Recruitment sales techniques? Yes, recruiting is largely a sales job, and we will explain why.
Recruitment sales techniques are pivotal, especially when you consider the talent marketplace dynamics. As recruiters, our role often mirrors that of a sales recruiter, where success hinges not just on finding talent but also on convincing candidates and clients of the mutual benefits.
Think about it; you are selling the candidate on the job and the client on the candidate. You may hear this and think you’ll just figuratively roll up your sleeves and get to selling without really considering what it means. While the odd success may happen, wildly stabbing at selling can be less than fruitful.
Thankfully, many sales techniques exist to help you strategize your sales efforts for optimum results.
Recruitment sales techniques are strategies used by recruiters to attract new clients (employers) and candidates (job seekers), build relationships, and close deals.
Within the evolving recruitment landscape, inbound recruiting strategies have proven effective, drawing candidates through compelling content and engaging opportunities. This approach ensures that the candidate profile we develop aligns with both the job requisition and the organizational culture, enhancing the candidate persona to meet specific senior level and tech recruiter needs.
Did you know that our free recruiting system can also help you make hiring easier? Keep reading to learn how you can start using Recruiteze for free!
Why recruiters need sales techniques
Many busy or uninformed recruiters think they can succeed by simply whipping up a quick job advertisement and shooting out some cookie-cutter emails that say, “This job is available.”
While this “technique” saves you time in the short term, but it costs you in the long term because it takes you much longer to find quality candidates. In fact, you may run candidates off.
Moreover, retained recruiters play a crucial role, especially when scouting for specialized or high-demand roles, ensuring a continuous talent marketplace flow. Their expertise, coupled with observation interviews and culture add evaluations, allows for a deeper understanding of candidate potential beyond the resume.
Clients don’t always jump at our first candidate selection either.
What if you know this candidate is great?
Perhaps you simply aren’t selling them well enough.
It’s something to try anyway. If you sell a great candidate well and the client still doesn’t want them, maybe you and the client aren’t on the same page.
If you have a valid reason for believing in the job or candidate you are selling and thinking it is a good match for the person you are speaking with, make sure your sales technique does it justice. Don’t take statements like “I already have a job,” “Their experience doesn’t match,” or “I’m too busy,” lying down.
Try out some of the sales recruitments sales techniques we will discuss below:
- Solution Selling
- Consultative Selling
- FAB Sales Technique
- AIDA
- SPIN
Before we dive into these recruitment sales techniques, let’s just run through some excellent general sales tips!
Excellent general sales tips for recruiters
You can’t sell the job if you don’t know the job.
Do your research. Talk to the hiring managers. Get a feel for what it would feel like to work there:
- What is the company culture like and the predominant managing style your hire would be dealing with?
- Which employees love it at that company?
- Which employees perform the best in that position?
Use this information to find candidates to pursue, sell the job to them, and tell the client why this candidate is perfect for their company.
Look at the first no(s) and can’t(s) as an opportunity to solve problems and questions rather than dismissals.
The candidate may think something is a deal-breaker, while your expert knowledge may have a different opinion.
For instance, one advantage may negate a concern they have, or the company may want someone exactly like this candidate when the candidate may not expect it. Or the client may not realize you have already considered their concern and have a valid reason why this candidate is perfect anyway.
Discuss possibilities with them and sell the advantages, but don’t be pushy. If the candidate really isn’t interested and keeps telling you no, don’t run them off from wanting to work with you in the future when you do have a good match for them.
For businesses operating on a self-funded (self-insured) plan, the recruitment process, including employee assistance programs (EAP), becomes part of a larger strategy to manage human capital management effectively. This strategic approach helps mitigate attrition rates and fosters a supportive work environment, encouraging long-term commitment from employees.
In leveraging job requisition specifics, we tap into the hidden job market, revealing opportunities that might not be publicly listed but are available through referral bonuses or contract to contract (c2c) agreements. This strategy ensures we maintain a competitive edge, offering mean wage or better compensation to attract and retain the best talent.
Check out how blog content can help you with recruitment sales.
Get to know the industry.
You will have a leg up in anticipating candidate problems, client problems, and motivating factors for both parties if you know what’s going on in the industry. I mean, consider how much more you can relate to and find solutions to people’s problems when you are familiar with their problems? You also can’t begin to picture what a candidate needs to know to be a vital part of the company without having some concept of what they are doing.
Use marketing strategies like creative job advertisements tailored to your target audience and information sharing on LinkedIn and other gathering places for career people to get candidates coming to you.
With well-honed marketing techniques, you can sit back and let the quality candidates arrive, already mostly screened.
Another great recruiting tip is to start using Recruiteze. We offer the market’s best recruiting system, and it’s free!
Solution Selling
You’ve probably heard the idea expressed that good sales come from addressing a person’s needs or problems. That is mainly due to the popularity of the Solution sales technique.
