2024 will be challenging for recruiters.

The difficulties faced in 2023 will not disappear overnight.

However, the underlying market is strong! Talent shortages are structural, and companies will regain confidence and hire aggressively again.

Sadly, not all recruiters will benefit from the rebound.

We need to be nimble, adapt, and prepare to take advantage when the market turns.

I set out here my ‘2024 recruiter action plan.‘

It is a lot, but tackle it one step at a time.

Use it individually and in your teams. Be honest with yourselves about how you score on each metric, tactic or competency.

This list is the framework. It took a lot of work to compile, as you can imagine. It is yours for free, and I hope it helps.

If you want the full version, designed as a set of video training materials with a lot more content, please sign up for the Savage Recruitment Academy, where our new 2024 action plan Masterclass (delivered by me) goes into far more detail.

But for now, start here;

1) In recruitment, as in life, you get treated as you allow yourself to be treated. You set the tone for your relationships with clients and candidates. Your behaviour, your demeanour, and your personal influencing skills are what set you up for success. Or failure.

2) Self-belief is the foundation of how you get treated and whether you can ever move from being transactional to consultative. The certainty that you are an expert in what you do and can provide real value. I call it ‘Recruiter Equity‘, and your career as a recruiter depends on this.

3)Recruiter equity is your clients’ trust, buy-in and belief in your ability and judgement. It combines your experience and knowledge and the personal confidence you show in delivering that expertise. It gives you the power to advise clients and truly impact the outcomes of your interactions with them. It also protects you from the impact of AI, just quietly.

4) Resilience is crucial to survive and thrive, but it does not mean toughness or being an emotionless robot. Strength in recruitment means depowering what you cannot control. It means ‘bouncebackability‘ and not allowing the inevitable disappointments to contaminate your following conversation with a client, candidate, or colleague. You don’t drag your wasted emotion forward and allow other stakeholders to suffer because of your bad day.

5) You will not succeed in agency recruitment unless you do a high activity level. But it has to be high levels of the right activity, of high quality, and done with the right people. This is seriously the biggest secret I have learned in 40 years. It never, ever fails. Unless you don’t follow the formula

All of these tips are in my new book. Buy ‘Recruit’ now.

6) Agency recruitment comprises a series of ‘moments of truth’. Human interactions where you can create outcomes for the greater good through your influencing skills. You must be superb at the ‘craft‘ of recruitment because all the rest will be automated soon.

7) In recruitment, the irony is that the ‘soft’ skills are hard. And it is mastering the soft skills that determine success in recruitment.

8) Making assumptions is what causes the vast majority of recruitment disappointment. You think you don’t assume, but you do. Constantly check-in, confirm, question, calibrate, test, and reconfirm. And always ask the magic question. ‘Has anything changed since we last spoke?’

9) Selling is listening. When the client is talking, you are selling. Selling starts with questioning and listening. Peel the onion. You don’t learn anything when you are talking.

10) Always ask the two great business development questions

11) Competing on price (alone) is a slippery slope to recruiting hell.

12)  Candidate shortages are a good thing! Clients use us to access candidates they can’t find themselves! When it is hard for employers to find talent, it’s nirvana for us. Don’t complain about a lack of candidates. Celebrate it! It is the reason your client came to you, and why you are valuable. (Note. If you are any good, of course).

13) To a candidate waiting for information and feedback, no news is news. The concept of CCCCF is fundamental to candidate care and recruiter success

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14) With clients (and candidates, too), you cannot advise, consult or influence if you do not build trust. And if you can’t advise, you can’t be ‘consultative‘. And if you are not consultative, you are transactional. And if you are transactional, you will be smashed by automation that will do what you do, but better.

15) The intelligent, sophisticated recruiter will get paid for a higher percentage of the work they do, usually via securing exclusive job orders and also by triaging the work they do have

16) No one will care more about your recruitment career… than you. You must own, work and drive your career plan. You own your career. Not your current employer

17) Recruitment. It will be better that you fail and give up than be mediocre. If you are only average at this job, there are too few highs to compensate for the many inevitable lows

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18) The ‘C’ word will kill your career. Complacency. ‘Complacent‘ does not mean ‘lazy’. It means being satisfied with the status quo. Past success is no predictor of future success in a fast-evolving environment. You must be ‘coachable’ and constantly looking to add to your ‘skills briefcase‘.

19) Great recruiters are sponges for life. In this business, you are never totally ‘on top of your game‘. You can always get better. And if you don’t, others around you most certainly will.

20)  Treasure your reputation. It’s the only thing you really own. People will judge you by how you make them feel. Your reputation is the sum of all the small things you do well, or badly. Burnish it and guard it.

21) Recruitment is more art than science. Stock your ‘skills briefcase‘ accordingly.

