FROM: Dave Fogg
For: Staffing and Recruiting Firms, and some of this information applies to talent acquisition in corporations.
If you know the root causes of failure it is much easier to design a more successful sales/recruiting process.
I am going to share good information here that helps us both identify causes of failure and success to help create a positive plan for us to partner and work together.
We do not provide people for outbound tele-sales. We learned over the years that outbound telemarketing to sell staffing services does not work as it did in the past. The point being outbound tele-sales will burn out most anyone and result in high turnover regardless if in USA or another country.
For a staffing service to effectively sell their services and sign more customers, they must figure out other methods of reaching decision making leaders in companies other than a young sales rep making 100 calls per day. These days 99% of calls go to voicemail that are deleted. And., when a young inexperienced salesperson does reach a mature decision making leader rarely do they convert the call into a new customer.
Staffing/recruiting services must come up with other services to offer so a specific company can stand out and be different. Otherwise, all staffing and recruiting firms look the same in the eyes of decision making corporate leaders. Looking the same as others sets salespeople up to fail because they do not have anything special or different to offer.
Because outbound tele-sales causes such high turnover we are not interested in supporting this type of sales work.
We built a good reputation with people in the Dominican Republic by providing jobs that are stable and can turn into long term careers with American companies.
Finding companies and Leaders on LinkedIn to build company/contact lists and then figure out the Leader's work email addresses and manually send personalized marketing emails is doable. This is time intensive but is more accurate than buying targeted email marketing lists.
In that example emailing is very strategic and is used to replace making cold calls to company Leaders. FYI, we have learned a great deal about the technology that is required to ensure emails reach inboxes and can share our experience with you.
An example is a person in DR could do this email list building and outbound emailing for your USA salesperson same as if the Dominican assistant is a clone of your USA sales rep.
We can provide people for jobs such as recruiter trainees, recruiting assistants and clones of USA recruiters, back office such as personal assistant to your company leader ( train them to handle your time consuming work that bogs you down yet is important ) new hire onboarding, accounting, payroll, social media marketing etc.
The root problems with recruiting and hiring Experienced vs. Recruiter trainees and the Recruiter Clone Concept:
It may sound attractive to hire an experienced recruiter who does not require training. But what is the reality? In the USA 7 out of 10 recruiters are badly trained. You can see them all over LinkedIn. They look to have experience but on the job 7 out of turn into disappointments and turnover.
More often than not, when hiring supposedly experienced recruiters they last 1 or 2 years before quitting or being fired.
The only way to control success vs. failure of recruiting or any results job is to choose your own people to hire and control how they are trained, used and managed. When you rent people from other companies you are giving up control and depending on the other company, such as when using offshore RPOs.
What makes anyone think an RPO in India or Philippines will magically have recruiters sitting on the bench ready for you to hire who do not require any training and know your company and jobs? For anyone who believes this, I have valuable swamp land for sale in Florida LOL 🙂
Sadly, many people get into recruiting and have bad training or bad experiences with other companies so they come to your company basically poisoned.
I personally think even if it takes some time and effort, hiring people who come in fresh and who you groom to work Your Way is the only way to control long term success/failure. The recruiter video training we provide can be perceived as a foundation or college semester recruiting course that prepares people for your recruiting leader to take them over and train up the rest of the way.
Many companies operate in ways that force recruiters work at above average pace just to produce marginal results and marginal income.
An example is pressuring recruiters with high activity metrics, few to no breaks during a day, working through lunch, work more than 8 hours per day and often put in time on weekends just to end up producing average to marginal results.
That is why so many people get into recruiting and then quit to pursue other careers that pay more and are easier!
If you were to study this truth, you would realize that many companies do business in ways that make recruiters work much harder than it should be.
I will share true stories of successful recruiting operations compared to staffing firms that cause their own self-inflicted failure.
Example of a successful staffing/recruiting firm and how they work with USA or remote support staff. I will use ABC Staffing as the fake/sample name.
ABC Staffing is located in Houston and the owners have personal experience with accounting. They created a staffing business that focuses on accounting, finance, payroll and other jobs related to accounting firms or accounting departments in companies.
A nurse staffing firm is similar, a staffing firm that focuses only on industrial workers is similar. When a staffing firm specializes in something, only then can both salespeople and recruiters become expert and work in the same direction.
A good model for a staffing firm is to open new offices in different cities where all are specialized in the same direction. Or, start with a specialty in a city and over time add other specialties where each is like a mini business.
Because ABC Staffing specializes they can grow a large database of specific people in Houston.
