It’s the middle of the pandemic, summer 2020, you have you list of prospective clients, 300 in total. You’ve called top to bottom numerous times since the beginning of the outbreak in February but no one is buying from you. Someone else in your team however is doing just fine. Winning exclusive deals and making good revenue – good, not great, it’s still a pandemic!
Here come the excuses about market, luck and fill-the-space. But what’s really going on here? Is it magic?
The other person has around the same amount of clients, say 300. But this person see’s these 300 clients as a very top of the ice burg. Working in recruitment for example you may be speaking with a talent acquisition person and that person says the dreaded “hiring freeze” words which are probably true. So when your boss asks you “did you contact the client we discussed last week”, you respond “yes I did, I spoke to them and they said there’s a hiring freeze”. Well I suppose that’s it then. Let’s pack up our bags and go home for the day, we tried.
If the company has 100,000 employees and you spoke to one person who often is a staff level TA (Talent Acquisition) or HR person, are you comfortable that this individual knows all hiring plans, all people who are ready to quit, all strategic changes including m&a activities new shared service centre launches? How about confidential replacement hiring, a senior Executive level hiring, new country launch or new product launch?
I once BD’d (business develop called) the head of legal at a major bank many times over the course of a year. During that year we went out for drinks a few times and he always greeted my phone calls in a welcoming and chatty manner. I felt for sure I would get a chance to recruit a role when it came up in his team…and you guessed, he didn’t engage me at all on any hirings. He had a “friend” you see, whom he’d known for 15 years that he used. Great.
At the end of that first year though he left the company. Chance! So I called the new head of legal and he agreed to meet. This time he did engage me, to my delight on an exclusive basis and after about six months finally gave me a legal counsel job to recruit. Excitedly I spoke to him to find out the details, I am going to nail this and get the best people out there I thought! We spoke about the role for around an hour. Surprisingly there were literally around 5 people in the world that could do this job due to the experience and language. With the especially low budget threshold this took the total amount of people interested in this job squarely at 0.
Amazingly though, speaking to the handful of people in the whole of this country that could do the job, a fantastic senior attorney told me about the perfect person sitting overseas with all the requirements.
She did indeed have an interest in returning back to this country and was keen on this particular bank. A miracle. So I sent through her cv, arranged an interview and could not wait to hear the feedback! THEN, in total it took one year from cv send to offer being issued through the bank’s HR to receive an offer for that candidate!
In short, in took two and a half years of continued business development to make one placement.
Now, from another recruiter’s perspective, all they would have seen is a job emailed to them, along with all other agents and then seemingly that same job closed a week later. When their boss asked them, “what happened with that job” they probably replied, “well I spoke to them earlier this year and they didn’t have any jobs”. Shrug of the shoulders and then move on.
Irrespective of market conditions, the more high quality relationships you have with key decision makers at junior, senior, local and global level, the more successful you will be. But you really have to be relentless and consistent in order to get there.
