Tom's Talent Blog

In June, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Ohio Staffing and Search Association (OSSA) virtual conference.  Hats off to the OSSA board and Jeanne Hoffman, Executive Director, for pivoting to a virtual event!  And, thank you to the sponsors for continued support of OSSA!

Watch my session, Slingshot to Your Best Second Half Ever!

As the economy recovers, talent acquisition leaders have an excellent opportunity to improve their company's recruiting programs. ScoutLogic has launched "Win the Recovery" thought leadership series to aid in these efforts. This series features video and written interviews with recruiting leaders sharing their observations and best practices.

When I started in the staffing business more than 20 years ago, every Monday morning my colleagues and I would get out the classified ads in the newspaper and start calling all of the companies that posted jobs to see if we could help them fill their positions. In some cases, we had a specific candidate we were presenting to them—this was an early iteration of what we now call skill marketing. Of course, every other staffing company used this same strategy, so I can imagine Mondays weren’t much fun for the people posting those jobs.

Today, skill marketing is still an important revenue driver for many staffing companies. And with talent at such a premium now, marketing hard-to-find, in-demand candidates can be more effective than ever.

I had the opportunity to talk with Travis Arnold, the CMO & Co-founder of Herefish. We talked about beer... and more importantly 6 steps to building a great sales team at your staffing firm. 

It’s easy when you have a new employee starting and you have an orientation schedule for a new sales person or recruiter.  The goal is to ramp them up for success as quick as possible.  You have this person start from the beginning, learning each internal process and procedure, and then sprinkle in some outside training sources that add variety and promote skills for increased performance.  But, how do you incorporate training with existing employees?

We're excited to announce our new partnership with Moore Essentials to help you find prospects and candidates from the 2 BILLION people on Facebook.  We have dozens of training sessions on staffing sales and recruiting, focusing mostly on sourcing through LinkedIn. Now the experts at Moore Essentials can show you how to source from Facebook!

Why did I write a book?  Because, sales is harder now than ever before.  Your prospects aren't answering the phone or calling you back, there is more competition than ever, and you just seem to be running up against one brick wall after another.  In this 100-page quick read, I explain why sales has become increasingly more difficult, the key mistakes that most staffing sales reps are making, and details a systematic sales process that is proven to get more appointments and land more new business in the staffing industry.

Learn another way to sell to prospective clients in the staffing industry.

Every Saturday morning, our six-year-old son comes crashing into our room with the same earnest request; “Daddy, can we play games on the TV together?” Since the time he was able to hold a controller in his hands, Brady and I have spent part of Saturday morning playing video games together. It's become a ritual that is a reward for him, and a fun way for us to spend some dedicated time together.

I just received at least the 10^th email this week from a different sales rep trying to sell me prospect leads – and its Tuesday. Now as a sales professional, trainer, and coach, I tend to probably be at the same time more critical and more sympathetic to sales reps trying to do their job. I’m critical in that I dissect their message and approach more than most. But I also feel sorry for many of them because I can tell by their email that they are either new, untrained, or misguided. And when I talk to sales reps about their sales activities, most sheepishly admit that they know what they are doing isn’t working, but just don’t know what else to do. Unfortunately many of the sales activities that we utilize cause more harm than good, labeling us as “salesy” and irritating the prospect.