ABC can create lists of all companies in Houston that hire accounting and finance personnel, and find all the company decision making leaders on LinkedIn to build targeted sales and marketing lists.
Sales and Recruiting are on the same page, both going in the same direction.
FYI, IT is not a specialty. IT is an entire industry. Application developers are a specialty within the IT industry.
No small locally owned IT staffing firm can become expert and well connected with all types of IT companies, IT people and IT jobs.
As accounting jobs came in to ABC Staffing the leaders converted the job descriptions into Recruiter Friendly work instructions. An example is simplifying and clarifying the job descriptions.
The recruiting leader of ABC staffing showed the USA recruiting staff and the outside USA staff how and why they created specific job title and key word searches.
The recruiting leader documented the search instructions on a FORM and personally or over video call with screen sharing SHOWED the recruiting staff why they created certain job title and key word searches.
The recruiting leader then did some searching on LinkedIn or a resume database to SHOW the USA and remote recruiting staff examples of resumes that show in search results but are not qualified people compared to resumes that are qualified and explain WHY and what to look for.
The point is it’s one thing for a recruiter to know how to use LinkedIn or a resume database while it is something else for recruiters to 100% understand job descriptions so they design the best LinkedIn or resume searches and know what to look for.
Sadly, what often happens is job descriptions are sent to recruiters who must figure out their own searches and their own interpretations of the job description.
This results in wasting time and money submitting candidates who are rejected, then beg the hiring manager for feedback to know why candidates are rejected.
Then correct the searches and start over again.
It is much smarter to create a Tighter process that ensures recruiters are set up with the best work instructions from the start!
In this example the recruiting leadership at ABC staffing did what recruiting leaders should, they made the time to simplify and explain job descriptions and they created the best LinkedIn and resume searches and showed examples of what to look for – then documented this information on a Recruiting Instruction Form.
Just imagine what would happen if a machinist at Boeing aircraft was sent a basic description and set up to figure out how to design and make a part all by themselves, this would be a disaster. Yet, this is what happens in recruiting all the time.
Because ABC Staffing specializes in accounting and finance in Houston they care able save up and build a valuable local database of qualified people. This becomes their Go To Resource.
In regards to LinkedIn and job boards 100% of their budget for job postings and resume search and INmail credits are used for accounting and finance people in Houston.
Over time, a newly hired USA or remote recruiter or candidate sourcer will learn to become more and more expert because of this tightly controlled recruiting process.
If accounting and finance starts to dry up, ABC can research and figure out other specialties to grow into.
Or, they can grow their business by using this process for different specialties each managed like a mini business within the staffing firm.
There cannot be a one size fits all set of activity metrics. The metrics to source accountants on LinkedIn are entirely different from Indeed. The metrics to source a tax accountant are very different from a bookkeeper.
However, when specializing a set of realistic metrics can be created that are based on a history of real data.
This is HUGE! The owners/leaders treat their Dominican/Remote staff as fellow employees, not as if rented from an offshore RPO.
The only difference is the Dominican staff can work remote for half the cost of comparable employees in the mainland USA.
The company leaders get Teams or Zoom to call and see their Dominican staff Live same as if they were all sitting next to each other in the Houston office.
It is a very bad mistake to get into the habit of communicating mostly by chat or email.
Chriss is my assistant in the DR. She has been with me nearly 10 years. Every day we talk at least 3 times face to face using Teams video call.
It is faster, easier and better to call Chriss on Teams so I can see and talk to her than type and send her an email hoping she reads and understands the same as I intended.
There is no excuse for not being good at communicating, when a leader complains they do not have time it means they are failing at being a leader!
If a USA or remote recruiter/sourcer was failing to produce enough qualified candidates the leaders would use video call with screen sharing to observe the remote recruiter working. Same as if sitting next to the recruiter and observe them work.
The USA leader could then see the truth and reality from which to provide instructions that help the recruiter improve, or realize the recruiter is in an impossible situation and change them to work on other jobs.
Just looking at numbers on a spreadsheet or app on computer and managing by numbers cannot and does not solve the root causes to activity and results issues.
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Here are examples of failure:
Staffing firms, same as corporate recruiting, will often create activity metrics that are based on hopeful outcomes, not on proven data.
An example is making up numbers such as X candidate submits per day = Y interviews = Z hires.
Usually these numbers are based on a hopeful outcome such as Revenue per month, or growth per year.
Managers then pressure recruiting staff to achieve these numbers where the LinkedIn, job boards and access to candidates do not match up with the metrics being pushed down on the recruiting staff.
