This One Simple Tool Helps RECRUITERS Win More Clients

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about this proposal?”

“Hmm… maybe a 7.”

“What can I do to make it a 10?”

You’re a recruiter. Which means you’re a salesperson. Which means, OF COURSE, you’ve used this line.

But what if you didn’t have to?

What if you could SEE in your prospect’s eyes the moment when they go from a SEVEN (meh) to a TEN (yes, please)?

The tool that my recruitment firm uses, literally makes this happen.

We’ve had any number of prospects, engaging pretty well with our presentation, but still on the fence. But then, once we reveal our coup de grâce, they enter the “ready to close” position in a matter of minutes.

It’s that powerful!

Want to know what this tool is and how you can get your hands on it?

Read on…

From Cliché to USP

If you’ve heard my name before, it’s probably in my capacity as the Co-founder and Executive Chairman of i-intro®, but you might not be aware that I’m also the Co-founder of an executive search firm.

I’m not someone who teaches because they can’t do. I teach because I have done, because I’m still doing, and because I enjoy helping others to emulate my success.

Plus, working directly in recruitment in addition to recruitment consulting, ensures I can keep a current perspective on how the industry is evolving and how life as a recruiter is affected.

For example, one of the things that troubles me these days, is recruitment marketing campaigns that rely on clichés such as, deep network, speed of delivery, experienced firm, etc.

I understand that these need to be in your pitch somewhere. Your prospects need to know that you have the bases covered. That you’ve reached the minimum level of expectations.

But my problem with these claims is that, if this is what you’re relying on, you’re not going to stand out from the crowd. You need to follow up your claims of competence with a USP that is powerful and that your prospect is going to struggle to find elsewhere.

It’s very hard these days to create a true unique selling point. But at the very least you should have a RARE selling point.

The trick is to establish your competence with the usual mix of endorsements and impressive statistics, and then introduce something so powerful that your prospects choke on their coffee.

This is the approach we use to win business, even when we’re competing against bigger, more experienced, and even less expensive recruitment firms.

·     We show our prospects our credentials.

·     We show them how we carry out our recruitment campaigns.

·     We show them the i-intro® process and the impressive results it produces.

And then…

We deliver the killing blow.

If we were a football player performing for a scout, everything that comes before would be showing off our dribbling and passing skills, and our extraordinary stamina.

But this moment would be when we drill the ball into the top corner of the goal from 35 yards.

Enough preamble. Here’s how it works…

The True Cost of a Bad Hire

Our main USP as a recruiter (yep, we have more than one) is our retention rate.

96% of the candidates we place are still in the role after 12 months. Sometimes it ticks a little higher (at the time of writing it’s 100%) but it’s always around about 96%

In real terms, this means for every 25 placements, only 1 leaves the role within 12 months.

This gives us the freedom to offer an industry-leading free replacement policy of up to 24 months, without any fear of leaving ourselves overstretched. We can offer this guarantee because we know, 96% of the time, our clients won’t need to make use of it.

This, on its own, is a powerful part of our pitch.

We use this part of the presentation to talk about the time, money and resources that are wasted by a bad hire. And, most of the time, our prospects get it. We promise high retention rates and we take on the risk with our guarantees.

It all sounds great.

And then – if you’ll forgive another sporting analogy – we knock it out of the park.

Once we have the prospect on board with the idea that we can improve their retention rates, we show them the TRUE cost of a bad hire.

We do this by performing a…

Recruitment Process Audit™

On the surface, it sounds pretty mundane, but the effect on the prospect is overpowering.

We begin by obtaining a few details based on the prospect’s current numbers and entering them into a calculator. Things like number of new hires per year, retention rate, average salary, and so on.

The calculator then crunches the numbers and produces a tidy report containing bottom-line numbers, specific to the client.

There’s no number-fudging going on here. No smoke and mirrors. The calculator uses REAL statistics based on a report compiled by the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, and combines it with the prospect’s own data.

The resulting report shows costs associated with things like wasted salary, wasted training, reduced productivity and so on. The kind of things the prospect can pour over in their own time. But at the very end of the report it highlights one, critically important, number.

A number that tells the prospect how much money they are burning each year on bad hires.

We’re showing them, literally, the TRUE cost of a bad hire.

Show Me the Numbers

The number is typically low or medium six figures per bad hire. And while an experienced recruiter probably wouldn’t be shocked by this, virtually every prospect we show this to reacts as if they’ve been slapped in the face with a cold fish.

It’s one thing to talk generally about the problems associated with bad hire, but it’s a whole other thing to be able to put a number on it.

We could, of course, figure out some average across the industry and quote that.

Anyone could do that.

But because we’ve inputted the prospect’s OWN figures, the number at the bottom is like a punch to the gut.

Suddenly it’s real.

Suddenly they’re thinking about what this number comes to multiplied over the last five years. The last ten years.

Suddenly what we described in the abstract has become real.

This is when the light goes on in their eyes. This is when our promise of improved retention and our free replacement policy becomes meaningful.

And this is when we start to close the deal.

The Close

There are two more benefits from being able to give the prospect a specific number, based on their own estimates.

The first is that, by showing how much money they’ll save per year by using us for ALL of their recruitment (we’re using this tool to win retainers and managed service contracts), it makes our fee a non-issue.

Whereas in the past, we had to be prepared for questions like, “Recruitment X have quoted us £5,000 less – why are you worth the additional fee?”

Nowadays, when we’ve just proved that using our service will save them, LITERALLY, hundreds of thousands of pounds per year, quibbling over a few thousand is redundant.

The second benefit is that this number goes into the written proposal and can be shared with the decision-makers who are not in the pitch meeting but who will need persuading by the people who are.

There’s no way to know if the people you’ve pitched to will accurately or enthusiastically share the details of your presentation. But if nothing else, they’re going to show them the number, and they can figure out the financial benefits for themselves.

***

Our recruitment sales tool doesn’t work in isolation. It needs to be strapped to a solid recruitment service and a measurably high retention rate. But if you have those things locked down, the Recruitment Process Audit™ is a pure, closing machine.

The Recruitment Process Audit is currently only available to recruitment firms that are part of the i-intro® programme. It’s only one piece of a phenomenal package of training and software that can transform your recruitment firm (just like it transformed ours). If you’d like to learn more about i-intro® and how it can increase your closing rate, your fees, and your repeat business, please use the link below…