Matthew Kimberley

Social media has not rendered cold calling ineffective, says Gavin Ingham in an excellent article on the subject:

Cold calling, done correctly, can be incredibly effective. Cold calling, done well, can be powerfully effective. Cold calling, employed successfully, can catapult a business from zero to huge growth with minimal budgets and with break-neck speed … Yes, cold calling done badly will waste time. Cold calling done badly is disrespectful. Cold calling done badly is no better than spam. Cold calling done badly will not work. And many businesses do cold calling very, very badly…

This is an important article – “In a world of social media is there any room for cold calling?” – and you should read it, particularly if you believe that LinkedIn is slowly suffocating the recruitment industry …

Social media helps eliminate the need for cold calls. You have so much information available to you about your prospect, the sales call can be warm from the introduction.

Who doesn’t respond well to “I was reading about you and wanted to talk”?

You’re a hiring manager. Your problem is that you frequently receive the same candidate’s CV from two or more recruitment agencies.

You currently deal with it by either opting to go with the first agency to send the CV, or you bin the candidate and take him or her from neither recruiter.

You’re not dealing with it right. Your real problem is that you’re working with too many bad agencies.

A bad agency doesn’t screen their candidates properly. A bad agency doesn’t disclose their client’s name. A bad agency throws resumes around in the hope that some will get snapped up.

Perhaps you’re working with only one bad agency. One bad agency can poison your whole recruitment process.

A candidate represented by a bad agency doesn’t know which end client is looking at his CV. He can’t give this information to a good agency when they ask his or her permission to represent them for your vacancy.

A bad agency can send you five resumes within ten minutes. But they can’t talk to five candidates in ten minutes to qualify and screen them properly for your company. If you opt for a “first-come first-served” solution, you may not be doing the jobseekers any favours. And if you bin the application, everybody loses out.

Here’s how you solve this problem:

Insist that every CV you receive from your recruitment agency is accompanied by an email from the candidate concerned, giving the agency specific, express permission to be represented by the agency for the role in question, with your company named as the end-client.

All agencies should be doing this anyway. In some places it’s a legal requirement, and in every place, it’s common courtesy.

You, as a client of  a recruitment companies, can help raise standards with this small step. You won’t receive any duplicate CVs ever again.

Margin and markup are different.

As a recruiter, if your buying price is 400, and your selling price is 500, that’s a difference of 100.

100 is a 20% margin, and a 25% markup.

100 is 20% of the selling price, and 25% of the buying price.

Clients and candidates are interested in your margin.

Which has the added advantage of being the lower figure.

… and another tool for your CV-writing kit.

Guy Kawasaki makes decisions about people, as an employer and an investor. He’s endorsing the advice of Glen Kelman – CEO of Redfin. His advice is a comprehensive overview of how to write a CV.

1. Verbs ending in “d”: shipped, launched, built, sold.
2. Results: not responsibilities or experience — but what responsibilities and experience helped you accomplish.

And his take on the length of your CV? “Two pages, max. If you’re under 30, one page.”

Read the whole post, and bookmark it.

If you don’t know who you need to speak to, say exactly that.

“My name’s Bob and I’d like to become a supplier, but I don’t know who I need to speak to. Can you help me out, so I won’t need to bother you again.”

and if you’re speaking to the right person for the first time, don’t waste anyone’s time:

“My names Bob and I’m a recruiter. I’m phoning to sell you something, unless you tell me that’s a bad idea, in which case I promise I won’t sell you anything today. I would, however, be grateful for any pointers for the future.”