests you take a look at “Friend or Follow.”

Jenifer Lambert says she knows what recruiting firms’ clients want, and has even boiled those wants down to something so short it could fit on a Twitter tweet, as follows:

Good news! Your clients want to pay you. They would be happy to pay you, but they have expectations that you must not violate.

Lambert, speaking at the Fordyce Forum in Las Vegas today, knows clients can be pains in the rumps.

Do you and your firm have a competitive advantage? Have you defined it?

Sanford Rose Associates’ Tim Tolan, speaking at the Fordyce Forum today in Las Vegas, says his competitive advantage is defined as follows:

Our competitive advantage is our ability to assess executive talent and match a candidate’s skills based on our client’s requirement. We do this by having real-world experiences and from being in our industry for decades. Our in-depth search process allows us to present candidates who will exceed our client’s expectations 100% of the time.

On a 99-degree day in Vegas, Jon Bartos told Fordyce Forum attendees some of what’s made him a recruiting success.

• Attitude matters. “There’s no time for loser recruiters,” he said, smiling (as he played the Queen song “We Are the Champions”).
• Practice the “golden rule.” Bartos’ gold-plated guideline is to never let an offer go out that could cause a candidate to say, “let me go away and think about it for a while.” You need to know what they need and want before the offer comes in. Bartos will kill a deal partway through the hiring process if it’s not going to work out, but he doesn’t wait for surprises at the end.
• Manage time better. “We all just have to watch what we spend our time on,” he says. Some of the culprits he mentions: chatting with family on non-emergency calls, as well as picking up the phone to take incoming calls when you’re not sure who’s calling.
• Change how you seek new business. You may be spending too much time pursuing new clients, and not enough getting more business and connections from existing clients.
• Use technology more wisely. Repeat the same processes (if they work), rather than reinventing them. Develop a research/recruiting checklist that works for you and stick with it.
• Deliver within 3-5 days.
• Make sure you’re working realistic, quality assignments. Bartos measures job orders on an A-B-C scale; if a client wants a VP who it’ll pay $50,000, for example, in a region where salaries are $75,000, that’s a red flag.
• Pre-qualify and re-qualify. You may, for example, be very surprised to find your candidate — even a very high-income earner — has declared bankruptcy. Depending on the job, that may not be a deal-breaker, but it’s the kind of thing you can miss by making assumptions.
• Set expectations. The candidate needs to know what to expect from you, such as when you’ll be returning their calls. At the same time, they should know what you expect from them.
• Be insightful. The more you know a client, the more you know a candidate, the more you know an industry, the better off you’ll be. “You have to know the marketplace better than everyone else,” he says. “You get that, and guess what: game over.”

I have been a recruiter since 1988 and have held leadership positions with large national companies as well as owned my own executive search firm for 10 years. I’ve been a member of the Pinnacle Society since 2006 and am also certified as an executive coach by the International Coaching Federation.

What a lot of people don’t know about me (besides that my first job in high school involved wearing a bear costume for kids’ birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese) is that I actually started a new job in January.

After 10 years on my own with two business partners, we amicably parted ways, and I was recruited by a large regional CPA firm, Goodman and Company, to provide executive recruiting and human resources consulting services to its client base. This was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make, but it has been a great reminder about the transition our candidates go through when changing jobs.

It has been a rough road in our industry recently, even for a seasoned recruiter, causing me to pause and reflect on what made me successful in the first place. I told someone recently that I feel I was a much better recruiter when I was less experienced. I wasn’t as efficient as I am now, and certainly didn’t have the trust-based relationships I do now, but I think I had better attention to detail because ultimately, more was personally at stake with every deal while I was building my business.

Now, much of my business comes to me based on my established reputation. But with more orders to fill, it’s easy to get sloppy. I took my own job change as an opportunity to revisit some of the fundamental placement principles and fine tune my skills.

I watched my former Pinnacle Society colleague Tony Byrne’s videos as a starting point: 30 Steps In The Placement Process. The first time I watched this I found myself thinking: “I can do this in 15 steps. Why 30?”

But in watching the suspender-clad training guru (who left us much too early, and was succeeded by Danny Cahill as training chair for the Pinnacle Society), it reminded me not only of how much I miss the ‘80s, but also of how business was conducted before technology took over.

It was a great primer about bridging the gap between the keyboard and the phone which advancing technology has created.