How to Qualify Candidates Like a Pro (45 Min Training)

Hey guys, welcome back to yet another episode of Top Billers Toolkit, where me and my twin brother interview top billers from all around the globe to unlock the secrets to their success. Today's guest is back by popular demand. It's Craig Whiting. We had an overwhelmingly positive response on Craig's episode, and it's racked up hundreds of hours of watch time on Spotify and YouTube, so we had to bring him back on. If you haven't seen Craig's first episode, he gets freakishly good results with new recruiters. In their first year, they end up billing $300K, and second year they typically hit $400K. Insane results for newbies, and a lot of it comes down to the brilliant training that Craig has prepared for them. On today's episode, we're going to be delving deeper into candidate qualification and role qualification, two of the most important parts in the sales process when it comes to recruitment, but where a lot of people still slip up on. Guys, Craig is an expert at his craft. Before he became a manager, he was a million-pound biller. He has got so much knowledge and I really, really love this episode. So I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. As usual, grab a cuppa or a glass of wine depending on when you listen to this. Let's get into it, shall we? Hey Craig, welcome back, mate. How are you?

Yeah, very well. Thank you, mate. How are you?

Yeah, very good. Thank you, dude. Very excited to have you back. You're the second recruiter to come for round 2, so this is a, this is a great moment. Um, your first episode got our highest watch time on Spotify. It's on like 300 hours watch time, which is insane. The people loved you so much that we had to get you back. So, uh, so thanks for coming.

Yeah, very honored. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure. And so just to add a bit more context to this call, um, for anyone that doesn't know, Craig has an insane training system for his recruiters. I've seen it. And what we— what I wanted to do, um, this podcast is go a bit deeper into that training because he's got like hours and hours of like really specific training, which is I'm sure one of the reasons why your recruiters bill $300K in the first year and $400K in the second year. Um, so I'm diving into that, but let's start with the first question. Let's keep it broad for now and then we can go a bit deeper. Um, if you were a new recruiter coming into the market, what would be some of the, the core fundamental principles to understand? Craig, what would you say?

Um, it's a tricky question because obviously there's, there's different industries and, and every market has its nuances, but fundamentally, like, there are core talents that, you know, form the bedrock of a good recruiter that is going to be true across all industries, which is, you know, hard work, perseverance, resilience, work ethic, empathy, all this sort of stuff, right? The stuff that everyone says and everyone knows. I think if you had a recruiter that's coming to the industry now, it's a very different time than how it would have looked even 5 years ago, but certainly 10 years ago. And a lot of the norms that would have worked, you know, back in the day are not really going to work anymore. So there's a real sense of, um, there's been like the individualization of recruiters now. So particularly with LinkedIn, historically you had company website, you had a company name, you had a database, you had all this leverage that you could wrap up around your brand. And I had it at the beginning with Huxley where you could kind of call people and say, I work for Huxley, and you've got a bit of brand recognition there. I think the big difference is that now nobody cares. Like, they care about you as an individual. People have much, much more of a platform to utilize and generate like content, um, but also access, right? So turn up someone, I'm gonna— I got a database now is, is irrelevant. Like, so is everyone. No one really cares. Um, so I would always distill everything down to your— the sum of two things: your knowledge and your reputation. And you can only get a reputation by building knowledge. It's— you, you can't, you can't create a good reputation in any other way. So if you're like day one in recruitment Everyone's going to tell you like all of the high levels of like pick up the phone and all this sort of stuff and like the, the kind of the macro, you know, macro bullshit. But from a micro level, if you don't prioritize your own reputation and you don't prioritize doing a good job and you don't prioritize putting your stakeholders ahead of yourself in terms of like your clients and your candidates and prioritizing those stakeholders through processes, you're not going to be successful. And then secondly, if you don't invest in building your own knowledge, how do you ever evolve from being someone that's always got to find new business and always got to find new candidates? Because no one's going to come back to you because you don't know enough to build a reputation and be successful. So knowledge and reputation are like super important. And then using your interactions with candidates, so, you know, in candidate qualification, for example, with clients, when you're understanding their roles, when you're understanding their strategic direction and everything else to, to use those opportunities to then build the knowledge base and do it in real time while you're doing the job rather than conceptually on day one with someone telling you like, this is what we recruit for, and then it's right now, go pick up the phone and sod off sort of thing.

Hmm. Understood. Sorry, Ben, you have a— No, I'm just going to say, um, that's a really— that's really interesting. And if I was to say there's a new recruit listing here right now and there's like, oh, that's, that's really interesting. If there was like one thing I could do for knowledge Um, for both those categories, there's one thing I could do every day. Do you have any tips on that? Any kind of tangibles? And if we were to simplify it, okay, if you do this every day and you do this every day, you'll get more knowledgeable, you'll be more experienced, and you'll be a better recruiter.

