Description: Industry experts answer your questions on challenges you are facing in sales and recruiting.  If you have a question, please email to pat@neffdowning.com.  We will solicit answers from industry experts.

July Staffing Questions:

#1    We have more open orders than candidates - we are trying everything we can to fill these jobs. Do you have any creative solutions or tips?

 

Answer: There are a ton of new creative, out-of-the-box recruiting sources in the past few months. One customer purchased large Now Hiring car magnets and had all recruiters stick to their car; another increased their referral bonus to $1,000 for 1,000 hours. Creative or not, where the most opportunity is in building a recruitment plan, and consistently executing on it. Sounds simple right? While we all pride ourselves on being the best recruiters compared to our competitors, many of us lack an actual recruitment strategy. Building a simple source list, determine activities for each source, frequency, and who will be accountable for each action, and you will see results. At worse, the results will give you a better view point of what's not working and you can adjust from there.

#2    How can I increase the number of responses to the emails I send to my leads? I can literally send hundreds and only get a few replies back. Please help!

 

Answer: Stop emailing and start calling! Recent stats show that the average worker receives around 121 emails per day, and 57% of people assume "cold" emails are spam without even opening the email. So it's not surprising to hear that another study found phone response rates at 8.1% vs email response 0.03%. Think of email more for marketing campaigns: building brand and value recognition over a period of time. This way when you do call, you are familiar name with credibility.

If you struggle to get the decision maker on the phone, or to return a call, email should be your plan B. You mentioned sending "hundreds" of emails; I suspect you have to keep your email generic so it applies to most. Do not focus on quantity, instead focus on quality. Make the email personal, grabbing their attention immediately in the subject line or beginning of the correspondence.