Today’s "Top Echelon Recruiting Tip" comes from industry trainer Jon Bartos of Jonathan Scott International. According to Bartos, there are two things that recruiters should be doing right now:

1. Increasing their call volume.
2. Being very selective about which job orders to work.

“It’s all about quantity,” said Bartos. “It’s about getting on the phone, making connections, and qualifying everything you get. The economy is sputtering right now, and it’s slowly creeping back, so recruiters have to increase their marketing calls and their recruiting calls.”

Bartos indicated that recruiters should make these calls with the goal of securing as many job orders as they can. Then they’ll have a number from which to choose and won’t have to be forced to work an order that could go nowhere.

“You have to be very choosy about what you work on,” said Bartos. “You should only work on the ‘A’ search assignments, the ones that are qualified.”

According to Bartos, there are a few questions that recruiters should ask themselves about a job order before working it:

• Is the company looking at internal candidates?
• Am I the only recruiter working this order?
• If I find a dead-on candidate, am I 100% sure that the company will hire them?

“The problem is that some recruiters are focusing on bad job orders,” said Bartos. “They might be seeing a lot of activity, but they’re not seeing the kind of results they want, and that’s because they’re not working ‘A’ job orders.

“Even if recruiters work an ‘average’ search, the chance of them filling it is not 50/50,” said Bartos. “They probably have a 10% chance of filling it. Today, it’s all about the quality of the job order. The volume has to go up, up, up. A starving recruiter will work just about anything. That’s why the volume has to go up, so you’ll have the choice of working on something good.”


Communications Coordinator Matt Deutsch is a writer for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog.)