Yeah, talk to candidates, ask questions, listen to the answers. Like, no one does it. The thing is, people don't do it right. So most recruiters turn up and all they think about is, how do I do a deal? And it's not their fault because they get beaten around the head and they turn up and everything's about doing a deal and you can understand why it is the way it is. But if you take yourself out of it and look at like, okay, well, it's really easy to talk to candidates because candidates want to talk to recruiters about, you know, jobs. Use it to find out like, who did you work for in your last role? What did you do? Why would someone pay you to do that? Is this, is this something that other companies pay people to do? Is this like a common skill set? Is it, is it very niche? Find out stuff about the organization. How does the culture work? How's it structured? What does progression look like? How innovative are they? You know, how behind the curve are they? How much churn do they have? Build all this knowledge because they're going to give it all to you anyway, and then go and talk to someone else and do the same thing. And then ask some questions like, in your experience with agencies, like, how could they do better? How could I add the most amount of value to you? And after 5 calls, you're going to see the common threads, but also you're going to have like a bank of knowledge. And then you're going to go and talk to the sixth person and they're going to go, wow, that lady or that guy is, is the best recruiter I've spoke to for a long time, just because you're gonna, you're gonna have stuff that's credible relative to them. But if you just get on and go, right, I want to do a deal, so do you meet this job spec, yes or no? Where else are you interviewing? Okay, I'll send you a CV, but I actually won't because I don't know if you're good enough yet. See you later. How do you, how do you do it? Like, so that's the easy answer. And then you learn through osmosis as much as anything else and just actively listening rather than waiting for your turn to start talking again.

Yeah, actively listening. I'm still learning that one. That is, that is a hard one to, to get right. Um, when I was going through your training, and we're kind of already deep into the candidate qualification, but you, you did put an emphasis on everything, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Craig, but everything in the training, you seem to put a super emphasis on candidate qualification being the most important part of the process. Um, is that right? And if so, why did— why are you making that super specific to the people you're training?

Yeah, so candidate qualification, role qualification, the two of them kind of work in tandem. But for me, understanding candidates is— and, and your qualification of a candidate is, is right up there as one of the most two one of the most important things that you're going to do for a number of reasons. But like, fundamentally, we have no product, you know, we don't sell anything as recruiters. We provide a service, right? And that service is candidates. But we're not providing candidates. That's not the, the reason that someone would engage an agency. They engage an agency to save time, because on a long enough continuum, every client could fill all their roles themselves. Um, and the time variable will differ from market to market. So If you're someone who places portfolio managers with hedge funds, it might take you 2 years to send them the right candidate. But if that person generates a billion plus of revenue a year for that hedge fund, they would consider that to be an acceptable time to wait. You're still adding value. If you were hiring a software engineer for the same hedge fund to do a 2-year project that they needed to kick off within the next 3 months, taking 2 years to find that perfect candidate would be unacceptable when you focus on time, right? Your, your value to a company, a client, is, um, related on like how effective are you at providing a service. That service is good candidates, but how efficient are you doing it in a, in a way that saves them time? Yeah, the, so what they're looking at is can you find me efficient candidates fast? But then secondly, if I'm going to invest my time in interviewing these candidates, I want them to show up. So how do you avoid them getting counter-offered and disappearing? And this is a fundamental issue, right? Because a lot of recruiters suffer from dropping offers, and I had it myself in my early days where you'd get an offer and you'd be like, I don't know if I can close this or not. Which for me now, looking back, and this is somewhere that it took me a little bit of time to get to, but fundamentally it's unacceptable. Because why are you willing to do all the work that you need to put in to get someone to an offer stage to then lose it, and that's okay. And where you lose is candidate qualification. Everything will come back from there. So how we break it down, or the reason why it's so important: number one, it's your first meaningful interaction with the candidate. Talk about reputation, right? You only get one chance to make a first impression. If you come off that call and you don't really have a lot of answers, you don't have good information, you're not credible, you don't come across as someone who knows what they're talking about, How the hell are you going to try and get that person to trust you and influence them down the line when you're pushing them to go to the interview but they've got another offer? Or you're trying to talk to them and get time on the phone about them taking your offer over someone else's offer because you've already framed their perception of you as you don't really know what you're doing, or you're not credible, or you're not knowledgeable enough, or you've only got your own best interests at heart, or whatever it might be. In the same scenario as If you went to view a house, right, and then the estate agent called you and you gave them a criteria of what you were looking for house-wise, and the first house that they came to you with didn't meet the criteria, or you asked some questions about it and they didn't have any answers, but they're going, take some time off work and come and view this house, but they're not backing it up with credibility, you'd be skeptical at best. But also, when that same estate agent was trying to influence you to buy the house you wouldn't put their, their input at the same level of value, right? So candidate qualification, first opportunity to create a first impression. That first impression is going to carry you through the entirety of the process, however long your process is. Secondly, it's your opportunity to get under the hood of the needs of this candidate, to make an assessment of them as to, is this someone that's actually viable for me to continue to invest time into? What a lot of agencies do is they have a role and they have a requirement and they try and force people into the box. So square peg, round hole, because it's like send CVs and CVs and CVs, right? Where's the value in getting someone to an interview when you already know that they're not going to take the job because the role doesn't align properly or they're over budget or, or whatever? You're going to invest a load of time into a process, time that you don't have because it's time that should be spent, something's going to make you money, for nothing. So candidate qualification is your window to put yourself into it, but not in a way of going, I'm all about me and I'm doing a deal, but it's a way of looking at a candidate and going, what's important to you? Why? How does your role look? How does progression look for you in your current company? How do you feel about that? How could another role give you more? And then they give you answers and you say actually that is aligned to what I'm looking for. Their definition of what good progression looks like matches what good progression in my client looks like. I feel confident putting this person in front of them because it's something that's going to be viable. But if you've got someone who says, I want to leave this company because my only route of progression takes me away from being hands-on and makes me a manager, and I don't want to be a manager, and you know that the company you want to put them in front of, the next promotion would make them a manager that will come out through the process and they're not going to take the job because you don't understand the needs properly, you don't understand the motivation. So it's, it's, it sets the framework for all of your future chats. It's your opportunity to qualify them relative to your role, but it's also your opportunity for like to, to, to provide the knowledge and the nuance and the, the, the subject matter that they need to know if it's worth them investing time in. And the more you do that, then as you go through the process, you're going to get buy-in, you're going to be able to close more offers, you're going to avoid counter offers. And even if you rolled this into like a super transactional recruitment company model, right, where you're like, it's one-stage process or two-stage processes and you don't need to qualify all these people because you just like throw in CVs over the wall and they hire in volume, right? Okay, fair enough. But you're gonna have to do a lot more deals per, per head to generate the same amount of money as someone in a higher yield market that has to make one placement, that spends more time on candidate qualification, right? Logic would say that in that very transactional model, your dropout rate is going to be higher as a percentage. So let's say you lose 50% of offers and you make 20 placements a month. Well, you could make 30 because you've lost, you've lost 10 already. And logic would probably say the reason you lose them is other offers, to other, um, to counter offers, to they're not aligned, it doesn't fit for them. You get them to the point and then they fall out. Well, what could you— if you spend an hour per candidate, that's 10 hours a month. It's 120 hours a year that you're wasting. And if you understand your metrics and your ratios, what could you do with those 120 hours? If you could do another 10 placements a month, or even 5 placements a month on top of what you're doing right now, what does that mean for money? Like, what does it mean for you, for your career and everything else? So it's, it's across all markets. It's about like using candidate qualification as a gateway to know how can you protect your time, but also how do you add more value to the client, and how do you appear more knowledgeable, more credible, and then how do you get more stuff over the line? Um, which is a long-winded way of saying it's really fucking important.

