Richard Milligan explains why recruiters need a phone script when 91% answer rates have dropped to 9% and calls last 11 seconds instead of 35. He made 18 dials, got 8 conversations and 7 appointments with a solid script. Most recruiters skip this entirely, creating a massive performance gap.
Hey everybody, it's Richard Milligan here with Four C Recruiting. I'm actually in my coaching studio where I coach 6 to sometimes as many as 9 hours a day. Had a great conversation recently with someone. I wanted to share it with you because it's extremely relevant if you're a recruiting leader. And honestly, if you're a recruiter, but what I really focus on is recruiting leaders in what I do. And that's someone who actually builds a team. Who's responsible for not just recruiting to the team, but leading the team. And that typically tends to be a market leader, a sales manager, a branch manager. It sometimes can be an area manager or regional manager that does recruiting while also leading. Let me leave you— let me tell you something here that's really important to what you're doing. One of the things I talk about a lot is that the phone has diminishing results. Meaning that like last survey we saw, um, sorry, I saw was like, um, it was like 11 million people that got surveyed. What they found is like 2 things are happening. Uh, one, we're answering the phone at a significantly less rate than ever before. Um, it's 9% of people will actually answer a phone today if you're not in the contacts list. So thank you marketers, you're ruining the phone for us, right? It's like 1 out of 11 will actually answer the phone. Now it's unique in some industries that you'll have a lot more people answer it because that's their primary place where they get their business, right? So you'll have more People answer it than 9%. But on the flip side of that, what we know is this, in just like 2 years, from 2017 to 2019, if it's a cold call, the amount of time that people actually spend on a call. So if I don't know you and you call me, that timeline's gone from 35 seconds that someone's investing into that call, it was down to 11 seconds. That's crazy. 2 years, a reduction of 66% or whatever that number is, the amount of time someone's actually going to tell you, I'm not interested, or just simply hang up on you in the middle of the call. That happens all the time, right? So why this is relevant, why I'm bringing this up in this video is this. I'm just coming out of a meeting with someone that actually in one day made 18 dials, got 8 people on the phone, got 7 appointments. Here's what's relative to this. Phone scripting matters a lot. Okay? Not only does phone scripting matter a lot, but being authentic in your phone script matters a lot. What does that mean? Look, most people don't know their phone script. Like, that's crazy to me. Like, you're a recruiting leader or you're a recruiter and you don't know your phone script. Now, I'm not being— I'm not being critical of this. I'm just a little incredulous of it. This is what you do. This is your craft. Okay? You have to know this, right? You gotta be able to— and I'm kind of being emphatic here for a reason. Because there's a big gap, okay? And the big gap between someone that can authentically speak a phone script that's a powerful phone script versus the person who's going to fumble over it and hope they get lucky with the meeting, there's a big gap there. What I would say is that the majority, okay, I don't know what the percentage is, but I can tell you it's way north of 90%. It's probably even north of 95%, okay? The majority of the people that I work with don't have a phone script And then the 1/10 of the 1/10 of the 1/10 of the 1%, which is virtually none, but my wife says don't use words like never and always. Okay? So, honey, this is for you. I'm going to say almost always. Okay? Almost always when I'm coaching, to my recollection, I haven't had anyone that said, I know my phone script and I'll own it. And here's what I say exactly verbatim. And here's how I overcome my objections. You as a recruiting leader have to get to a place where you own your phone script, where you can overcome the primary 3 objections that you're going to get, which is like, I'm not interested, I'm happy where I'm at, and I'm busy. Okay? Those are the 3 primary objections you're going to get, and you have to authentically be able to overcome those and get to a place where you can get a yes. And if you can, this is the inspiration part. If you can, you can make 18 dials, Get 8 people and set 7 appointments. True story. Okay, so I'm challenging you, get there. If you don't got a phone script, figure one out, right? Listen to my podcast. There's a— I actually talk about phone scripting on my podcast, Recruiting Conversations. Get there. The next part of that is own it, own it, own it. Okay, write it out, then record it, and then listen to it like you're OCD About knowing every word that you speak inside your phone script. Get to that place, write it out, record it, okay? There's— if you've got any type of smartphone today, you've got a recording device on your phone. And then replay it, replay it, replay it, replay it till you can regurgitate it coming straight out of deep sleep, okay? The 3 objections, know how to overcome those. You're going to get weird random other objections as well. And as you get those, own those objections and overcome those objections as well. Okay. Didn't intend for this to be a 5-minute video. Man, I am fired up about this. Like, you have to own your phone script. Okay. Recruiting Conversations is the podcast. We talk a lot about this, or we've talked about it in a couple of podcasts. So I invite you to listen to my podcast there. And until my next video, have a great week, everybody.