Very simply, you:
- Determine the needs of your target audience,
- Design a product or service, so that best solves those problems,
- And then sell it by telling everyone how it solves their problems.
You might describe a situation you know your target market can relate to, then illustrate how this product or service, in this case, this job or candidate, perfectly fixes the problem.
This is a built-in way to ensure your target audience will crave what you sell rather than trying to convince them of its value.
This technique serves recruiters well if they know their target audience well enough to understand their needs truly. Unfortunately, many people misapply the solution selling technique because they don’t understand what the job candidate really wants and needs and, even worse, don’t know how or when to discuss the issue with them.
According to the Harvard Business Review, when solution selling first became popular, the general populace (and your target audience) were more likely to need help solving their problems. Today, the internet makes information immediately available to anyone, and people have learned to answer their own questions more readily.
You can still apply solution selling techniques, but you need to look for more creative ways to apply the technique. In the same article mentioned above, the Harvard Business Review suggests that you look for people in a state of flux rather than ones with a clear understanding of what they need. One way to find this is to look for people early in the decision-making process.
Consultative Selling
Consultative selling is a sales technique based on the idea that you can best understand and therefore sell a person on the concept of something by acting as a consultant.
Talk to them, relate to them, and then advise.
Docurated asked 30 sales experts,
“What’s the #1 way to develop a winning consultative sales approach?”
We’ll include some of our favorites here.
Dan Seidman, an international sales trainer, suggests 5 “Power Questions” to ask, in this case, your job candidates and clients.
One example of a power question is:
“How long has this been going on, and what has it cost you?“
You would be addressing some problems and giving a quantifiable figure for a loss or waste. This act both emphasizes the need to change and helps make change easier by giving a figure to create goals around.
He explains about his power questions, “These questions lead to a conversation where buyer and seller are sitting on the same side of the table, trying to figure out what’s best for the buyer. That embodies a consultative selling experience.”
David Richman, a former talent and sales leader at Morgan Stanley, defines a consultant:
“What is a consultant? A consultant is someone who exhibits three qualities at all times:
- Has expertise in the relevant subject matters.
- Fully understands the client’s values and needs, especially related to the circumstances they are being asked to consult on.
- Always maintains an approach in giving advice that puts the client’s interests first.”
FAB
Media Square Recruitment suggests that you make sure to explain the advantages and benefits of the job you’re selling. You may think these points are self-explanatory after giving them the features, but going over them eliminates room for doubt and creates a more powerful draw. You should also make sure you tailor the way you describe the benefits and advantages to the candidate.
FAB stands for Features, Adventages, and Benefits. So basically, when using a FAB recruitment sales technique, you are explaining the features its advantages and how it benefits the buyer. In recruitment it can be:
- Features are distinctive atributes of the candidate or a company. It can be years of experience in a particular field, gender, years of age, or references.
- Advantages/Accomplishments are everything that makes the company or a client differentiate from other candidates and companies in that particular industry. It can be a fantastic client portfolio, the university they came from, or other significant accomplishments that make them perfect for the job role. Advantages of a company can be reputation, CSR, etc.
- Benefits explain how that candidate can help the company and vice versa. So basically the benefit of working at a certain company can be a competitive salary, work environment, and culture, bonuses, etc. If you are struggling to determine the benefits, just remember that they derive from features.
So, if you are creating a FAB presentation for a candidate, features would be what that candidate does, accomplishments how well they do it and their results, and benefits of how they can benefit a company.
AIDA Recruitment Sales Technique
The AIDA sales technique also helps you strategize the ability to entice another person, in this case, the candidate.
AIDA stands for:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
You want to focus on attracting their attention in the first 30 seconds, keeping their interest, stoking their desire for the job, and then providing an action. This might be the next interview, an opportunity to meet the hiring manager or a tour of the building.
SPIN
SPIN is similar to the Consultative sale technique, but it provides a step-by-step process to address the candidate’s problems.
Essentially SPIN stands for:
- Situation
- Problem
- Implication
- Need-payoff
You begin by asking questions about the candidate’s current situation, then expand to discuss the problems caused by this situation. Essentially these questions will help you understand their current situation and gather the necessary information.
You would go on to bring to light the implications of these problems, making the candidate more motivated to change and providing a framework to build solutions on.
Then, you would inspire the candidate to discuss how the job’s features and benefits would improve the situation so they will convince themselves.
Conclusion
These recruitment sales techniques apply to any sales tasks, including those performed by recruiters. You could benefit significantly from applying other business methods to your work, such as sales and marketing.
You can strategize your recruitment campaigns for the most efficient time management and everyone’s ultimate satisfaction.
So pick a sales technique or create your own based on these ideas, but don’t waste the opportunity to get to know the job, industry, and candidates.
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Also, check out:
Creative recruiting strategies.
9 tried and tested closing techniques for recruiters.
5 hiring lessons to learn from Steve Jobs.
Creative recruitment strategies.
How to hire good remote workers.
Hiring challenges faced by startups.