Love that, man.

That's fine.

Um, it's funny because, yeah, you mentioned metrics. Whenever I hear about recruiters wanting to make more deals, there's always more clients, there's always more, more jobs, but very few people speak about their, their candid placement ratio and how many people drop out. So I think it's a really important conversation.

Um, also dropouts, right? If you have Like, if I go to any hiring manager anywhere and say, how can an agency add the most value to you? I would argue that the first two things they would say, beyond the basics of like, don't be a dick and know roughly what you're talking about, the first two things they'd probably say is stop losing people to counters. If you can. That would help me because I'm investing huge time in these interview processes, reviewing CVs, doing all this sort of stuff. And even on the very transactional model where there are, um, less interview rounds, they're probably reviewing a lot more CVs. So it's still very time-consuming. They're still having to invest this time. So to then invest all that time to then lose someone to a counter, to have to start again, that's not good for a client and a hiring manager. And it becomes your name is associated with the aggravation. And this is another thing, to go back to your first question of what do new recruiters need to know. Number one, never ever have your name associated with aggravation in any way. Everything you do in front of clients should be seamless, down to the way that you present a CV and how the CV looks, the way that you provide availability and how easy and obvious it is when they open the email, they can just see it straight away. This stuff, like the small stuff, is so important because it creates connotations of easy. And you want your offers to be easy because it's not valuable to a client if you're really good at filling roles with them, but every role is like an arm wrestle to get someone over the line and they invest loads of time in it because the feedback will be, yeah, they can find good people, but like it's a lot of hard work, it's a lot of aggravation. So that hamster wheel of like always have to find new clients, well, you can alleviate a lot of those problems by just reducing your dropped offer rate. Because you become associated to, yeah, they deliver and it's easy. That's all anyone wants. They just want ease of access, right? The second one they're going to look at is how do you get more qualified candidates faster, not how do you get me more people to interview. No one wants to interview 10 people to hire one if they can interview one person to hire one. And maybe someone wants a comparison. All right, interview 3 people and hire one. But if you can, if you can invest 3 hours as a hiring manager to hire one versus 10 hours, and on your less interview model you're going to hire on bigger volume, so the hours still stack up, that's more valuable from, from a recruiter perspective, right? How do you get better at finding better and better candidates that are going to go over the line to reduce your CV to interview ratio? We'll qualify them. And then expand on the qualification to the hiring manager. This is why I'm sending you this person. You said you want ABC. Well, this person has done ABC over here. They've done this. Their motivation is this. This is their view of what progression looks like. I understand that progression in your world looks like this, so there's a good match. This is the sort of culture they're looking to join. I mean, this is for perm, but even for contract, like, understanding this stuff and presenting it, someone on the other side of that seeing that, that write-up with the CV is going to go, wow, these people really do a good job. They know what they're looking at. I'm going to come back to them.

