Let’s talk about the 5 phases of a million-dollar recruiter. Now, you might be thinking, “Oh, that sounds a little bit hype-y. A million-dollar recruiter? What?”
The Recruitment / Search Business Owner Problem
Yeah. The 5 phases of a million-dollar recruiter as I see it today. That’s usually using an inbound automation and authority. Not using outbound chasing the phone and bums on seats. So as we see it and as our clients see it.
The 5 phases of a million dollar recruiter. You might be thinking first of all, “Well I’m in startup mode and I’ve been in the startup mode now for a year and I’m still struggling” or indeed you might be in recruitment now for many years and you’re a plateau. You’re just moving forward but we’re having good months or good years, bad years but we haven’t really grow. We haven’t made a massive jump. We haven’t doubled or trebled or quadrupled our business in 1 year and that may well be where you are.
You might have a little bit of fear around what’s going to happen next, where am I going next? I’m depending on the economy. I’m depending on what’s happening with my team. If my star recruiter goes where am I going to be? You may be in that place and fear is not a cool place to be. Right now, it could be that you started your business to get more freedom or to get more money but it might be where the mindset is about. You might be looking through your first half million year. You might be looking through your first half million months, I don’t know but whatever aspiration you’ve got there are 5 phases whether you’re in startup mode.
About half the companies come to us are brand new. So the recruiter is being peeved to get in really poor commissions in these startup alone and often though we also get those companies come to us and they’ve been tip-toeing around the 100 to 500K a year and they’re looking to now double and really make a big impact on their industry.
The 5 Recruitment Phases
Grab a pen and a paper I want you to draw the following out so it’s 5 phases. Now, this is what I created in my mastermind group. This is my strategy and I never want to see this copied anywhere else but this is what it looks like. There are 5 phases you go through to become a million dollar recruiter. We’re going to be adding a sixth phase in the not-too-distant future.
- The first one is this you got the foundation phase so when someone comes to us they might not have a website. When they get a website created, they may not have a LinkedIn profile that really delivers. They may not have a database. So we go through a foundational phase. Foundation is identifying what niche you are in. Quite often we get, “Andy, I’m not sure where I should be in java development, whether I should be in php development or maybe I should be in both?” The first thing we do is identify which niche you’re in. So you want to be writing down niche. That’s key or multiples niches that’s also cool.
Secondly, is your website set up to be an authority website to get inbound leads?
The third thing is your LinkedIn and your other social platform set up to position you as an authority in the marketplace so you should have a template which we can really just copy so all your clients care about is what results can you get for them. Your online platform social media platform should be results focused, that’s the foundational phase.
Then we go through 3 different phases. We go through foundation to start with, then we into the attraction, the authority, and the automation. So these 3A’s actually dovetail together so if you imagine drawing. If you want to draw this out draw a rectangle and then break the rectangle into the 5 different columns. The foundation is the first one. In foundation, we’ve got about 30 to 40 different strategies. Then we move into the Attraction, the Authority and the Automation.
- An automation strategy it can also give you authority. It can also give you the attraction piece. Inside the attraction piece, how do you get inbound leads? That’s what you should be doing. That’s the attraction piece. Again, 30, 40, 50 of strategies there but you want to be focusing to how can I get inbound leads? That should be your question for you to go away and fix.
- The second is authority in the marketplace. Nowadays I see recruiters going and post ads on AdWords. Do you really think your clients sit there and think “God you know what I really could do and find a good recruitment company so we never hear from a recruitment company? Oh, look there is AdWord there is ad there for a recruitment company.” Your clients are inundated with recruiters chasing them. They’re peeved with you so you need authority. You need authority so you break through the noise in the marketplace.
The next thing you need is authority with candidates. We had a product that we used to sell in Timeout in the United States many years ago now. LinkedIn blueprint and we saw one for candidates and I’m sure the candidate had to get essentially found on LinkedIn. It’s a really cool strategy and we actually give it away for free now inside our mastermind group but the candidate side of things – your candidates don’t want to be treated like a piece of meat and that’s what candidates told us that most of recruiters treat them like a piece of meat. You don’t want that. You want authority for both clients and candidates.
- The third A – Automation. You must have automation in your business. If you haven’t got automation in your business nowadays I imagine … I can’t imagine. You’re working long hours. You’re in at 7:00 in the morning. You leave at 7:00 at night and you’re very much bound in braces and you work really hard. It’s probably your calling card, “I work so hard and I do this..” and it is part of the significance you get from your business because you work such long hour and I feel tired thinking about what some recruiters do nowadays and the hours they put in. Systems should do that. Automation should do that. Nowadays there is no reason on earth why you should be manually doing what 80{80ed2ceb8b8e43e1df58520e86acb16df96de695ac839db5fcf8319ced9d95bc} of your business can be systematized and automated.
Automation can mean 2 things: One, really cool tools. You heard me talk about tools many times but also it means a system that takes the manual work and it’s off your place. Anything you do in the business more than once should be systematized. You have a little voice saying “Yeah, but Andy I’ve got this X factor. I’m the only one who can actually source candidates and know exactly what to look for.” Wrong.
