Recruitment Is Just Like Sales
This one is for the entrepreneurs, aspiring recruiters and hiring managers.
I get asked/told a lot that recruiting is just like sales. My take is… sort of.
Instead of selling a product or a service, recruiters are selling a project or a role or a career or (in some cases) a lifestyle change.
If you can identify the role/change/lifestyle that your candidate wants (high achiever who’s looking for faster career growth, big tech employee who wants to make more impact, working parent looking for more time to spend with their family), then you can give that to them in the form of their next role.
Please note: I work in technical recruitment, which means I hire Software Engineers. ICYMI, Software Engineers are in high demand. Great Software Engineers are in even greater demand. The job security means that tech recruiters strive to extract engineers from their current jobs to fill their open roles.
The real world situation is that the best Software Engineers rarely (if ever) apply to jobs. Instead, they get poached from one company to the next. Some, don’t even go through interviewing processes when they change jobs.
So, how does one “close” a candidate, to borrow a sales term.
Identify Their Pain Points
There’s two ways to do this — in the positive and in the negative.
The positive goes like this: “What are you looking for in your next role?”
The negative, as I’m sure you guessed, looks like this: “Why are you leaving your current role?”
I like to cover both in my conversations because I think it’s important to understand 1) why is this person willing to get on the phone with me (no one’s job is perfect) and 2) what about my role/company I should make sure to highlight.
“Selling” Your Company
I don’t want this part to sound contrived because it isn’t. I use the term “selling” because it’s a commonly used phrase. What we’re really doing is figuring out what people want and offering it to them.
Every company has its own personality, just like people have their own personalities. If there’s one truism I hold to in life it’s that some people just don’t get along with each other. Not every company in the world is going to appeal to every person in this world (e.g. not every loves working at Google, which is arguably “one of the best places to work”).
That said, different things about my role/company are going to appeal to different people. By identifying the Pain Points above, I’m better poised to highlight the aspects that really matter to an individual.
Real talk: My advice to you, if you feel squeamish about this, is to come from a place of positive intention — offer someone what they want, in a way that is genuine, and will have a positive impact on their life. In that case, you’re always doing right by your candidate. If you don’t truly believe in the product you’re selling, check out my article on burn out and negative work environments.
ABC: Always Be Closing
I half joke as I wrote that title but you really should be. Just as the candidate is always assessing whether or not this role will be a fit for them, you should also always be selling your role/company. Any opportunity that you don’t sell is a missed opportunity.
Here’s an example: Sally is looking for a new role because she’s on call during weekends and working late hours. Sally has two kids and wants to be able to spend more time with them so she’s passively looking around for a new role. I reach out to Sally and she takes a 30-minute call with me to discuss what she’s looking for. Sally tells me her pain points and I tell her that our employees have unlimited PTO and take an average of 25 days off a year. Our Co-Founders are both parents, so they care a lot about parental benefits and work/life balance. Sally is stoked and we move on to interview her. In her final conversations after interviewing, I send Sally the benefits — we offer entertainment for kids, child care subsidies for parents, and health insurance where we pay into dependent’s HSA. In a final Team Fit call, I get Sally on the phone with another person on her team who’s also a parent to speak to how they balance family and work. Sally takes the job.
If you notice, there are several angles we use to sell Sally on our company — 1) highlighting our PTO policy in the first call, 2) our company culture and work/life balance value coming directly from our Co-Founders, 3) getting her on a call with a peer who can corroborate on this company value. Had I only left these selling points to the close process, Sally could’ve still accepted the role (she also could’ve dropped out mid-process — interviewing is hard!). But, bringing this into every part of the process really solidifies the candidate’s choice before you even get to the numbers.
I’ll start by saying that I was pretty good at closing candidates before I moved to a company people had heard of. I had lost a grand total of 2 candidates we had given offers to at a previous startup, which put me at a close ratio of about 90%. A decent industry average is about 70%.
What I wasn’t good at was negotiating.
The Dance of Negotiation
If I asked you what are some resources you think are good for learning how to negotiate, I’m sure there are a couple of books or people that might come to mind — “Getting to Yes,” “The Art of Negotiation,” “Start With No.” I have personally read Chris Voss’ “Never Split the Difference” and had some valuable learnings. But here’s what I’ve really learned about negotiating:
- Having conversations around compensation are hard, so get good at having hard conversations.
- Not every negotiation tactic is going to work for everyone, so find your style.
I personally am a super awkward negotiator when it comes to my own compensation [insert stereotype about minority women here] so I didn’t think I could be good at doing this for others. Actually, the research shows that women are better at negotiating for others. What I started doing was to formulate a style of negotiation that resonated with my values.
This means, my negotiation style is 1) collect data early, 2) be open and transparent, 3) collaborate and come up with a solution together. It sounds contrary to what you’ve probably been told in the past but my close rate is above 70% in the last year, so I’d say it works for me.
If you want more on negotiating your own salary, read my other post here.
In a Sales role, you probably go through these same phases and use some of these tactics. The skill set between Sales and Recruiting are highly transferrable (I once sold timeshares in Australia). I’d love to hear from folks who’ve made the transition in either direction! Or you have more golden phrases like ABC, hit me with them.
If you’re a recruiter and you cringed when you read the title of this post, I sympathize. There are parts where recruiting is like sales (building a funnel, conversion rates) and then there are parts where I think it completely differs (handling people’s careers/livelihoods). That said, if you’re in sales and think you want to try your hand at being a recruiter, or vice versa, chances are you have a lot of the basic skills you need to get there! Check out my other post on, “The Essential Skills of Recruiting.”