Mm, love that.

Now you don't have to do so much new business.

I got this impression on the last call, Craig, it's all about the details with you, which I absolutely love. It's like these, these details that you— I wouldn't normally think about, wouldn't normally come up in conversation, but you are painting a bigger picture, which is really fascinating. Um, I just want to jump to hunt objections. I found that really interesting, kind of obvious for, for a lot of salespeople, but I would love your kind of take on it, Craig. So, um, you're not looking for somebody to be right, you're looking for them to be wrong. Um, can, can you— what's your kind of take on this when you teach your, um, your recruiters?

Yeah, we, we are looking to find candidates. We're looking to find all the reasons why someone's not right, because if we can find them, a client will find them, because they know actually what they're recruiting for, and, and we're inferring. Like, everything is inference on secondhand information. Um, if you can't find a reason that someone's wrong, there's a very good chance that they're right. So where a lot of, um, agents, recruiters, headhunters, new people in the industry go wrong is they're so, they're so desperate to just hit numbers. They're so desperate to get CV out the door and to get an interview and to do a deal, and it's just do a deal, do it like all the time, that they'll overlook glaring, you know, weaknesses in candidates, massive red flags, huge objections. Almost on the hope that it will kind of magically sort itself out. And I can understand it, like, oh, well, maybe when they hear more from the horse's mouth, they might change their mind or whatever, right? But like, fundamentally, we're only ever going to be able to test to sort of a surface level in terms of actual ability for someone to do a job. And then we can really get into the weeds on like candidate needs and the more of the emotional more of the qualitative side of things. So that's where a recruiter really adds a lot of value. And then we can also try and get under the hood in terms of things that are actually important in a macro perspective in terms of like progression is a big one or culture or other things. If you're touching on these points and you're getting objections internally, not candidates not being interested, but like you already know, like, ah, this doesn't really stack up. Like, for example, company wants candidate in the office 5 days a week, candidate currently does 2 days a week in the office. You talk about 5 days and they kind of go, oh yeah, well maybe, you know, are there any reasons that you would struggle to do that? Well, you know, I've got 3 kids, I do the school run, I've got a dog and I'd have to get some, some a dog sitter or whatever. They're never going to do 5 days in the office. When push comes to shove, it's never going to happen, or they're going to need some sort of monumental comp uplift. So this needs to be handled now. And this is an objection where you don't, you don't pump it down the line and sort of go, I'll deal with it later, because then it becomes aggravation for the client. You either send it, but you give them the steer. This is a situation, this is this, this is this, they're going to need a much bigger bump to cover the cost of childcare and dog care and everything else. And then you, you qualify that with a candidate first, you have exact numbers on what it looks like. But then you also get into like, what have you spoke to the missus about it? And like, how will this actually work in reality? If you can find that objection, don't waste the X amount of hours you're going to spend through the process just for that person at the end to not take the job because it's 5 days a week in the office. Because you already know, what's the point? Use that time to go and find someone that can work 5 days a week in the office and make some money. But that's the slightly longer term thinking outside of just weekly KPIs, you know. And this is what we spoke about the first time we spoke, of like stop beating people around the head about deals and start like giving them the bandwidth to prioritize doing a good job because you'll get to deals faster.

Hmm, really interesting. Um, just on the same topic of objections, are there— I'm sure there's potentially hundreds of objections that you could find, or maybe that's an exaggeration. There's probably a lot of objections you could find. If you were to whittle it down to like the core objections that you're really looking for, Could you, could you summarize that into categories? Like, would it be progression, salary, and culture, or would it be, you know, 5 things that you have on the list, or does it vary hugely from candidate to candidate?

