Welcome to The Fordyce Letter:
My phone is ringing off the hook. More calls than I can remember receiving in a long time. Good news. The recruitment marketplace is heating up again. The callers are expressing a desire to re-attack their niches. This means they are getting ready to market again — an activity many of my students haven’t really concentrated on in months. And with marketing will inevitably come those pesky Hiring Manager (HM) objections, so now it’s time to remind everyone how to respond to them.
Why we make Marketing Calls
But first things first: why do we make marketing calls? We make marketing calls to find companies that fall into three general categories:
- First and foremost, those companies that have a tremendous urgency to fill a position. We recruiters are most often paid to circumvent the time factor.
- Those companies that have a difficult position to fill. They have run ads, offered referral bonuses to employees, checked with competitors, consulted with colleagues, and extensively interviewed with no success. In this scenario, the recruiter offers these companies a window of opportunity – a “court of last resort,” if you will.
- Those companies that wish to be kept apprised of top-notch talent as those talented people surface, regardless of whether there is an opening.
It is generally accepted by top producing recruiters that these three types of companies, which we will ultimately place with, make up 4% of our marketplace. So, if our marketplace contains 1500 contacts (which I recommend), then 4% of that marketplace equals 60 companies with which we will place. Multiply those 60 placements times an average fee of $10,000 and we have a $600,000 per year desk. Multiply those 60 placements by an average fee of $20,000 and we have our basic $1,200,000 annual operation. That, my friends, is how recruiters, by themselves, bill over $1,000,000 per year. They understand the math.
So now we have been reminded of why we need to make marketing calls. However, when we make them, we are invariably going to hear HM objections and there will be a tendency to give up way too early.