True Story to make a point: XYZ Staffing is located in Tampa. They are a full service staffing firm which means they think they can handle almost any job opening.
They do not know when so say NO.
The salespeople call on ALL companies in Tampa and will sign contracts with any company they can get a contract with.
Some companies are manufacturing but XYZ will accept any job from office to HR to marketing to engineering to production workers to warehouse. A manufacturing company is not a manufacturing specialty, it is a company that hires all types of people.
Only in the actual manufacturing plant and on the production floor are the people mostly doing manufacturing jobs.
And, in Tampa they have many different clients that hire different types of people!
A - No recruiter can be expert at understanding all jobs
B – At XYZ they assign the different jobs to recruiters without any expert leader clarifying and simplifying the job descriptions. No samples of qualified resumes are provided to recruiters, all they get is the written job description.
This results in each recruiter making up their own interpretation and understanding.
C – Each recruiter designs their own LinkedIn and resume database searches. There is NO quality control which leads to improper searches and not knowing what to look for. The recruiters are mostly guessing.
D – XYZ Staffing has a limited budget for job boards, resume and LinkedIn searches and sending INmails.
Because they accept too many different jobs and have a limited budget for candidate sourcing tools, LinkedIn and job boards are divided in too many smaller slices of the budget pizza pie which means the recruiters cannot work the numbers game for any of the job openings.
The recruiters run into the wall as they exhaust search and message credits and have a limit to job postings.
E – Designing outbound recruiting messages and job postings that produce good candidate results has become a SKILL. When there is no Leader managing this and recruiters handle on their own, you can see how out of control this process is compared to other types of companies such as manufacturing or accounting that operate with much tighter process controls.
F – The Leaders at XYX never Got It, they treat their Dominican staff same as if rented from an offshore RPO when they should treat them same as valued fellow employees and on the same team.
The leaders rely too much on messaging instead of face to face live video call.
The leaders never observe the USA or remote recruiters working. They rely only on numbers from activity tracking applications.
Negative pressure is pushed on the recruiters when nothing is done to observe their work to identify the truth and reality. The recruiters feel much more negative than positive and this causes them to fail, quit and take other jobs or get fired.
What I just shared is more of the norm out there in the staffing industry, not the exception.
This story can be changed to show a staffing firm that signs clients in any city where the Leader can get into a company and sign a contract.
Or, in IT staffing many firms make the mistake of trying to cover all IT jobs and not pick something to become expert at, or they sign clients in various cities when they do not have local candidate databases and this spreads their candidate sourcing/LinkedIn/Job board budget too thin.
My Advice:
If I were a USA recruiter I would personally want to start a remote person as my CLONE. I would get them from outside the USA because the cost to hire such a person in the USA is too expensive.
I would want to design my own LinkedIn and job board searches and design my own messages.
I would create a 2nd company email and set up in my Outlook. This is for my recruiting assistant to use on my behalf. Let’s use the name Nancy.
I would use video call with screen sharing to look at job descriptions, create searches, do some searching and SHOW/Teach Nancy over video call with screen sharing.
I would use video call with screen sharing to replicate Nancy sitting next to me.
I create the work instructions while teaching her at the same time.
As Nancy does the time consuming searching and outbound messaging, candidates see as coming from ME so they respond to ME.
I can react much faster and more candidates will look me up on LinkedIn and reply to me than to any candidate sourcer such as Nancy.
I can JUMP on some candidates ASAP while having Nancy contact some as my recruiting assistant.
She can screen people and set them up on my calendar for interviews.
Nancy can also help me keep candidates WARM as they wait for interviews with me or with hiring managers.
Nancy can also follow up with candidates to ensure they show for interviews with me and hiring managers.
Using Nancy as my Recruiter CLONE is the best way to get results from her faster, and is the best way to train Nancy to think, work and recruit exactly as me, like she is a Mini Me!
Maybe pairing a USA recruiter with a lower cost remote assistant as a clone is the model.
Maybe starting this way and when ready promoting Nancy to full recruiter and using this as a process to grow a recruiting team in the lower cost location is the model.
However, assuming that just because a person know how to use LinkedIn and send them job descriptions and expect they source and submit candidate to me where I am not in tight control is a recipe for failure.
This is not a USA or Dominican thing, it is a process thing. All across the USA recruiters, sales people and others who are in results jobs are set up to fail because of the flawed processes they work within.
Creating a tighter process that identifies all of these causes for failure and solving them with a good and tighter process is the path to improved recruiting or anything in a company.
Dave Fogg