Cold leads are where most recruiting happens, but most recruiters waste time on them without capturing the work in a system. Build relationships before candidates start looking, and you'll be the trusted contact they call first.
So here's what I would say. Why are cold leads important? One, this is going to be who we're mostly going to speak with, right? And so once we've spoken with someone, we've invested time to qualify them, right? And we're talking about, you know, just to connect with them, we're having to qualify them, right? I mean, in most places, we're looking at their previous work tenure. We're looking at, you know, if you're hiring like in the space of being a recruiting leader, like what I coach to, you're typically looking for someone that's already got experience in the industry. So we're looking at production, we're looking at the intrinsic value that they would bring in terms of reputation and brand to the organization. Why in the world, after doing— investing all that time to qualify and just connect with them, we flush all that time, energy, and effort away? It only makes sense to capture on that by having a system. Because this is going to be who we're mostly going to speak with, this is one of the reasons why I'm going to be so fixated on developing these cold leads. The second part of this is most of you are fishing in smaller ponds. This podcast is being produced for recruiting leaders. The recruiting leader is someone that manages a team and then is also responsible for recruiting to that team. That means a lot of you are primarily focused on a single market or maybe Maybe a state. You may have— we may have some regionals listening to this that might be focused on a larger geography, but once you start fishing in that smaller pond, you'll— you— what you find is that this is actually a pretty small group of people that you're actually going to pursue. If you're, you know, typically looking for a producer who already has experience and has production history, that means that you have a limited number of people that you would actually recruit. So that's the second reason why cold leads are important to us. The third reason is this: there isn't much competition for them. Most people are looking for the person who's already experienced some sort of trigger event that's now ready to make a move. So if there isn't much competition for them and if it's more difficult and you've got to have a specific process to just even get in front of them, which is one of the things that I teach, And you're able to get in front of them while they're cold, guess what? You, you're the one that's on speed dial when that trigger even happens. And so the third reason why I'm so fixated on these cold leads is that, like, I want to be in blue ocean. I don't want to be in the bloody water. I don't want to be over here where everyone's fighting for this person that's talking to 5 to 7 companies. And when someone's had a trigger event take place, A lot of times they start engaging in multiple conversations when they don't have trust already built with someone. So if I work to build relationship prior to that and I'm in front of this trigger event, I think that's what great recruiters do. So when that trigger event happens, I am the only person that that individual makes contact with because they know, like, and trust me.
