Recruiters should build relationships with cold leads before they're ready to move, since people change jobs every 2-3.5 years and hire from contacts they know and trust. Without a systematic follow-up process, you only catch 5-15% of dissatisfied candidates. Ad-hoc outreach wastes energy.
So when we start looking at all the peripheral factors around this, one of the reasons why I'm so fixated on developing cold leads is this: some things just don't change, okay? There's certain things that are what I call evergreen strategies, okay? There's non-evergreen strategies, things that are always going to change. But from an evergreen perspective, one of the things that I know about us as human beings is that we do, we do business With people that we know, like, and trust. And that has not changed going back thousands and thousands of years ago. So with that being truth, if we can come to an agreement on that, then one of the things that we should— I think elevates this idea of why we should be fixated on developing cold leads is that you've got to build trust with someone. They've got to know you. They've got to like you before you ever get to a place before they're ever willing to align Their talents with you. So if we can come to some consensus on that, then what I would say is, why aren't we focused primarily on developing our cold leads? Because if at some point everyone's going to have a trigger event— average timeline for employment is somewhere between 2 and 3.5 years depending on the industry— so if someone's going to have that trigger event, then don't I want to actually be positioned as someone they know, like, and trust? So if they'd be willing to pick up the phone and say, hey, we have a relationship, things have changed over here, and I would like to talk to you. This is one of the reasons why I'm so fixated on developing cold leads. Now what this means is that we actually have to have a system in place. If we don't have a system in place, then, then we simply are just creating activities That have short runways on them. Right. So I think a lot of salespeople think in terms of let's just go muddy the waters. So we act like we're a bull in a china shop, just trying to make something happen, just trying to create energy. And if you don't have a system beyond doing, say, initial research and making that, you know, in our research, we're identifying this person as someone of interest to us. And then beyond that, actually stepping into this and having initial contact, We can do those 2 things all day long, but if we don't have a follow-up system in place, then we are constantly losing energy because we're only going after that 5 to 15% that would say they're unsatisfied where they are right now.
