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This podcast is part of the audio recording from our consistent lead generation video masterclass. If you would like access to the entire video series where we share our framework for making marketing work in your business then go to this page and add your name and email address.
Welcome to this video series on how to attract consistent candidate and client leads. We know how important candidate attraction is for every single recruitment company across the globe right now. Of course, there’s a backstory to this particular video series. It has been about 15 years now that Denise and I have been working with recruitment companies, business owners, and marketers to help them market their companies.
Before that, our connection with the recruitment sector was in our corporate lives, where we have a combined experience of about 50 years. We built multiple sales teams when we worked within the pharmaceutical industry. We partnered with recruitment companies to help us do that. We have got a real history working within this sector. One of the things that I want you to keep in mind as we go through this video series is to frame the conversation that most business owners will measure our success based on cash, the financial goals that we set for ourselves, and achieving those goals.
Success Factors to Consider
I want to share the fact that there are other success factors to consider as micro and small SMEs are looking to build and scale their businesses. Let me share some of those with you. Think about it. Of course, we all want to generate revenue; we want to hit those financial goals. Yet, how can we possibly do that if we don’t have an audience to which we can market both candidates and clients? Because you want to be able to connect the candidate with the ideal clients, so you’ve got two happy individuals. That will help you generate revenue.
However, if you don’t have authority and expertise in your marketplace and you’re not able to communicate that to your audience, you won’t create as many opportunities. You won’t have the ability to influence why somebody in your audience, it doesn’t matter whether that’s a candidate or a client, should work with your recruitment company, rather than one of your competitors. Additional measures of success are things such as authority.
If I think about some of the clients that we work with, they have years of experience in a particular sector that they’ve then brought into recruitment, or they have got a huge amount of experience working within financial recruitment or tech recruitment or sales recruitment. They’re serious experts. They can bring that authority or knowledge of a marketplace and influence people to create huge amounts of opportunities. Now, where does time fit in, you might think? We’ve all seen, heard, read, and talked to people who have got a huge amount of financial success, yet they seem burned out.
They don’t particularly seem to be enjoying what they’re doing, and they don’t seem to have a lot of time to enjoy the fruits of that success. What’s the point? They’re just on a treadmill of generating revenue and not thinking about all these other success factors, including time. If I think about Denise and I and what we’ve been building over the years, we’ve been building a business with a number of different elements to it, where we have a global audience. We have hundreds of thousands of downloads of our podcast, and the audience very clearly is global.
Now, people keep coming back to that podcast because they know that we have the knowledge and we’re experts. We have authority, and we can influence people in various ways. That creates huge opportunities for us. Yes, it generates revenue, but that allows us to reinvest in the business and creates time to explore other business interests that create more opportunities. As we’re going through the next few videos, we’ll talk about all the different success factors you have in your business because there are many more other than financial.
The Seven Pillars of Building and Scaling
Let me introduce you to the seven pillars of building and scaling a recruitment company. You’ll notice it starts with marketing, and there’s a logical reason for that. You have a recruitment service that you want to market to candidates and clients. We can think of a service as a product because there’s contingency recruitment, retained, and exec search. Many people and business owners I’ve been talking to recently are looking at productising some of their services.
In order to generate any revenue, you need to have a product or a service in the first place. To get the revenue, though, you need an audience. You need an audience of clients to market that product or service to and an audience of candidates because recruitment is unique because you have to match the client with the candidate. It’s like selling a house – you need a buyer and a seller. It’s a unique market. Now, when it comes to marketing, though, you have to create demand for your product with your client audience and create some interest with your candidate audience in order to bring them together.
Create a Demand
If you don’t have that demand, and that’s not generated through marketing, your consultants don’t have the opportunity to convert the demand to match that client with that candidate. Of course, dipping back to marketing, even before you consultants get the opportunity, you have to convince your audience, both candidate and client, why they should come and work with your recruitment company rather than one of your competitors. Everything about a business starts with marketing because a product is part of marketing. You have to message why people should buy your service, your product over somebody else’s.
Once you’ve created demand through marketing, you bring in your consultants. Of course, if we don’t do one and two, there’s no need to have an operational team to support the consultants to match clients and candidates. There’s a lack of a need for operations and people. Once we have got demand and converted it, we need to look at how we deliver that service. What is the experience that clients will get from your recruitment company? What’s the candidate experience that they are going to get?
Now, we have deliberately separated our client and candidate for a reason. It is a unique market because you have two audiences you need to market to and eventually bring together. The reality is that if we go back to pre-pandemic, there was a huge amount of focus in the marketplace on client attraction and working clients, etc. Yes, there are loads of candidates out in the market, and of course, that’s not quite the situation that businesses are experiencing today.
Deliver a Great Experience to Clients and Candidates
We felt it was really important to separate these because you need to make sure that you deliver the best experience to clients and candidates, then bring them together continuously, rather than being inconsistent.
Now, you might be wondering why I’ve left the all-important finances at the bottom. There’s a really good reason for that. None of this can happen in the best, most efficient way to deliver those all-important finances as one of your success criteria if you are not managing your mind.
If you’re looking to build a seven or a high seven moving into an eight-figure business, and yet there’s that voice inside your head some days thinking, ”Well, people like me don’t build high seven-figure businesses.” If you have that kind of thought, trust me, that will sabotage some of what you do as you go about building your business. If you want to scale and build a team yet you have some thoughts around, ”But nobody can do it as well as I do. Can I trust people to do and use these processes that I’ve perfected and worked well to implement the same way?”
