Lessons from the Wolf Pack is an ongoing series of recruitment advice articles taken from, or inspired by, situations and events observed during our phone coaching sessions with recruitment consultants making real, live calls to win business and find candidates. This is advice directly from the recruitment front lines!

Lessons from the Wolf Pack #8

How Many Calls to Make When Marketing a Candidate Out

Marketing out a candidate is a very effective recruitment activity that can be done in virtually all industry sectors and at all salary levels.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this its the process of identifying and fully interviewing a good candidate and then making direct calls to companies that might be able to create, or might have, a role for them.

Often the list of companies you are calling comes from the candidate but a lot of the time it's to your established client and prospective client database. As well as possibly placing the candidate it's a powerful business development tool as you are calling for a much more specific reason than simply - 'do you have any vacancies I can help you with?'

Also by making calls on behalf of a good (or even better) candidate you are showing your market place that you work with quality individuals.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is how many calls do you make on behalf of the candidate before you call it quits. And here's my answer ...

When marketing a candidate out given that you can’t dedicate all your time to one candidate, no matter how good, I would recommend that you make two calls to reach every decision maker at companies who might be interested in your candidate and then send an email to everyone you failed to speak with introducing the individual.

If the candidate is a star candidate then you can make a further call to follow up the email but the baseline of activity is two calls and one email for every target company and then moving on to other candidates and other vacancies.

Marketing Candidate Process

Process for each target decision maker:

Key: C = Call E = Email Brackets = optional additional action

CCE(C) – this is the classic method where you phone first – it has the advantage that you can gather email addresses on the first two attempts to reach the decision maker which makes it easier to email at the end.

ECC – a popular variation – your calls are following up an email that you have sent. Naturally this requires that you already have the email addresses. I don't agree with calling up purely to get the email addresses. If you are going to call the company then you might as well make an attempt to reach the decision maker.

There is no data as to which of the above methods is most effective. I feel that they have an equal chance of success whilst you are in the early stages of building a client base and your presence in an industry. Once established the second method is probably better as you are emailing decision makers who hopefully are at least aware of you even if they have never used you before.

Making Additional Calls

Additional calls can be made to companies you are particularly interested in doing business with. For example it might be that you have twenty target companies in total but three of those are of a size that particularly interest you.

Make your two calls and email to every company but continue to ring the three that are of particular interest by putting them into your sales system. At some point you have to stop but you make more efforts to reach them because they are a key target for you.

In Summary

Marketing out candidates is a great service to be able to offer your candidates and a great way of developing your own client base. If you're not marketing out at least two candidates a week then you might want to give this classic recruitment process a try!

More Recruitment Advice Next Week

That's all the Lessons from the Wolf Pack this week - tune in next Wednesday for more advice from the recruitment front lines. 

And remember if you're looking for recruitment training or recruitment coaching for yourself or your team give Edenchanges a ring or drop us an email today.

Until next time; be successful!