Hi, I am Shruti calling from XYZ soft. Are you looking for change??

Sounds irritating, right??

This is so common in recruitment fraternity. Half the time the recipient is not hearing you or he/she is fed up of all-time tete-a-tete

You are a recruiter; and you do cold calling to fetch in pool of candidates??

Well Yeah! Then let’s look at this,

Sameer, a project manager, started for his work at 9.30 am, had an escalation with client last night; mapping the list of tasks for his team today. While driving, he receives a call from a recruiter who starts her mechanized pitch and Sameer, out of courtesy, hears her out. Before he can respond, she again starts the next sentence, as

“What is your current CTC, expected CTC, notice period/joining time”

My friend, he can’t decide his career move in a picosecond for you. Or just because your targeted numbers of CV’s are to be delivered!!

He hence asks you to drop a mail and ends that COLD CALL you made. He never then responds to your emails nor your call and you wonder why?

Remind yourself, as a recruitment professional, that the days of cold calling are gone.

So, why do you expect, a person would respond to your particular call out of 20 plus calls he received that day??

Below are some mantras a recruiter can follow

1. Pre-screening of resume is must: It is re-iterated that a recruiter must go through the resume copy of any candidate very attentively. No matter how much pressure of deliveries is on you. A stitch in time saves nine. Ctrl+ F to find best fit in search strings is not screening.
2. Speed-Accuracy Coupled: Though you want to rush to the candidate and initiate the process; ensure that you are accurately reading the contour of the career.
3. Rigorous probing: You will have questions when you really screen a profile. You may also want to cross-check the information provided on the job boards. Probe eagle-eyed with not sounding an investigator.
4. Avoid unnecessarily extended calls: Yes, you have called him to get the maximum possible information. But this does not mean that you extend the conversation unnecessarily. Take notes so that you do not repeat the questions.
5. Be ethical: Some recruiters tend to grab pathetic bad habits of tweaking the details of the candidates for the sake of surviving that moment-of-high-pressure. However, this is all temporary; one gets caught sooner or later. Don’t do it and do not let your candidates do it. Educate them how badly it can ruin a career by faking applications.
6. Keep it humane: Some recruiters are robots; they speak the narration speech crammed in training or overhearing their peers. Every individual is different; understand the psyche and talk sense. Use fillers or phrases like “if I may ask” before/after the compensation details or “in the meantime” instead of taking silent pauses while jotting down the information. This will help you build a relation. The other side should not know that there is an excel doc open at your side. Take the details in an interactive way, not monotonously. Talk humanly.
7. The unknown you: Candidate is not your acquaintance who knows you by your name. Introduce yourself properly. Also the sharing of position you are offering should have clarity. Don’t jump onto the job details unless you receive a confirmation from the listener.
8. Do your homework right:  Read the skill set needed and understand the basics of it. Implicitly there are behavioral attributes to the profile which one should gauge beforehand. For instance, “every software engineer is not a development professional”. I remember one of my candidates sharing the experience of a call wherein he was asked “are you abc developer”? He replied sarcastically to the recruiter to read the job description again as “abc” was a testing tool and had nothing to do with development.
9. Do it right the first time and always: When you call your prospected candidate to take the required information; ensure you fill in all your fields. Do not wait for the hint from your lead or peer when they recheck and then you run to make the second or third call. You may have been doing the calling nth time, however, do it right always.
10. Stay cool-headed: It happens a lot of times that candidates turns arrogant during the very first call. Reasons can be many; one of them would be a bitter experience of your organisation in any past processes. Don’t give it back unless needed, stay calm. Tell yourself that the response is to some process failure or his perception from the experience he have had; never meant to demean you. If possible, cut down the perception by setting a ‘good’ new one.
11. Focus and energy: It may be a tiring day. You may have made throat-choking calls and now you dial the last number in the evening. Do not vent out your stress on the candidate who asks you same old questions. It’s his first call.
12. Upgrade: Stay updated with the latest changes in technologies/skills you are hiring for. It helps in talking to people in their language. It gives them the feeling that you are one of them and not someone alien to the work they do. People confine to those whom they trust would take them the right way. By doing this, you will deliver nothing less than quality profiles.
13. Scale your conversation: One size fits all is not true in recruitments. You have to pitch in a fresher, mid -level and a senior differently. Now this does not mean you give all respect to a senior professional and none to fresher or you are confident to talk to a mid-level professional and nod-in-yes to whatever a senior level person says. Take few seconds and decide the path of the call to be made.
14. Respect your job: Recruitment is considered to be chit-chatting by that other world of candidates or hiring managers as they mostly see them doing calling and coordination. Do not belittle yourself. Instead take pride in where you work and what you are doing back and forth. Key would be to invest in research on your mandates. Take interest in understanding the industry, scope, market mapping, and competitor analysis etc. Make learning your objective.

People are key resources to any organisation, so congratulate yourself that you are a career maker.

And yes, you are doing much more than selling credit cards at a call center!!

So, I believe these are few things, if practiced rightly, would change the rate of submissions getting shortlisted on a consistently upper level. Hiring would be made easy with warm calls. Hard-smart work always pays.

Juhi Gupte is Talent Acquisition Specialist with 5 yrs. experience in recruitments. She has strategic approach towards lateral, campus, bulk and niche hiring for technical and non-technical roles. Juhi has been recognized for her contribution to technology hiring for Drupal Technology.

Juhi is a fun loving person and a bibliophile at the same time. She is currently working with Faichi Solutions, Pune as Sr. IT Recruiter.