Last week, I had the honor of speaking at the NJSA conference. I taught 3 workshops (Website ROI, online marketing, differentiating your staffing firm), and as always happens, the teacher ends up becoming the student.
So what did I learn? Here are just a few lessons:
- Recruiters get Web 2.0 marketing. If you want to learn how to lower your recruiting costs, attract higher quality talent, source candidates faster, and conversely use the web to generate sales leads, make time to attend some of the excellent training being taught to recruiters on LinkedIn, Facebook and other forms of social media. www.ere.net is a great place to find the trainers.
- Find a niche. In a down market, you have to create new opportunities. If you’re a generalist, and perceived as a commodity, it’s hard (actually impossible) to create demand. As a specialist, you can develop expertise in something beyond staffing. This gives you the opportunity to truly consult with your clients, teach them more strategic ways to use your services, and sell solutions to real decision makers. In the coming months, this may be critical to your success in the next 6 to 12 months. As an added benefit, by focusing you can better leverage your sales and marketing efforts to create a bigger impact with fewer resources. This will give you a dramatic edge on the competition.
- Listen to Jeff Skretny. I’ve had the opportunity to hear Jeff speak a couple of times, and every time I learn something new. Jeff is a technical recruiter and excellent speaker. As he told the story of how he completed his best year ever, he shared a ton of great ideas, but the one that sticks with me most was inventing competitive pressure. You see, Jeff was challenged by another recruiter to see who could produce the most over a 12 month period. And while Jeff may disagree, I think it was his competitive spirit more than anything else that motivated the actions necessary for exceptional performance. So as you face the challenges ahead, invent a little competition for your team to inspire creativity, innovation, and peak performance.
Thanks to Ken Sudnikovich and Jack Wellman for giving me the opportunity to speak – I mean learn at NJSA!