It can be systematized. There are criteria that you search for candidates. Inbound candidates, it can be systematized.
There are 3 phases; attraction, authority, automation.
- Then we move into the fifth phase. This is my favorite phase. This is scale.
Scale is where businesses go from 200K to 400K very quickly and then they go to 600k, 800K very quickly because of scale. So we use the systematization and the systems and the automation but now we start talking about building remote team also. Every single one of my clients if they follow my strategies, which they do, will have a remote team. That means their business, most businesses will double just by having a remote team. So we’ve actually got a whole full-part process for building a remote teams that mean someone working in Philippines or India wherever it might be and lots of you are now going, “But I’ve tried VA and it didn’t work they went missing.” Yeah because you messed up. I’m very transparent with this. I went through over 50 VA’s in my own business going back 10 years and it’s my fault. 100{80ed2ceb8b8e43e1df58520e86acb16df96de695ac839db5fcf8319ced9d95bc} my fault.
The other VA’s, of course, are not cool but the hiring process and my management process I messed up. So my mess-ups have now created a process called frustration to freedom whereby my clients now build a remote team which means while they’re on holiday, their LinkedIn network has grown by 1000 a month. While they’re on holiday, they’re getting inbound leads. While they’re on holiday contents are being distributed across 5, 6, 7 different social media platforms. While they’re on holiday, they’re getting clients and candidates come to them because their virtual team is doing this. We worked the SOPs – Standard Operating Procedures.
- As I mentioned before we’re creating a sixth phase and this is really cool if I was selling the business. For those of you who have been following me via webinars, social media, podcast etc., you know that we’re all about systems and metrics. Imagine this, an investor comes to you and you say to an investor “When I put 100 units RRRR, I get 20 inbound messages or I get 50 inbound messages. Normally of those, half of them are quality and I get 20 appointments. Of those 20 appointments, I normally close half of them so I put 100 units in. I get 10 new clients or 5 new clients, whoever it might be.” Your investor has something there which is not dependent on you being the face of the business. It not depending on you and your little black book. It’s depending on systems.
So the sixth phase we’re creating is a phase around selling the business. Now, the old school where selling business is via brokers. Now, I don’t know as much about this as I will know within 6 months.
The strategies I create, I don’t know about the strategies when I create them. What we do is we create a strategy based on the problem. For example, one of our clients had a problem she had a 50,000 sized database but she didn’t know how to leverage it. So we created a strategy called the Data Map & Navigate and we match up clients to candidates. It’s something like online matchmaking. It removes all the scour in your ATS and we created this strategy. Each time we get a problem we create a new strategy.
Now, at the moment I don’t know everything I need to know about this but we’re doing the research, we’re working with people. I do a lot of traveling every year just for my own education and at the moment, we’re actually looking into how to create your business to become systematized business and how you can make it sellable and how would you sell it?
Just to recap, anything that you do in your business more than once should be systematized and you don’t need to be doing it. So 5 key phases for a million dollar recruiter – foundation, attraction, authority, automation, and then scale, my favorite one because this is where you start to work on the business, not in the business. We have a cliché term that lots of people use but it is fact. You might have seen some of the webinars and the videos we got out across the web but we’re working on the business, not in the business and the next phase is going to be how to sell the business.
What can you do then to actually get your own system up and running? The first thing you do is this, reverse engineer the steps so if you say “This year I want to do a million dollars”, okay cool. Your average placement fee is say $20,000 so you want to do a million dollars. Average placement fee is $20,000 right so you need 50 placements. Now of those 50 placements, how many new clients do you need? On average, we get 2 placements per client so you might 25 new clients. You might have existing clients but say you need 25 new clients then but how many new candidates do you need? On average, for every 5 send outs, we place 1 so multiply that by 5. How many CVs do you need or many interviews do you need to actually find the right candidate?
Reverse Engineer The Steps
Reverse engineer the steps. Now you got a set of metrics. You need X amount of client leads, you need X amount of candidates at the top of the funnel. If you read the article “How to Get Your Recruitment Website Right to Get More Inbound Leads”, you can now work out the metrics you need to create a million dollar business. Then you just need to actually create the strategies or use strategies to create the flow for the clients and for the candidates. That is how you create a million dollar business. Going through the 5 phases and reverse engineering the metrics.
Pretty cool, huh? It’s not rocket science but it means you need to get off the hamster wheel of when a role comes in then we drop everything then we go and trying to find clients/candidates and then you got no process for actual building up your client/candidate database.
You must have consistent inbound flow for clients and candidates.
If you’d like to speak one to one about where you are now, if you’re serious about creating a million dollar business or indeed you’re looking to maybe go the sixth phase, let’s speak. I’m going to ask you a few questions. It’d be a bit like a friendly interrogation. If you go rmi.acuityscheduling.com and if there is any space, schedule the call. If there is no space come back in a few weeks or you can maybe sign off on one of our webinars, have a look at some of the other cool stuff on here.
You can be a million dollar recruiter. You can be if you’re serious – that’s the key thing. You’re not a dabbler but you’re serious, you’re hungry and you can follow the process.
