Three Challenges Top Level Recruiters Face

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In today’s competitive job market, where unemployment is at a low, employees have many choices. It is much like the housing market where it is either a buyers market or a seller’s market. In this environment, you are likely going to face these three challenges. Read on and I will show you three simple strategies to overcome them.

Challenge 1: You have had a great year and wonder how you are ever going beat your sales revenue from last year. This is a common issue many recruiters faces year after year.

Solution 1: Look for things that your competition is not doing or is unwilling to do as a way to get new growth.

Michael Phelps has won the most gold medals in Olympic history, but he didn’t start at the top. In 2006, I spoke with him at an event I had organized, and I asked him how he achieved greatness.

“Everyone says you’re so successful in the water because you’re tall and your feet are huge and you’ve got this lung capacity. I’m guessing there’s something else to it.”  He replied, “Years ago, my coach said to me, ‘Hey Michael, are you willing to work out on Sundays?’ to which I said, ‘Yeah.’ He goes, “Great. We just got 52 more workouts in than your competitors, because most people take Sundays off.”

Knowing this one success secret as a professional or leader can prove to be valuable time and time again. The question to ask yourself if “What am I willing to do that my competition is not?” That’s what going to set you apart.

Challenge 2: How do you build trust with a new client?

Recruiters have to build trust to get a company to use them. Recruiters also have to build trust with executives who are happy in their job to consider the job opportunities at a time when they are “not looking.”

Solution 2 Many people think that if they give out enough information about how many successful placements they have made or all the benefits that come with a job that people will suddenly want to take action. The mistake is thinking if you get people to know you and the offering, they will then like you and eventually trust you.

The order is all wrong! People have to first trust you, which is a gut thing. In fact the handshake came about to show you didn’t have a gun in your hand. Then it moves to the heart where people decide if they like you or not. Then it moves to the head where people think “Can I see myself in this job?” Or “Can I see myself working with you?”

Once you know to start from the gut and work your way to the heart and then the head you will handle the trust issue.

Remember:

• Trust (Gut)
• Like (Heart)
• Know (Head)

Challenge 3: You and your recruiting firm are seen as commodities. The common objection is “you are all the same.”

Solution 3: The key to standing out so that people remember you when they are hearing a pitch is to tell a story!  The person who tells the best story gets the sale.

A good story has 4 elements:

• Exposition-Paint the picture of who, what and where
• Problem-Describe a problem someone else faced so the client sees themselves in your story.
• Solution –Tell a story that shows you overcoming an obstacle and going the extra mile for a client
• Resolution –What is life like after working with you? How happy is the new employee in their new job? How much revenue has the new employee you placed generated for the company?

Now you know how to build grow your business beyond your previous success, new ways to build trust and how to make sure your story is compelling and memorable. To be the best and stay on top, you must let go of the old way of selling and pushing out information. The new way of selling is to tell stories that pull people in and make you irresistible.  Start using storytelling to become a revenue rock star!

Persuasion With An Added Twist

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How do you persuade someone to do what you want them to do? Take your side, buy from you, invest in you, hire you and listen to you?

When I interviewed Dr. Robert Cialdini he opened up a whole new area of persuasion that is in his book Pre-Suasion. The process starts before you talk! Here is what he said:

“Pre-Suasion, is that it doesn’t matter how good a seed you have, if the ground hasn’t been prepared ahead of time, it’s not going to bear fruit until that cultivation is done. Something else has to happen first for the thing really to get leverage and traction.

You talk about that in your book Pre-Suasion where it says, “There’s a privileged moment for change that you need to have to get people to be receptive to your message.” Can you expound upon that? I love the analogy of the fruit of soil.

Privileged moments are those moments that occur just before a message is delivered so as to create a state of mind in recipients that’s consistent with the forthcoming message. It’s the moment in which we can arrange for others to be attuned to our message before they encounter it. That step is crucial for maximizing desired change.

