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Apply to join our REI Recruitment Roundtable Facebook group (for practicing recruiters only)! This is a place for the community to encourage each other. A place to share ideas, challenges, tips, and tricks. And a place to receive extra opportunities for free training. It’s for recruiters who really want to ELEVATE their careers and the industry as a whole!
As a recruiter I know you’ve been there. You take the time to craft the perfect InMail or email message. You read it over and over to ensure the right details are covered to get potential candidates to respond. You ask yourself a million questions. Do you include the position title you are recruiting for? Do you call the candidate by their first name? Do you add a link to your company or the job description just in case they are interested?
After all these questions you finally do it – you hit the send button. Then you get up from your chair, grab a cup of coffee or a cocktail, and then wait. You wait for the perfect candidate to respond to your articulate, well-written message. You keep waiting.
Suddenly, your inbox rings and notifies you that you have a reply! You click the message and its turns out to be the first of many out-of-office replies. A short time later your inbox rings again and this time it’s a potential candidate who thanks you for your time but isn’t interested. Finally, another message comes through and they are interested in speaking with you! Your message worked! You proceed to fall out of your chair and do the happy dance. Your message was awesome! Your message was effective! You are awesome!
Whether you have been recruiting 6 days or 16 years, you know the rush that I am speaking about. You send out 250 messages and get a few candidates to speak with. Better yet, you automate the outreach with awesome technologies that do the sending for you and create real efficiencies.
But what if you could get more of your target candidates to respond? I’m serious – what if you could send less messages and engage more candidates? What if you could take the potential candidates that respond and convert them into a higher percentage of real candidates?
For years, the Recruitment Education Institute has trained recruiting professionals on Candidate-Focused Recruiting. CFR is based on seeing things from the perspective of the candidate. In order to be effective, we need to determine a candidate’s general tendency and needs by using observable behavior. We know that there are 2 key parameters that influence how a candidate buys:
• Patience: Urgency or Stability
• Orientation: People or Task-Focused
If a candidate’s observable behavior is Task-Oriented with a sense of Urgency, we can easily describe them in three categories and adjust to each in our interaction.
Characteristics
• Diving, action-oriented
• Focused on results
• Fast-paced
• Makes decisions readily
Needs
• Few Pleasantries
• Relevant Details
• Autonomy Progress
• Direct and to the point
• Opinions will be loud and fast
• Prefers to focus on objectives
• Prefers to focus on performance
Understanding the observable behaviors of a candidate will inform how we interact with the candidate in the most effective way and with the greatest influence.
But herein lies the problem – we cannot observe the behavior of a potential candidate that we are attempting to engage with on LinkedIn. What if our message is written from the perspective of the Task-Oriented, Urgency-focused profile above, yet the intended recipient is People and Stability-Oriented?
Characteristics
• People-oriented
• Warm, intuitive
• Patient listener
• Team player, easy-going
Needs
• Connection
• Relationships
• Loyalty
• Peace/consensus
• Empathetic
• Conflict adverse
• Prefers to focus on needs/motivation
• Prefers to focus on emotions and beliefs
There is no question that a message meant for one profile may not resonate with the opposing profile.In the case of a potential candidate that we cannot observe, how do we better understand who they are, what drives them, and how to approach them as a result?
Although we are not affiliated with
Crystal Knows, it is an intriguing tool. Leveraging artificial intelligence, this little tool can analyze an individual’s LinkedIn profile and predict their behavioral patterns! In addition, the tool provides situation-specific advice to communicate effectively and write persuasively with the target candidate.
Navigating over to my LinkedIn profile, here is what this handy tool says about me:
“Steve tends to be outgoing and decisive, with a preference for shaping new ideas over analyzing existing ones.”
Yup, that’s me!
Say this…• Here’s the high-level overview…
• More forward-thinking people are doing it this way…
Do…
• Provide a high-level summary of the value
• Try to keep the conversation focused
• React quickly to their feedback
• Send visual aids email or screen share
Don’t…
• Focus too much on risks or downsides
• Talk too much about past experience
• Go into too much detail
• Provide too much additional data
This describes me perfectly! Knowing these behavioral drivers before reaching out to a candidate should change your approach with each individual. At the same time, its proven invaluable to me in personalizing my messages. I have personally seen response and engagement rates increase by 40-80% at times!
Knowing your target before reaching out to them is like finding gold for a recruiting professional.
This is NOT a paid endorsement! I love sharing new tools that make our roles as recruiters more valuable, efficient, and focused on results. Check it out for yourself
HERE!
