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Today we are having a look at those back-to-basics type things that you might have forgotten about. This is a direct transcription, by the way, so excuse and typos. If you are in a situation where business is not coming quite as rapidly, or you’re not finding the candidates you want, I suggest listening to this podcast. We are going to give you ideas around some fundamentals that may have changed in the last year that you’ve not addressed.
A lot has happened in the last 12, 18 months. As we all know, there’s been a major shift; I don’t want to labour the point. However, whenever there’s a major shift, people’s needs and wants change; people’s businesses have changed too. That is something that you need to be mindful of when you are positioning either your recruitment product or your recruitment service.
I’ve had many conversations with business owners over the last few weeks and months, particularly this year, where they are now looking at what exactly their service offering is. What could they tweak? What could they embellish? What could they iterate that makes it more attractive or enables them to, first of all, get their foot in the door before they start to work with somebody on a longer-term basis?
With that being said, I will cover three key fundamental areas that we need to get right if we want to make more sales, more placements. They are:
- Having a good handle on your customer issues, your customer challenge, or the main problem your customer has and the corresponding pain points or symptoms they have and how you will identify that.
- If your customer has certain pain points and certain problems, you need to consider whether your current recruiting solution will meet their needs. Here we need to look at features, advantages, and benefits. Because in today’s market, if somebody’s needs have changed, then the feature, the advantage of your product, the benefits that your recruiting service gives – might need tweaking in the way you deliver this to the customer.
- Then finally, because very few people buy on the first engagement you have with them, you need to understand how to handle objections, and you need a really good objection handler.
Here are some suggestions on how you could profile them with your customers. That could be either a candidate or a client because people are currently recruiting again. The challenge you have is providing the best possible candidate for your client. This method can work across the whole spectrum of people that you work with.
Let’s look at your customer’s pain points.
Interviewing Your Current Clients and Candidates To Identify Their Pain Points
This could be because they want to grow a new division. It could be that most of their people are still working from home. How do they interview? What you need to do is establish what their key pain points are.
Let’s use an easy example here. Many people are still working from home, depending on which sector you are in. It is currently more challenging to interview somebody face-to-face; therefore, video interviewing is an option for many people. If people have challenges around interviewing, that is going to slow their growth. They are not going to get the right people in place; they are not going to achieve the results they want. These are all symptoms of their pain point.
You could help people with a challenge like this by using the latest interviewing software, whatever that might be. It may be Hinterview that you’ve decided to use in your particular recruitment organisation. It’s thinking here about what are their main pain points.
Now, there are several ways that you can identify these.
- You can email people and ask them to email back. They don’t always do it.
- You could send out a survey. Sometimes people fill them in if you give them some form of incentive; sometimes, they won’t.
- A great way is to pick up the phone to some of the latest people you’ve been working with and ask them about their challenges. Ask them what some of their pain points are; have a really good conversation with them.
- Another fascinating way to do this, and will help you with candidates, is to head over to Amazon. Search on topics in your specific area – for example, building a talent pipeline, developing a career –those types of subjects. It will bring up a range of books for you. I would suggest looking at the different publications that have a lot of reviews.
For example, I found a book by (I’m not aligned to this guy, by the way) called Jeff Hyman. It’s called Recruit Rockstars, The 10 Step Playbook To Find The Winners and Ignite Your Business. It has 89 reviews and looks like they are 4.5/5 star reviews.
I would probably read the majority of them. If they’re all very similar, then that’s fine, but I’m looking for different nuggets.
There might be something on a five-star review that gives you an idea of why someone would want to look at this book.
Then if I went down to the one-star review, there are some interesting things. I won’t reveal them all now, but if you go and look at the words and phrases that people use, it will give you a great insight into some of the things they’re looking for. I will often do this when I’m researching something for us or researching a market that we’re working with. We live in a review society; people are incredibly honest.
Use the Language of your Market
The great David Ogilvy, the advertising legend, always said, use simple language, use the language of your market. There might be words and phrases that you can use when you’re writing copy or when you’re talking to people. This will give you a great understanding of the problems and issues your current clients and candidates have.
Once you’ve done that, you need to think about how you position your offering. This is where alignment comes into play (and I’m going to drop a link to this because you can go and listen to an episode of the podcast from a while back here, still as good as it was then, around features, advantages, and benefits) because a lot of the challenges with sales and selling to people is that people don’t align; when a salesperson, or your recruiter, don’t align customer needs with your offering by highlighting the benefit of a particular part of your service. If you have not carried out a features, advantages, and benefits review that you can map out and share with your recruiters, I strongly suggest it’s time you do, particularly as things in the market are changing rapidly. Make sure your features, advantages, and benefits relate to what customers now want.
Objection Handling
There are probably about half a dozen key objections that people have. Unfortunately, very few people answer them well. This is where knowing and brainstorming will help. Incidentally, the Amazon research I spoke about earlier will enable you to find out some of the key objections. That way, you can create content around the objections that your candidates and clients might have.
What’s brilliant about this is that you can have an objection handler written out ahead of time, and you can also create content. You can create videos and a blog post; you could create something like I am doing with this podcast. There are so many things that you could utilise to handle those objections.
Now, you may have been thinking, “I thought you were going to tell me something sexy, Denise, like, ‘Get back to referral marketing, get back to networking’,” and yes, I’ve got quite a few other things that I want to share with you next week. But if you don’t have your positioning right, if you don’t know what your clients and your candidates need now, you will struggle. If you don’t know how to communicate that to them by handling objections, profiling your features, advantages, and benefits related to their pain points and symptoms, you will never get anywhere. It’s people that do this well that do well.
Let’s look at getting back to some of those fundamentals of our job.
How We Can Help
We have many clients on track for their best year ever because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we give them. If you want a quick chat to see if what we do can work for you, book your call and demonstration here.
Thanks,
Denise