I mean, it's— no, it doesn't vary. Like, at the end of the day, people are people and jobs are jobs, and it's all the same thing. Like, a very rare person would say, yeah, I'd be doing this if I didn't need money. Like, everyone's doing it for a reason, right? So you've got, um, You've got nuts and bolts logistics that have to be handled. Money is one, uh, location, commute, ability to do it, willingness to go in the office is a big one now because obviously work from home post-COVID has become very tribal. Um, visas— someone needs a visa and your company don't sponsor visas, like, that's a pretty big objection. So these are quite important, but they're fairly easy, they're surface level. Um, when you want to get into understanding of like why people are going to take jobs, but also where are these objections going to come from— nuts and bolts is one side, then you've got into actual like what are the reasons people take jobs. So in my opinion, people don't take jobs for money. They take jobs because they want the job and they have an expectation that that job should pay a certain amount of money to, to, to be commensurate with the skill level. Or they have real-world financial requirements, which is just the world we live in, that mean that job has to meet a certain, um, financial bar. But the money is, is, is, is an essential, is a must-have, of course, but it's not the primary driver. It's like, again, the house. You don't buy a house on price, but budget is important. Right? So you have your budget, and your budget is your budget. But someone just wouldn't turn up and go, well, here's a house and it's in budget, so take it, buy it. No, it's about feel. Like, it's emotional. People buy houses based on emotion. How does it make them feel? Not how much does it cost. Yeah, so similar on jobs, right? And the thing you have to realize with candidates— and this comes into candidate qualification and putting the candidate at the forefront— is any objection to any candidate, any motivation to any candidate is 100% true and correct and right. It's not your job to tell someone else what should or shouldn't be important to them. It's your job to shut up and listen and just find— you're a broker, you're just finding a fit. So you need to spend time understanding qualitatively what do people actually move jobs for. So one of the things they move jobs for is onward opportunity and progression. But that means different things to different people. So you need to focus on that and understand from your clients how they're set up in terms of what do they actually provide, because they're not going to change for this person. So progression would be one. Culture, day to day— some people want an environment that's maybe a bit softer, a bit wet. Some people want somewhere that's like rough and ready, and they can maybe, you know, work with better people or fast-track quicker or whatever. So understanding their cultural requirements and what's going to get the best out of them. Some of them particularly in technology world, want platforms to learn commercially, like new skills. So again, is that something that's available? So all these things are going to be more or less important to differing degrees to a candidate in terms of their evaluation of like, is this a good job? So these are things that you have to find objections in because— give you an example, one of the guys here placed the role last week, um, The guy worked for a company, he worked for Amazon, I could say that. The guy worked for Amazon, he joined in the throes of COVID so he was doing like 2, 3 days a week. They've now normalized, they've gone back to 5 days a week. That doesn't work for him anymore. It doesn't work for very family-specific reasons that can't be changed. He had 2 offers. His other requirement, this has come out of qualification, is he loves tech. Pure, like a massive techie, that's what gets him out of bed. He had two offers. The offer that was more money was going in as a manager, and his progression route was management moving forwards. He still had a semblance of hands-on. He's going to be a manager, more money. The offer he took was our offer, which was less money but still more money than what he was currently on. Both companies gave him the flexibility, but this role was hands-on, and culturally it's an environment where progression doesn't mean becoming a manager, it means getting more scope.

Interesting.

So he took a job at less money. So if you take the granular view of like, what's an objection? Well, money. It fits, it's more money, you're going to take it. You're never going to place that candidate. How did we close him to say less money? Well, really easy. We just qualified him properly and then we spoke to him about, look, you can get more money, but you're going to be unhappy. You've got more money anyway and you're going to be happy. What's, what's that extra 10 grand worth? Like, is that the price of your happiness? And don't forget your next promotion, you're now a manager fully, and your promotion after that, and now you're a manager forever and you're unhappy. Your, your performance will dip, you'll get less value out of it, eventually you'll, you'll stagnate and you'll be further behind money-wise than you would have been if you stayed technical. And he went, yeah, you're 100% right, took the job. So this is like a great example. Yeah, it's objection handling in action. So you've got the qualitative, you've got the nuts and bolts. The qualitative is stuff that gets people to move And it might be relocation, another thing like, you know, my wife's Canadian and she wants to move back to Canada. And if there's a company that can support me in a move to Canada because they've got an office there, that's going to be really compelling for me.

Hmm.

Okay, great. Well, now all you got to do is if you've got one of those clients or you find one, how good are you?

You're going to get bombarded now, Craig, with like 100 messages from Canadian companies wanting to recruit you. Yeah, that's really— Ben, did you have a question through? Yeah, I'm just gonna— just really, because I would love to get on to the other questions, Craig's, but you know, your answers are brilliant, so I don't want to slow you down either. But if there was like one question— it sounds like the difference was that you truly understood what you said, what gets them out of bed in the morning. That was what you mentioned. Is there like one question or two questions that allow you to get that information? Is it— is it what gets you out of bed in the morning? Is there a variation of that, like What's that question that you ask that really gets their true motivation of what drives them?

So I love, like, my first question is always, how's your current situation? And I'll always say how, because how is a big open, like, it's a massive open question. They can go wherever they want with it. And we do a lot of training around questioning. So open questions, certainly at the beginning of a call, and then just literally shut the fuck up. And actually listen to what they have to say, because they'll tell you the things that are important to them. And they might go, what do you mean, how is your current situation? And then you can prompt them a little bit. But how is your current situation? What-how questions are brilliant because they're super open, and you can kind of ask any question by saying the word how at the beginning. We avoid why as far as we can because why is quite accusatory. So why in any language is quite a It's really interesting, an accusatory sort of question. So we'll get to why towards the end of a call when we get into more direct and closed questioning, but the beginning is very, very open. So you get, how is your current situation? And then we can listen, and then we'll pull things out from what they say. Um, and then the other question that I really like to ask people is, if you, um, uh, if you were looking at creating your next role, how would you draw it out? Because again, they tell you everything that's important to them. And the first— the first— the first 3 things that they say will be important to them, the stuff after that is their nice-to-haves. But they've given you the needs, and then you can start to address on that. Because the first thing they mention is flexibility over money. Flexibility is a thing that's going to be important to them. Now you have a, a thread that you can start to pull on a little bit. You mentioned flexibility, so I'd just like to go back to that. So you let them say it all. What does flexibility mean to you? Again, a what question. How, what. You're not, you're not, you're not saying why because that's going to put their back up. So how, what questions, number one. Just listen. Stop thinking about doing deals. And then, um, if you want to, how is your current situation? And if you could, um, if you could craft your next role, how would you draw it up? And they'll tell you everything you need to know.