22) Respectful, consultative ‘pushback’ builds credibility and better relationships with clients and candidates. It is also excellent for your self-esteem, which is no bad thing.

23) Only one thing ultimately drives success for a perm or search recruiter: the golden metric. How many of your candidates are sitting opposite your clients? That is it: ‘client-candidate interviews’, or CCIs, as I call them.

24) Selling in recruitment means influencing outcomes, not hardcore pressure-selling. It means introducing jobs to candidates and candidates to jobs. A good recruiter will sell daily, managing each moment of truth. It means influencing, advising, consulting, and creating excellent outcomes.

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25) In recruitment, everybody sells! The actual ‘selling’ will vary, but everybody sells – CEO included.

26)  A client in pain is an excellent thing. Stay calm. Not physical pain. But it is true that when a client is under pressure, when a client is facing issues, when a client has deadlines, they are more committed to getting an outcome and, therefore, more likely to be committed to our process and us.

27) I cannot imagine a genuinely skilled recruiter who can’t run great sales meetings. Developing business, opening doors, prospecting, understanding a prospect’s needs and delivering a compelling pitch are fundamental requirements.

28) Creating a powerful narrative is an essential recruiter skill and a platform for impressing, building credibility, and ultimately influencing outcomes. A recruiter should have one narrative for clients and one for candidates, each constantly evolving depending on the market and new trends. A sophisticated recruiter has developed the skill to spark positive conversations with clients and candidates, which makes them memorable and valuable and separates them from the average recruiter.

29)  Strangely enough, the starting point for successful fee negotiations is to get the conversation off the fee percentage and on to the question of what your fee is actually for. Bundled up in that conversation is your ability to sell your differentiator. That is the secret sauce. What do you have, and what do you do that gives your client unique value?

15-Hour Temp and Contract Masterclass

30)  Remember this before you discount next time. Don’t think of the fee only as dollars gained or lost; think of the fee as what your service is worth. A discounted price means a discounted you. Never forget that

 31) When negotiating with clients about temp bill rates, the ‘big secret‘ is to shift the client’s focus from the rate to the total cost! (Read ‘Recruit. The Savage Way‘, to understand how smart this concept really is)

32) A temp on your payroll is always a precious asset. So, in talent short times, it makes no sense why anyone in our industry would give a substantial discount on the fee when a temporary employee turns permanent. (This is called a ‘conversion fee’ in some markets and a ‘buyout’ in others.)

33) Recruiters compete on their ability to access candidates that their clients and competitors can’t find, bring those candidates to the hiring table and manage the entire process through to acceptance. That’s where the actual value of a recruiter is.

34) As COVID-19 drove a more remote recruitment style, some recruiters became less engaged, especially with candidates. This is your huge opportunity to differentiate because great recruiters will move from being referrers of résumés to acting as the candidates’ agents during their job search.

Free ticket here

35) All outstanding recruiters understand that assessing the candidate’s suitability for a job is the easy part while managing their expectations, understanding their real motivators, building rapport, and controlling the moments of truth are what separate the mediocre recruiters from the great.

36) Trust me on this, and never forget it, please: when it comes to ‘recruiter headaches‘, candidate shortages are not in the same universe as job shortages. Your mantra needs to be, ‘Candidate shortages are excellent because my differentiator is that I know how to find them, and I know how to bring them to the hiring table, and I know how to manage the process through to offer and acceptance‘.

37) A candidate is a person who has the skills and presentation that your clients will hire. Whether or not that person is looking for a job is simply a matter of timing! They will be – someday. We need to invest for the longer term by engaging and bringing candidates into a conversation long before they plan to move.

38) If you only have access to the same candidates that everyone else has, then your competitive advantage is driven by speed and price, and, in that case, you are on a slippery slope to recruiting hell.

39) The definition of a placeable candidate is a candidate with the skills, experience, and presentation to likely get them a reasonable offer from a client – yes, we get that – but who also has the motivation, commitment and incentive to accept it. A ‘placeable’ candidate has both.

40). The hard part of the candidate interview process, which will make all the difference when getting the acceptance, is assessing the candidate’s true motivators for a move and identifying lurking barriers to an acceptance. Your job is to identify the potential obstacles, articulate them and nullify them.

41) Closing a placement starts in the first interview. You must learn to prioritise candidates and put 80% of your time into the 20% of candidates who will get and accept offers. Wasting time on uncommitted candidates will cause you much pain.

42) Unless you enjoy having offers turned down and counteroffers accepted, you must get close enough to candidates to understand their motivation to accept (MTA) and their commitment to move (CTM). Work to understand these from your first conversation through the interview and at every point after that.

