Hook New Clients with a Tantalizing Case Study

A new year is right around the corner.  How will you position yourself to develop more business in 2012?   A great way to start is to share how your happiest, best satisfied clients have benefited from your service in the form of a case study.

The best part about conducting a case study is that, as a recruiter, you have a wealth of resources for this type of marketing initiative:  good interviewing skills, listening skills, and a aptitude for connecting and networking with people.  The hardest part is getting it down on paper.  But, once you do, you have a marketing goldmine – a piece of collateral you can reshape and use again and again.

Prep Work

1.  Make a road map.  You want to use your case study to make a compelling argument for using your recruiting firm.  Prepare a few open-ended interview questions that will help to develop a rich case for your company.  Focus on uncovering problems your clients had that your recruiting firm solved.
2.  Get the cold hard facts.  Think about any metrics that your clients would have that can support your case.
3.  Test the waters.  You may have a few clients who would make great case studies in mind already.  But if not, you can save some time from interviewing the “wrong” client by sending out a short survey, first.  Email potential interviewees with a brief questionnaire to help gauge their interest and appropriateness for doing a case study.
4.  Get them on board.  Hesitant about asking clients to do you a favor and participate in your case study?  Remember that it is positive exposure for their company as well.  And there’s no shame in offering a gift card to sweeten the deal – the pay off will more than make up for the cost.

Get the Story

5.  Prep your interviewee.  Schedule a time to speak with them in advance so they have plenty of time to answer your questions in depth.  In addition, emailing the interview questions in advance may help interviewees to give more developed answers.
6.  Info gathering.  Interview your selected clients in person or over the phone.
7.  Create a narrative.  Everyone loves a good story.  And every good story has conflict and resolution.  As you right your case study, focus on the problem your client had, and how your firm helped them to solve it.  Include compelling quotes and metrics to back up your study.

Market Your Work

8.  Quotable quotes.  Pull great quotes from your case study to use as testimonials on your website and other marketing collateral.
9.  Go Viral.  Turn an interesting point made by a client or candidate into a viral blog post.
10.  Why your firm?  Post the case study on your website or use as print material to send to prospective clients.
11.  Make it purty.  Visualize client metrics in a fun infographic that tells their success story.
12.  Post it.  Share everything with your social networks.
13.  Spread the word.  Ask the featured interviewee to share with their social networks, expanding your audience.

If you start now, you could have a few client success stories ready to rock for 2012.

Recruiters Have Much to Be Thankful for This Thanksgiving

Despite recession woes, it’s still a great time to be a recruiter.  Here are ten reasons to chew on this Thanksgiving:

10.  There are still excuses for being a lazy recruiter from time to time.

9.   Job boards are dying.  Whether you believe this statement or not, recruiters can be content with the fact that hiring will always be a people business, and it’s the people who will decide how they want to search for jobs.

8.  There are always new tools for connecting with people.

7.  Competition for passive candidates is compelling recruiters to be more creative.

6.  Evolving search engine changes mean that marketing your recruiting firm online means focusing on producing great content instead of trying to figure out how to trick search engines.

5.  Staffing firms are growing, and even making the Inc. 500 list.

4.  You don’t need fat paychecks to attract young talent these days.

3.  Recruiters are living in the age of Siri, and now can have access to a personal assistant without coughing up health benefits.

2.  Thinking about starting your own firm?  Now is the perfect time to start-up.

1.  Recruiting is entering the realm of reality television.  People love reality TV, no matter how bad it is.  It’s a good thing.

Happy Thanksgiving!

In Missouri, there are only two preciously short weeks in November that you can shoot an antlered deer with a firearm.  Every year, men and women all over the state get out their hunter orange and camo, and prepare to sit in a tree in the wee hours of the morning, hoping that a huge buck will wander in front of their sight lines.

While every season, 40% to 70% of the antlered deer population is killed in Missouri, only 1 in 5 hunters will actually get a deer.  So, really, the majority of people who get their hunting license, prep their deer stand, gas up their four wheelers, and head out into rural Missouri will come back empty handed.

Why do they keep doing it?  And are they that different from the recruiters who work every year toward some internally-spoken goal, knowing that only a select few of them will reach big biller status?

According to jonbartos.com, only the top half of one percent of all recruiters bill over a million dollars a year.  While the majority of recruiters isn’t necessarily coming back empty handed, the uber successful few and far between.

So why do we keep up the hunt when, chances are, billing millions will always be just a dream?

Ignorance….is bliss.  Some of us are just out there, not aware that, in terms of billing, our career will be mediocre at best.  Then again, maybe not knowing the odds are against you is just what some recruiters need to succeed?

Thrill of the hunt.  Maybe we are like a hunter who got a 6 point buck a few years ago.  Maybe we got lucky, fell into a hot niche, and just happened to have a great year once.  And we won’t rest until we can surpass it.

Experience driven.  There are some hunters who don’t really care much about shooting deer.  But they do like sitting around drinking beer with their buddies, or like the excuse to unplug for a few days, or maybe they just enjoy sitting in the woods at the crack of dawn.

Maybe most of us are like that.  We realize there is this illusive 12 point buck that is big biller status.  But that’s not what is in our sight lines.  We like reaching out to people, making connections, giving an exceptional candidate an awesome opportunity, or finding a great client the perfect match.  And, we’re happy to do it every day of the year, no matter what it adds up to.

Weathering Inevitable Change Online

Klout, the site that measures your social media activity to calculate your online influence, changed their algorithm in late October.  Klout users’ scores dropped, spurring a stream of negative buzz on Klout’s website.  But this isn’t the first time a change has resulted in discontent among the online masses.

Panda
The Google Panda update wreaked havoc on page rankings throughout the web in an effort to squash irrelevant links in the search results.

Netflix
Netflix changed their pricing structure, raising the price of online streaming and sending Netflix users into a tailspin.

Facebook
Recent changes to make way for the Facebook Timeline has users in a tizzy.

Should You Play by the Rules?
We’re conditioned to work a certain way to get ahead – like settling for a B-list streaming movie because you used up your dvds for the month, or writing loads of keyword stuffed articles to get a better page ranking – and feel powerless when changes wipe the slate clean again.

Then again, these sweeping changes can give us a new perspective on what we are really trying to accomplish online.

Look, if you’re working on increasing your [Klout] score you’re focusing on the wrong thing. Focus on actually BEING influential and you’ll weather any algorithm change that happens now and in the future.  -Kyle Wegner

Maybe we are focusing on the wrong thing.  Having to most Twitter followers, the highest page ranking for a keyword, or the best Klout score is great.

But, what’s even better, is converting the most Twitter followers to candidates, coming up in a Google search when a client is actually looking for a recruiter, and attracting new business through your social media influence.

Just Keep Swimming
Pursue what is working for you, not necessarily what works for everyone else.  Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.  Focus on the metrics that directly influence the bottom line.