Last week I had the honor of speaking at the conference of the National Association of Personnel Services (NAPS) in Houston, an event with lots of smart and talented people sharing information and learning good practices. Embedded within those good ideas, unfortunately, were Repetitive Practices, inefficient routines that are often the way things have always been done. These include:

• Candidate and client control
• Feature-benefit selling
• Always Be Closing
• Back to basics
• Value propositions
• Influencing or convincing clients or candidates
• Time kills deals

When people pause and honestly assess these tired ideas, they realize:

• Your can’t control anyone. You can facilitate a process that mutually benefits everyone.
• Customers don’t buy features and benefits. They do buy an improvement to their current circumstances.
• Closing isn’t as powerful as collaborating.
• Back to basics perpetuates the problem. Stay with the basics solves it for good.
• Value propositions pale in effectiveness to provocative stories.
• Trying to influence or convince anyone is a waste of energy and only does harm. Allowing people to convince themselves take less effort and helps your relationship.
• Time simply marches on. What kills the deal is the recruiter or salesperson who fails to gain agreement to a process, up front, that maximizes the time at hand.

It’s time that we, as an industry, begin to thoroughly question and assess what we’re being told, unless we’re satisfied with the status quo. I don’t know about you, but I want better for our industry. Better respect, better profits, and better processes that reduce our labor intensity. Perpetuating past practices isn’t going to make that happen.