Are You Recruiting or Selling?
Demand for your products and services is great but you’re not able to capitalize, because you can’t hire the people you need. I can’t remember a time when the labor market was this tight, but you’ve been here before. Just think back to the last time you had to grow sales in the face of intense competition or a slow economy. If you’re thinking “this is recruiting, not sales” then you can thank me for identifying the root of your problem, because recruiting is sales, and you should treat it as such.
Here are your three biggest recruiting problems and how you can fix them with a sales mentality:
You’re building a job description when you need a Recruiting Strategy. When I help people scale their business with EOS™, we build a Marketing Strategy that clarifies 4 things:
Target Market: What does our ideal customer look like and where can we find them?
Three Uniques: In what ways are we uniquely qualified to make our clients successful? How do we state that powerfully, concisely, and repeatedly?
Proven Process: How do we graphically explain to a prospect what their experience will be if they engage with us?
Guarantee: If things don’t work, how will we make it right?
Those four elements of the Marketing Strategy apply 100% to your Recruiting Strategy. If your gut reaction is that you can’t or aren’t willing to commit to a Proven Process and Guarantee for recruiting, that’s fine. You don’t have to build them… as long as you’re OK with losing to the people that do.
2. You’re treating recruiting like an event when you need to run a process. A good sales process turns your Marketing Strategy into action. It’s a continuous cycle of meeting people that fit your target, building relationships with them, earning the right to propose a solution for them, and closing deals. You run your sales process all the time because you know you’ll always need sales. You’re always going to need people, so why don’t you run your Recruiting Process all the time?
3. Your recruiting is owned by someone 3-deep in your business, when you need clear recruiting accountability at the leadership team level. Would you place accountability for hitting your sales target on someone who reports to someone who reports to your CFO? No, you’d place that accountability on a Sales professional who sits on your leadership team. You need to do the same with recruiting.
Before you do any of the above, you need a mindset shift. Entrepreneurs tend to slip into a scarcity mentality, which is understandable when you’re low on resources, high on issues, and keenly aware that payroll comes every other Friday. That scarcity mentality says, “I must make sure the revenue is coming in the door, and then I’ll hire the people to deliver on our promises.” But if you’ve had some measure of success, you need to switch to an abundance mindset, which says “I believe in myself and my team. We can get the revenue we need and deliver that revenue at higher and higher margins, as long as we have the right people in the right seats.” If you believe in yourself, you need to move to an abundance mindset, build a recruiting machine, and start down the path of getting the people you need.
Here’s an offer: I believe in you and would be glad to let you borrow that belief until we build the focus, systems, and confidence that allow you to believe in yourself.