The Cold Call Is Dead: Implications For Recruitment & The Job Search

The Cold Call Is Dead - What It Means For Recruitment & The Job Search

I was cold called yesterday. It was, it must be said, a brilliant effort
from a charity fundraiser from World Wide Fund For Nature - polite, well
researched and perfect in pitch & tone. It was almost a shame when I
delivered the inevitable to-the-point rebuttal that she was not getting
what she wanted out of the call.

What does it mean if the perfectly executed cold call, delivered at a good
time and to the ideal audience (I contribute annually to the World Wide
Fund For Nature, and signed up recently to a campaign of theirs) fails
so badly? It wasn’t the failure itself, bad enough a return to
investment this was for the cold caller, it was the fact that it was never going to work.

The telephone has been a staple of the sales business for as long as there
have been white collars at work. I believe that it has been on a long,
slow and now accelerating decline as a sales medium. Indeed, as we all
become more comfortable with alternative communication platforms now
available to us, it could be that the phone call is already dead as a
first contact medium. Here are a few reasons why:

1. It’s An Interrupt
We have a finite capacity to process information and we are rapidly
reaching the upper limits of it. Since the advent of the social web the
signal-to-noise ratio has become increasingly difficult to manage, with
corresponding damage to productivity, erosion to attention span and near
eradication of any ‘down time’ where no message is being sent or
received. An unsolicited phone call pitched into the middle of this
media maelstrom? You’d be lucky if it’s even noticed, much less picked
up and answered.

2. It’s An Open Ended Resource Risk
There’s always been an inherent resource risk in picking up the phone. A
connected call demands an immediate, open ended commitment on the part
of the receiver. It’s not an email which can be scheduled for action
later in the day, or a chat or text message which can be discreetly
ignored. When the phone was our primary conduit to the outside world, it
was mandatory to pick up in order to connect with the people we needed
to. Nowadays, with a multitude of channels available to us, there is no
longer any need to take the risk of an open ended commitment that comes
with picking up the phone on an unsolicited call.

3. It’s Might Actually Work
The phone is declining as a sales tool precisely it can and does work. A
paradoxical statement? Not when you look from the perspective of the
business that’s being sold to. There is a high risk that decisions are
made based on a sales pitch rather than the due diligence widely and
economically available through other means. Quite simply, there has
always been a tension between the agenda of the caller and receiver, and
now the receiver has cheaper and lower risk options of discovering the
services they need.

What Does This Mean For Recruitment & The Job Search?
This has profound implications for everyone in the recruitment industry or
in the process of looking for a job. Recruiters and job seekers have
always been united by a common challenge - getting hiring managers
interested in what they can do. If the phone call is no longer the sales
medium it once was, then a recalibration of where resources need to be
spent is essential if recruitment or job search objectives are going to
be met.

Agents are going to have to find new ways of approaching prospective clients,
or new ways to drawing them in. Job seekers can no longer expect any
mileage from making speculative calls into companies, attempting to
speak to this HR manager or that decision maker. New strategies and non
phone based approaches need to take central place in what is becoming a
nascent sales paradigm based on attraction marketing, online reputation
management and personal branding.

Final Thoughts
The phone call isn’t dead, but the cold call certainly is. It’s no longer
feasible to think you are going to be successful by interrupting people
in their overloaded working lives, and forcing them into the choice of
being rude or getting on with their day. Phone calls will continue, but
as a second contact medium, to deepen relationships with contacts
already made through other means.

Hung Lee is Founder & Director of Wise Man Say Ltd.

Comment by Hannah Butt on December 7, 2010 at 9:56am: Hi Hung,

Thanks for directing me to this post - a good read! And also lots of interesting comments.

From a TalentPuzzle perspective, the phone remains a vital part of our business development strategy - but I think you're right about cold-calling. Developments in social media have meant, for us, that the phone has evolved into a different tool entirely.

The majority of our sales calls are now "warm" rather than "cold". The building of a TalentPuzzle brand by creating a presence on linkedin, twitter, blogs, online newsletters etc means that many of the people on our call list have heard of us already, and some may have had some kind of contact with us already. More than this - online networking means that in some instances potential clients self-identify themselves as being appropriate to, and interested in, the services we offer.

The aim of these activities is not solely to make these kinds of calls easier for us, but this is a very useful side-effect.

Nevertheless, I still think that the phone is the only tool to consolidate these various forms of casual contact into something more formal.

For anyone else who's interested, I wrote a blog last week tackling the subject of recruitment agencies and how cold-calling can break-down communication between agencies and employers...
http://blog.talentpuzzle.com/online-recruitment-blog/good-recruitme...

Regards,

Hannah