Manage Your Mind
If you have those kinds of thoughts, they will impede your ability to succeed. Managing your mind at every single step of your journey is so important. Have awareness about how you’re thinking. The reality is that if you are someone who’s just heading towards seven figures and your goal is to create a business that’s late seven early eight-figures, the way that you think and manage your mind when you’re building and running an eight-figure business will be very different to someone who’s heading toward seven figures.
I think you’re getting the message. This is my management thing; it’s really important. You’ll find that we will keep coming back to it because it is so important. That is the frame for marketing because if you want to grow a business and want to attract that consistent client lead flow, it all starts with the marketing piece of the puzzle. However, there’s a problem when people start looking and implementing marketing to build this consistent lead flow.
Use the Statistics to Your Advantage
Generally, we have seen this in our corporate careers, and while working with recruitment companies, the focus is often on the 3% of people ready to act now who want to work with a recruitment company. As a candidate, they’ve made that decision, they’ve felt unsure about whether to move for the last 12 months, and now it’s time to make that move. It’s time to kickstart their career again because it’s felt like it’s been on hold. Now, the reality is that this 3% is such a small part of the audience that you want to attract and work with and bring into your business to help you build that revenue to scale it.
Let me give an example of where this 3% fits in. Often when I’m talking about an email campaign, in my mind, I’m thinking of a series of emails, and that could be 6, it could be 16 emails. It could be an ongoing series of emails, yet often for a recruitment company, an email campaign can be one email. It might be an email shop.
For example, a business sends out a thousand emails, and they might get a 10% or 12% or 15% open rate and get a few people responding. They may even get some phone calls asking can we talk about a job? The focus then is that a business reacts to that response and starts working on that job. Now, that’s fantastic, but that is an example of businesses or candidates that are ready to act now, and they are your part of your 3%. We know, though, that through simple math, that leaves 97% of the audience you want to work with that are just not connecting.
They are probably unaware of you. They’re not returning those phone calls because they’re not quite sure who you are, why you’re phoning them, and what you’d want to talk about. They might not be responding to those emails for the same reason; they’re not even getting opened for the same reason; who are you? The reality is that work needs to be done around how we take this 97% of people you want to engage with and get on their radar when they’re unaware of you. How do you make them aware of you and begin to nurture a relationship so they start to engage in a small way?
You build that relationship to a point where they regularly engage with you and your services, where they’re referring people to you and come back to you to help them build out bigger teams as they are recovering and scaling. There’s a journey to take a lot of the people who aren’t aware of your business. A framework that we created way back in 2015 came in as we were asked for more guidance on how companies could build their internal marketing capability.
Also, we know how they could introduce experienced marketers who didn’t know the industry to get more familiar with implementing marketing that worked within the recruitment sector. Let me introduce the recruitment marketing sales roadmap to you.
The Recruitment Marketing Sales Roadmap
Now, there are numerous layers of detail to this roadmap. In this video, I want to introduce you to the first layer. Then in the second video, I go into more detail about the exact steps to build this consistent candidate and client lead flow that we know is so important to your business right now.
The starting point then is planning, and it’s often an area that can be skirted over. It might sound unusual for me to say what I’m about to say. We talk to business owners who have a lot of clarity from a goal-setting point of view. They know what they want to achieve financially. They know the time scales of when they want to recruit and bring in team members. They know what resources they will need to put in place to support those people, both operational support and software and tech etc.
Some people have an idea of some aspects of that, and some are quite vague and uncertain. They know they want to grow but are unsure about committing to figures because they want to see how it goes, or maybe they’ve had their fingers burnt with everything that’s happened in recent times. We know from our corporate life and from working with business owners in the recruitment sector that the more clarity you have around what you want to achieve, the more clarity you have around where you are getting business from.
Something as simple as the Pareto principle – for those of you who haven’t come across that, it’s the idea that 8% of your business comes from 20% of your clients. Do you know exactly where your business is coming from right now? Some people do, and others are less sure but knowing it is really important if we are looking to decide where we want to invest marketing and resources moving forward. Planning is key, and I’ll go into more detail about that. Of course, we have this whole marketing conversation, and there is so much involved in marketing.
Actively start going out on social media, email campaigns, paid advertising, or video. There are so, so many marketing strategies. Of course, the website is a fantastic starting point from a marketing point of view. There’s an awful lot to look at when it comes to marketing, but remember, marketing is the first thing to look at, and it’s about creating demand for your services.
Once you’ve created that demand, we can look at converting that demand and nurturing that business so that clients continue to convert and keep coming back for more support from you and your recruitment company. Now, in the next three videos, what I’m going to talk about in the next video, I’m going to go into the next layer of detail and share with you the 10 steps of the recruitment marketing and sales roadmap. In video 3, I’m going to talk about one of the key areas of marketing, and that is if you want to get your brand and your services out in front of your audience, content marketing is so important.
It’s also incredibly important in terms of how you can tap into other marketing activities as well, whether it’s paid advertising or email marketing. I want to share with you some of the common mistakes that are made, and some will really surprise you. They’re probably not what you are thinking, and we want to make sure that you don’t make these mistakes moving forward with your content marketing. We’re going to share a bonus fourth video as well because I want to share with you seven things that you need as a business owner when you are wanting to scale and build your recruitment company.
Remember:
This podcast is part of the audio recording from our consistent lead generation video masterclass. If you would like access to the entire video series where we share our framework for making marketing work in your business then go to this page and add your name and email address.
How We Can Help
We have many clients who are on for their best quarter because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we provide.
Book your call and demonstration here if you want a quick chat to see how Superfast Circle can work for you too.
Thanks,
Denise
P.S. If you want to join Superfast Circle and would like to find out more, speak to us here.