For example, in one study, when researchers approached individuals and asked for help with the marketing survey, only 29% agreed to participate. If the researchers approached a
second sample and preceded that request with a simple presuasive question, “Do you consider yourself a helpful person?” Now, 77.3% volunteered to help with the survey. Why? When asked before the request if they were helpful, nearly everyone answered yes. Then when the request occurred, most agreed to participate in order to be consistent with the recently activated idea of themselves as helpful people.”

How can you plant the soil so your seed of persuasion grows fast?

To read more about persuasion visit https://johnlivesay.com/persuasion-keynote-speaker/

“Storytellers Rule The World” Plato

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Whoever tells the best story gets the sale. How do you tell a great story? What if fears are just stories we tell ourselves?

When I had Michael Brenner on my podcast, he shared his storytelling secrets:

The digital world we live in is something that you can take advantage of if you commit to being consistent about it. Twitter came out and I signed up and got a Twitter account. I didn’t get it for a long time. Then I started blogging and I realized that when you add content, you create to an audience you’ve nurtured on the social platforms, the combination of those two things can be powerful. That led me to being asked to do things like podcasts, webcasts, webinars and things like that.

As I overcame my fear of public speaking, I found that I love it. In the digital world that we live in, it’s consistency. I wrote a mission statement for myself that I didn’t want to just sponge knowledge out of the world, I wanted to give back. As soon as I made that commitment, that meant writing and speaking. It emerged and I feel so fortunate to be able to do what I do. The recognition was never something I sought out, but obviously, it’s great to see.

What I hear is that the shift from worrying about what you’re going to do and getting it out to the world in your speaking helps you overcome the fear of speaking, and then the same thing is you don’t want to just take knowledge, you want to give it out. Your purpose is what drives you. I hear that time and again from successful people like yourself, who tell me, “My bigger purpose is, and that’s what drives me, and then the results come from that,” as opposed to, “My purpose is to get recognized as X, Y and Z.” Would that be a fair summary?

Absolutely. To the question you asked, I didn’t seek to become a public speaker, let alone a recognized one, but public speaking was an extension of that mission of trying to share what I know and what I love to do with others. Speaking is one of the platforms that I use to do that.

One of the things you and I share in common in addition to both being keynote speakers is we both have been in the shoes of our audiences because you have this background of working for companies, so you know what it’s like to have a quota and meet deadlines and get promoted and all that stuff. That brings a whole other level of credibility and authenticity. For me, my purpose is to help as many people as possible get off the self-esteem rollercoaster of only feeling good if their numbers are up because I was on that rollercoaster and it wasn’t fun. I love what you’re doing of helping people figure out a way to take the content they’re creating and get a return on investment, which leads us to your great book. If you haven’t seen the cover of Michael’s book, I highly encourage you to go to Amazon.com and look up The Content Formula and buy the book. Tell us where the cover image came from because that’s a great image.

The frustration that led to the book was all around the massive amounts of money that I see companies wasting. There’s not a single company out there of any size that isn’t wasting 40%, 50%, sometimes 60% of either marketing budget or even the time and effort they put into marketing. I tried to dumb it down and simplify it. For your audience who haven’t jumped over to Amazon, it’s an image of a piggybank. It brings you back to those days when you were a kid and you were saving the quarters that grandma gave you in your birthday card. The answer to the question, “How do you stop wasting all that money?” is simple. The frustration that I feel is almost juvenile. It makes me so crazy I want to bang my head against the wall. The goal of the book is to try to shed some light on the simple answers. For example, we’re all storytellers and there are experts inside every company. We had the Super Bowl and you see $5 million spent on a 30-
second ad and it’s easy to see why our egos lead us down paths to creating communications in our companies that don’t resonate. Yet, our companies are filled with great people who have real stories to tell, that can help their customers, and we have to expose that. If we do, we can achieve the ROI and the growth in our business that everyone’s looking for.

What story will you tell about yourself and what you are selling?

To read more on selling go to https://johnlivesay.com/storytelling-keynote-speaker/