The speaker outlines a disciplined daily workflow designed to maximise revenue for a contract recruiter. The routine starts the night before with a written day plan, eliminating morning indecision. In the morning the recruiter handles admin, emails and LinkedIn tasks, then immediately begins a 90‑minute business‑development (BD) window timed to New York’s 7 am (the recruiter’s 12:30 pm) to reach managers before their workday. After a brief desk‑lunch, the day is broken into two‑hour “sprints” focused on a single activity such as sourcing candidates or calling a list of prospects. Throughout the week the recruiter interleaves sourcing, BD, market research and lead generation. Success is driven by non‑negotiable daily targets – speaking to at least 10 candidates and 5 hiring managers, sending a set number of targeted spec CVs, and extracting concrete outcomes from each interaction (permission, referral, market insight, or next steps). The speaker stresses persistent follow‑up, pushing managers for alternative contacts, and confirming callbacks via email to demonstrate professionalism and stay top‑of‑mind.
Chapters
In the morning I'll come in, sort out all my admin. I always do my day plan the night before. As soon as I walk in the next day, I don't have to sit there for 20 minutes thinking what I'm going to do. And if you do it the night before, everything's fresh in your head of what's gone right and what's gone wrong, essentially. So you can build on that the next day. So that saves time in the morning. So come in, do all my admin, sort out my emails. I might build some more lists that I'm going to approach for BD or sort out some projects and stuff on LinkedIn. Just get everything sort of lined up that I need to sort admin-wise, go back to people. And then as soon as half 12 comes, half 12 is half 7 in New York. So I'll get on the phone and for an hour and a half just purely do BD. So catching managers before work. So I might be calling project leads and companies that are implementing Workday, general managers I know that are hiring and have been hard to get hold of. So I'll smash the phones for an hour and a half and then I'll typically have some lunch at my desk for 15, 20 minutes and then assess if I need to either find candidates for roles, I'll do that for— we typically split things up into sprints. So 2 hours per sprint of just focusing on one particular thing. So that might be just sourcing candidates. So right, for the next 2 hours, I'm just going to find candidates for X, Y, and Z, or I'm just going to call through these 100 candidates here that could be just to generate leads or whatever it is. And then again, assess my day and come back to, to more BD. But I think recruitment, there's not too many things you can do. It's a mixture of candidate sourcing, business development, but always throughout the week, you've got to build in things that are going to generate business outside of that, where it could just be like lead gen, it could just be doing some market research. And I think another important thing is to set yourself non-negotiable targets. So if you want to be successful and then, and, you know, bid a lot of money, you've got to be hitting targets that you set yourself, whether that is a certain amount of CVs you get out a day, per week, a certain amount of client calls that you have with managers. So like typically what we say here is that you've got to send out a certain amount of spec CVs per week, targeted specs. I'm not talking about bringing 100 people and just spec in absolute shit. I'm talking about random. Yeah. Get a good candidate into a project of a company, you know, that would need that person. That's a targeted spec that's going to actually get a job. We typically say you should speak to 10 candidates per day and 5 hiring managers per day as a minimum. If you do that every week, that's 50 candidates you've spoken to and 25 hiring managers. If you do that every week for a month, I can guarantee you, you'll be successful unless you go onto those calls and as I said, come away with something that is either, if you're speaking to a candidate, get their permission, send them to a vacancy, get some market knowledge, get a referral of another candidate they think is good, get a lead, or get a manager or two they've worked for before. And if you're speaking to a hiring manager, don't be afraid to push them. If they're like, right, I'm not speaking to you, I'm not right, just keep pushing them and say, you know, who is right? Who can I speak to? What is— who is right? Yeah, exactly. Is there a better time for me to call you back? And then follow them up with an email saying, thanks for your time, sorry I interrupted you. I'll give you a call back at this time on that day, just so that you show that you're on top of things and good at what you do.