43) Too many recruiters take a stated salary expectation at face value. Often, that number is inflated and largely the result of wishful thinking. If taken as an accurate guide, the candidate could miss out on the perfect job because you, the recruiter, did not understand their true motivators.

44) Countering a counteroffer starts at the very first interview. A counteroffer must never be ‘unexpected’ for the candidate. Making an offer that will be accepted and not counteroffered successfully is not an event – it doesn’t happen in a single conversation. It’s a progression, a step-by-step process – managed by you.

45) The key to ‘countering the counteroffer‘ is that you take the candidate, in their mind’s eye, to the resignation day. You transport them to that moment and ask the candidate what is likely to happen. This requires subtlety, patience, and the ability to shut up at critical moments.

46) The golden rule of job offers: do not make an offer unless you already know it will be accepted.

47) You must know how to navigate the Valley of Death. And do it every time to the letter.

48) Are you ‘client fit‘ or ‘client flabby’?

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49) Consultative client management is built on credibility, allowing the recruiter to work with the client as an advisor and a real consultant. There is no arrogance built into this point of view, but the experienced recruiter will know more about the nuances of each step and what actions must be taken to get the desired outcome.

50) Filling a job does not start with finding suitable candidates for that job brief. Instead, it begins with taking an order that is well-qualified in the first place.

51) Qualifying a job order means testing and calibrating the client’s assumptions, often outdated or flawed. Skilled storytelling from the recruiter can play a big part in bringing authentic evidence to the discussion and acquainting the client with the market as it is today. It includes managing and agreeing on the process and setting time frames and communications parameters.

52) Taking a job order is perhaps the best opportunity to prove your worth as an advisor and a genuine consultant to build credibility and trust. Don’t miss it!

53) A perm recruiter’s job is to find candidates, shortlist them and present them to clients for interviews. Then, the client decides who gets the job. A temp recruiter’s job is to find the candidates, shortlist them and present them to the client – the same deal. But the big difference is that the recruiter should decide who gets the job.

ANZ Webinar.        UK Webinar.

54) The timeless reality is that most people are not looking for a new job, but a high percentage of those people are open to considering an opportunity if it is presented to them

55) A great recruiter has the credibility and the confidence to secure the role on a retained basis, or at least exclusively, so they have the time to put in place a full range of appropriate strategies to find the right person.

56) The concept of the contingent, multi-listed permanent job order is a fundamental flaw in agency recruitment. This dysfunction is so inherent in most recruiters’ business models that they don’t even understand the damage it’s doing to their business and all the stakeholders.

57) Selling job-order exclusivity starts with clearly understanding why working with one quality recruiter on a specific brief is in the client’s best interests. We need to understand those reasons, believe those reasons and be superbly articulate in explaining those reasons to a client who may be sceptical.

58) Not all job orders are created equal. Some are far more ‘fillable’ than others. Many are not even real: approval to hire has not been given, you are in competition with four other agencies, or the process is to benchmark already highly regarded internal candidates.

Greg Savage – The Savage Recruitment Academy

59) If a client rejects any candidate on your shortlist, it can mean only one of two things. And they are both terrible i) You misunderstood the brief. You got it wrong ii) The client does not trust your judgement.

60). Fire unreliable, dishonest, uncommitted, disloyal, and unprofitable clients. Now

61) There are only two reasons to come to work. Fun and money

62) Your value as a recruiter is in your knowledge, advice, consulting, networks, brand, influencing, and problem-solving skills. Embrace the technology; automate as much as you can. So, you can add value where it counts. That will be your competitive advantage.

63) The real value of recruitment is your influencing skills. Pretty much all the rest can and will get automated.

64) If you hide behind digital, you will fail as a recruiter. Of course, you must be excellent at using technology, but the differentiator is building relationships, garnering trust, and influencing outcomes.

65) Creating a powerful narrative is an essential recruiter skill and a platform for being able to impress, build credibility, and ultimately influence outcomes. A recruiter should have a narrative for clients and one for candidates, constantly evolving depending on the market and new trends.

66) ‘Candidate care’ in recruitment. “It’s like inviting 100 people to a party at your house and then leaving 95 of them outside in the rain without a drink.” Don’t be like that, please.

67) Tentative language is your Achilles heel

68) Recruitment rocks! Done well, it can be a remarkable career, doing something that really matters, and creating excellent outcomes for all parties

69) Buy my first book, ‘The Savage Truth’. Well over 10,000 copies sold

70) Buy my most recent book, ‘Recruit. The Savage Way‘. Seeling at the rate of 1,000 copies a month since publication. My very best advice on how to be a superb Agency recruiter

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The new “Reinvent your recruiting in 2024 Masterclass” is now live on the Savage Recruitment Academy.

Based on what I see is working and not working in the leading recruitment companies I work with

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