Love that, love that. Absolutely brilliant. Great, great advice there. And we're really— again, we put you on the spot a few times in the last pod, uh, Craig. We're gonna do it again this, um, this part. Um, I'm really— because this is something I actually, hands in the air, struggle with and have struggled with for a long time. I've done hundreds of sales calls, but I still struggle to do this. I'm sure Ben, you're a lot better than me. This, but it's, it's how do you sell something back to a candidate? I'm always a bit, um, I'm just shit at doing this. I still haven't learned the best way to do it. I'm just wondering if there's an example you can think of of how you sell something back to a candidate without it feeling a bit weird, because whenever I do it, it just feels a bit weird.

Um, yeah, um, I mean, it's predicated on qualifying them properly, but sell based on like facts and needs. That's it. You don't need like you Again, there might be like, there might be some really like transactional markets where you can tell someone to take a job because it's a great opportunity and they'll actually listen to you. But in the real world, it's never going to work because you're the least informed, you're the least knowledgeable person in the process. I can't tell a tech person who's just done a 5-round interview process with technical people and they're interviewing for a technical job that they should take it because it's fantastic. Because they can blind me with facts and I won't know whether they're true or not. So going, oh, come on, or like, you know, I really want you to take it, it's not going to do anything, right? So if you don't understand, like when I, when I got my job with Huxley out of uni, I had offers from all the S3 brands. And I took the Huxley job because Huxley, whether by design or by sheer luck, had made the effort to understand what was actually important to me. And at the time, very personally, I'd been living, um, I'd been in a long-distance relationship with my now wife for a year through my last year of uni, and I just— I'd been in Cardiff, she'd been in Kent, we did a long-distance relationship. I just wanted to get home. Huxley sold me on we work and we go home and we come back to work. Every other brand sold me on the social, the, the Thursday nights out, the go out on the beers, the this or this, right? I took Huxley. I knew nothing about recruitment, and it was all the same company essentially, just different brands of S3. I had no, no, um, nothing like quantitative to say they're better than them. I took them on basically Feels like that's more of an environment for me. This is a very emotional, personal, need-based decision, right? They didn't sell me by going, it's brilliant. They sold me on fact. So as a recruiter, if you do a good job at the beginning understanding the needs, why do you have to sell? You just highlight facts. And if you hunt objections, you're not going to have anyone in the mix who isn't aligned to what that company offers. So the company will sell it for you, but they'll sell it by just telling you about what it— like telling the candidate about what it is. So the last example that we mentioned, that guy, we didn't close him by selling to him. We closed him on facts. The facts are both your offers will give you the flexibility that you want, so that's even. One of the offers will give you more money, but it will take you away from technology. Which you said when we asked you how you draw your role up, you didn't mention management and leadership once. You talked about tech. The offer that's slightly less money but more money than what you've been offered right now for more flexibility will keep you technical. So what price do you put, Mr. Candidate, on job satisfaction? Is it worth the extra 10 grand? And he went, no, it's not. I'll take this one. Where's the sell? But it's all sales. That's, that's sales. Right? Understand the need, sell back to the need, but don't sell by saying something's brilliant. Go back to the house scenario, right? Let's say that you got married recently, Sam, right? So, right, let's say your missus is like, Sam, you've been dicking around with this podcast for too long, mate. I want to see something out of it. It's time for you to buy me a new house, right? And I don't know, she loves horses and she wants a house that's got a bit of land. So one day when your podcast becomes stratospheric, you can build her some stables, right? If a good estate agent understands that, they're gonna— you've got a couple of houses, you've got a house you're looking through through them, but you've got a house that you're looking through through someone else. Both the houses are exactly the same. They don't speak to you, they speak to the missus, and they start going, this house is brilliant because it's got an acre of land and that would be beautiful paddock and this would be a wonderful stables. And I know how great Sam's doing and Sam can build that. Where's your missus going to want to buy the house? Yeah, selling on facts and back to the need. And that's— that is sales 101.

Love that, man. I haven't heard anyone describe it so perfectly. That was a little masterclass. I love that, mate. Um, should we jump into some LinkedIn prospecting? Yeah, I want some specific questions and that kind of stuff. I feel like that would be awesome to end the— go ahead. No, that's a great, uh, great point. So, um, I wanted to understand, because I saw on your training, um, Craig, that you have quite a few softwares that you use. I saw Apollo, Dripify, HeyReach. Um, what's the— maybe, maybe I can ask, what is the most useful piece of tech that you're using amongst yourself and your recruiters out of everything you're using?

