Articles - Business / Client Dev & Marketing

Pierre Clemenceau called.

Pierre is one of my favorite students/colleagues.  I met him years ago in DC when I was there on a training trip.  We grabbed a quick bite to eat and I was impressed with his intelligence, eagerness to learn, rapport building skills, etc….and he spoke French.

I didn’t know many recruiters who spoke fluent French and periodically travelled to, and made placements in, France.  Anyway, we have had a good working relationship since then. 

Pierre called because one of his long-time clients wanted him to send them an invoice for one of his placements for what amounted to a 10.4% fee on a $144K salary.  He wanted to know how I would respond.  Well the obvious response is obvious to us all, but I asked Pierre why he was even considering this discount.  He really didn’t know.  His business relationship with this client had just kind of evolved to this level over time.  His client gave him all of the standard excuses:  money was tight; other recruiters would work for less; they didn’t have to hire, but wanted to hire; etc.  Pierre was in a quandary.

 asked him if he had ever heard me talk about the problem of long-time relationships leading to domestication (or taming) of the recruiter’s original instincts.  He said that he understood that concept and that, in France, they even had an expression for this dilemma.  They would ask the question:  “Avez vous été apprivoisé?” Or, in English, “Have you been domesticated?”

DOMESTICATION

Over time all relationships get lazy.  Original instincts fade away.  We start taking the POLR (Path of Least Resistance) route because it is seemingly the easiest choice.  But is it really the best choice?

Aren’t we Hunter-Gatherers?  Shouldn’t we fight this inclination by our client companies to tame us; to domesticate us; to turn us into Farmers and Herders?

Then, of course, this ‘taming’ becomes exasperated by the tough economic times that we have been living through these last few years. Some tell us that we need to develop multiple streams of income.  In fact, last year the Executive Recruiter News reported that some retained recruitment firms had expanded their portfolio of services to include more broadly defined “talent management” services—this blurred into the area of “career transition” which was usually handled by the large outplacement companies.  So instead of conducting the recruitment business with a higher degree of expertise, these retained recruitment firms had admitted defeat and given up.

We even hear from some of our ‘respected’ experts that the old ways don’t work anymore; that we need to follow the new paradigms to achieve success.  And these ‘visionaries’ with their telephone book-sized training manuals just so happen to have books and CDs and DVDs that will teach these new patterns and insure success in this new and changing business climate.  “Just send the money to…”

And, of course, they tell us that we must be on LinkedIn and on all of the job and candidate boards.  (Don’t they realize that they are now encouraging us to join the average American worker who has more than 30,000 places to search for work according to the Employment Management Association?)  In my own recruitment training experience, I actually contracted with a large firm based here in Atlanta in 2008 whose recruiters were more interested in database management and how to write an effective job order for the job boards than they were on learning how to effectively use the telephone to become more successful.  Needless to say, they were not setting placement records, but it’s easy to blame the economy (or the trainer) when they didn’t want to blame themselves.  And it’s no wonder that we all get confused as we become domesticated and join the pack headed for the exits.

I sometimes think that today’s trainers are into teaching us Sourcing Techniques (or worse yet, Employment Agency Techniques) as opposed to Recruitment Techniques!  After all, we are told that webcam interviewing is just as good as in-person interviewing and that to be successful we must ‘tweet’ and build a blog ‘following’.  We are admonished that an Internet presence is critical to our success.  Oh yes, and how about offering executive career counseling, resume writing services, reference checking services, drug screening services, relocation services, outplacement services, become certified in ‘on-boarding’, etc…. ad nauseam.  And, of course, we need to charge fees for all of these activities.  So what if we have become so tamed that we are now charging our candidates…something our industry has never done in its history.

We are told to turn our backs on what we had learned years ago because that paradigm doesn’t work anymore.  There is a better way; a way that will allow you to work only on Fridays and bill a million dollars a year (Don’t laugh.  I was told that a trainer actually offered this ‘pie in the sky’ proposal to his audience!).

Well, all of the aforementioned businesses are fine as ‘stand-alone’ professions, but make no mistake.  They are NOT the recruitment profession—a profession of which I am very proud and very protective!  These other professions are not what got us here.  We are Recruiters.  We recruit for a living.  That means picking up the instrument (the telephone for those of you living on the fringes of our profession) and speaking into it!  Only then can we establish rapport—rapport where people like, believe, trust and understand us.  Rapport is never built on keystrokes!

In the words of the legendary Alan Schonberg, of Management Recruiters International fame, when speaking to new franchisees who thought they were the smartest guys in the room, “Fail my way first, then you can fail your way!”

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