Um, I'm probably not the best person to ask that question. I, at this point, for my own recruitment, I, I kind of just do everything through my LinkedIn Network, and that's about it. Um, Dan, my business partner, knows the Ops side up to the eyeballs. Um, I like Dripify, but I'd probably say I've used that for only because I've used it the most, and we're pretty new with HeyReach and Apollo. I think this tooling stuff— I mean, so Dripify is brilliant, it's very, very helpful for us. Yeah, but we are very careful to use tooling to accelerate the human aspect of the job, so not to replace the human aspects of the job. We don't default to email recruitment, mass outreach, this sort of thing, but we do use things like Dripify, for example, to keep in touch with our networks. So we would use Dripify in a way to say, let's build really condensed, um, searches filtered by technology and industry, etc., of our first connections. So people that know— so someone that knows me already, we're connected on LinkedIn, they might be familiar with my content and this sort of stuff. I'll use Dripify to create a sequence over the course of a year that will give them market updates, for example. And that's a way that I can communicate en masse with multiples of people that isn't opening myself up for error by— because that's the problem with automation, right? It's obvious that it's automated, but also you're always going to get found out a little bit, and it will damage your reputation because people don't want it. Like, no one's ever sat on the phone at a bank to a human and gone, would you mind putting the automated keypad back on please? It's not going to happen. And when you get into jobs, it's a very personal thing. It's a very emotional-driven thing. Same with a house, right? You wouldn't buy a house from an AI bot. You'd buy it from a human estate agent that you'd met that viewed the house with you. At least not anytime soon because you just wouldn't trust it. And jobs are really important. So we use Dripify in that way, but it's a way of retaining like reputational value in the market so that there's some name recognition when I call. It's not a way of filling jobs. Because it's not, in my opinion, it's not going to work. Um, Apollo is great for extrapolating things like, um, email addresses and phone numbers, so we do use it for that. But again, it's not then taking an email address and chucking into like a mass automation campaign. Yeah, um, because you've got to be careful, right? Like, people don't like stuff like that. And it might be that we step away from those sort of things if we don't if we don't get good returns from it. Because everything we look at from a leadership perspective within the business is only oriented around what adds value, like real value, which is how much repeat business do we get. Fundamentally, that's where the value comes from. Love that.

Um, I was gonna ask a question and I completely forgot. Oh, um, I love that you're giving people market updates. I've heard that a lot. What do you choose? What do your clients actually want to hear about when it comes to market info and updates? Like, what— because I'm guessing there's a plethora of stuff you could focus on, and, and I really agree with that nurturing aspect, but what do they care about? Like, what do they actually want to listen to, do you think?

Uh, well, I think they certainly want to know what's going on in the market because, um, everyone, whether they would publicize it or not, is passively looking for a new job. Um, they just aren't doing anything about it until that perfect job comes along. And for some people, it never will. Um, so they do want to know what's going on in the market. But also, like, you've got to understand, like, short-termism in recruitment as an agency is the worst place you can be, which— that's why you're always doing new business, because you can't see past the end of your nose. Um, you're always focused on the next deal. Clients if you're operating at a sort of senior enough level, they're thinking very strategically, right? They're looking— so a lot of our clients are doing headcount planning for 2026 now, and we're working with them on it. They want to know what's going on in the market. They want to know what the trends are. They want to know what other companies are doing, not because they want to go and commit corporate espionage, but because it's like, well, where are the trends? Where are the candidate pools going to be? Are we doing stuff that's like following the herd sort of thing where that's going to have an impact on our ability to get to market? And talent acquisition is such a massive, like, part of any business growth strategy. It's the most important part. So they're very interested in what's going on in the market. They're also very interested in how comp is evolving. Recently they've been very interested in the remote working, what are other firms doing kind of sentiment, because no one wants to be the outlier. Um, and then the other thing that, you know, we'll put into these updates is just stuff that's authentically derived from conversations we're having with clients. And ditto for candidates, same thing, conversations we're having with candidates. These are some of the FAQs that we're kind of getting this month. These are the things people are interested in. Here's the answers. And some of it's a bit trivial, some of it's probably quite valuable, but again, value is subjective, right? So it's in, you know, beauty's in the eye of the beholder. So Um, as long as we're giving stuff that— the whole thing is just, it has to be authentic, it has to be derived from the market. I'm not sat making stuff up because that wouldn't wash, you know, people would see through that quite quickly.

Makes complete sense. And how are you— because I'm just interested in how you're using video, because you, you put Loom and LinkedIn selfie videos. At what point in the process is that more for pitching? Is that again value-based? Like, how are you using video in the process?

We mostly use Loom for internal training, by and large. So all of my training that I do is me Looming screens showing what I'm actually talking about. Um, so we make like— we've, as you, well, you've seen it, Sam, but we've got this huge like repository of training that is video. So we use Loom for that. The other way we use it is, for example, if we had, um we were trying to headhunt someone, um, we'd sent them— we would originally begin with a text message, more of a— not, not a text message on the phone, a, a message on LinkedIn that's text-based, or an email, um, which would be more of your traditional outreach. If we don't get a response to that, we'd follow up with a Loom because we're trying to show how all of our efforts are like trying to show that we're not automation. Because in my opinion, people value that now. And we're seeing a trend back to like, people want to feel like they're being contacted for a reason. They're not one of 10,000 people that's been caught up in a, you know, in a thing. So, um, we would do a Loom as a way of providing personalization to say, hey, look, I actually do want to talk to you. Um, but we'll do it second because it's more time consuming and people get a bit of like, the ego comes into it, right? Because you send a Loom and this and all the rest of it. So, like, when you're old like me, you get to that beautiful point where you don't give a shit about that sort of stuff anymore. But most of our workforce are a little bit younger, so they put more time into this outreach. So, we do it second because our ratio returns on outreach on the traditional kind of text-based messaging is still very high.

Why do you think it's so high? Sorry to jump in, Craig. Why do you think it's so high?

Uh, because the content is very credible and it's very detailed and it's bespoke. So we are, we are sending messages to people we actually want to talk to. We're referencing why we want to talk to them, but we're also demonstrating in those messages the knowledge base to give us credence to say that we are people that are worth talking to. Our space is very highly specialized, so you have to, you have to compete maybe more on knowledge than anywhere else. And potentially for other markets, you might be able to like, I don't know, say you recruit nurses on short-term basis, right? Dripify probably do everything that you could ever want it to do. And then Apollo, rip all the phone numbers, phone bash, call people, whatever. But Dripify basically does the job for you. So there, yeah, put the tooling at the forefront because who gives a shit? Like, you, you, it does, it's going to give you the value return that you want, and then you're just speaking to people that have already positively engaged and are now inbound to you off the back of that Dripify campaign. And don't get me wrong, in our stuff, like, I'll send out market updates and pretty much every time I send it, I'll get a bunch of messages back saying, hey Craig, thanks for that, I'm looking at the moment, here's my CV. So, but again, I would still advocate for anyone in recruitment to generate like long-termism in your career and to be successful over time. Just because you recruit nurses now, doesn't mean you want to do that forever. So doing the reps in terms of time on the phone, learning about the market, learning how to communicate, learning how to sell, learning how to listen, learning how to structure your questions— those are very, very good skill sets to have rather than hiding behind an automated email and then email recruitment. Because at one point you might say, I want to start doing more senior level stuff, or, you know, I want to start doing retained work or pitching clients and and, you know, all these things where these communication skills and the nuances are going to become so much more valuable for you.

If, if you could give one tip, because I'm guessing there's quite a few nuances to a good in-mail to get, you know, a high response rate from candidates. If you could give again new recruits one tip and say, look, if you do this one thing, you'll likely increase your conversion rate— oh, your response rate, sorry— what would that be, do you think, Craig?

I think you've got to walk the line between like detail and then like TL;DR. So, but I would say always like frame it around facts rather than sales. No one is going to respond to a message saying, hi, I've got a fantastic opportunity for you, call me. You're not giving them enough. Like, well, why? Where's the hook? Like, why should I? Mine are structured with like a high, you know, I tend to open it. So I've taken now to writing all of my content online and all of my messages in a very colloquial fashion. So it's obvious that an AI bot couldn't have written that. Um, because I think people buy into that, and I get so many messages from people saying, I really like you, I like— even though I don't agree with everything you say, I like your content because it's real and it's authentic. Um, and people, I think, are going to trend more back to that because there's so much, like, there's so much just the same stuff everywhere these days. Um, so my email is always open with, like, please excuse the colloquialism below, but I'm I'm actually writing this and I'm— this is an automation. Um, then I'll reference the, the reason that I'm contacting them. So it'd be like, look, I'm— this message is related to an opportunity with this company that I'm currently working with. Here's a short one-liner as to like why you should take them seriously. Here's a short paragraph on what they're actually doing at the moment. So I make it about them. This is, this is the scope, like this is what it is, this is why they are going to market for it. Um, and all of that is designed to like to actually give them a sense of it, because if it's not going to be of interest to them, then I don't need to— like, that's fine. Like, I don't want to talk to those people anyway because it's not going to be right. Um, and then the next piece will be around like, this is why I think you should talk to me about it. So that might reference things like attrition, like churn rate within the firm, uh, comp progression, culture, things that I know are viable and valuable to candidates within that space. And then it will be, can we find a time to talk? I'm not sending them my Calendly and asking them to do any legwork. Like, again, this is in the whole no aggravation scenario. So I'll sort of say, look, I can make myself available around you. I would really appreciate if we could have 15 minutes so I could expand on this. Would you have any interest in a chat? And most people come back and they'll say, not looking right now, but this would be the sort of thing I was interested in if I was. Let's keep in touch. Or it's, yeah, we'll have a chat. Or it's, no, this isn't quite right for me because I'm now doing this or whatever. Okay, great. I now know what to go back to them about in the future.

Love that, mate. Um, I can't believe how quickly this has gone again, mate. 4 minutes to 2. It's crazy. It's an hour has flashed by. Craig, thank you so much for coming on again, mate. I feel like we could still do a round 3 and go deeper into more subjects, and we probably will if you're happy to come back on. But thank you for coming on for round 2, mate. I really, really appreciate it.

It was very valuable. No worries at all.

Thanks for having me. Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and Spotify. Tune in for another episode next week, and we look forward to seeing you again very soon. Peace and love.