How To Make The Most of Your Recruitment Leads

Our team has a few tips to help you make the most of your leads.

One of the main things we see that needs to be improved is the amount of time it takes to contact your candidates. Firstly, most of the time, your candidates haven’t only applied to work for your company. They’re applying to as many places as they can within their area. Sometimes getting a new member of staff can come down to being the first company to get back to them!

This rule also applies when you have tried contacting a candidate and been unsuccessful. Don’t wait another week to try again; we recommend trying multiple times a day! The longer it takes for you to contact your candidates, the more offers they’re getting from other places. Instead of contacting all of your candidates once a week, try contacting them in the morning, afternoon, and evening, multiple times a week.

Also, don’t forget to make a note of when you are trying to contact your candidates. These notes can help you out in multiple ways. Firstly, the notes help us with more insight into your position, allowing us to give you more tailored support. If one of our Account Managers gets on a call with you and sees heaps of leads with only very sparse notes, it looks like you might have been leaving potentially hireable candidates for no reason!

It can also help you by tracking what works when you’re contacting your leads. Writing down the day, time, and method of contact can show you the best methods for contacting leads that are specific to your area. We find that generally, work candidates have a higher contact rate in the evenings, whereas clients have the best contact rate in the morning. We also find that there is a universal increase of contact when you give your leads a phone call rather than an email!

To really get the best contact rate, we recommend giving the candidate a text 10-15 minutes before calling them. That way, they will be expecting your call and won’t just assume it’s a random cold call. Every area is different though, and you might notice a different pattern which works for you.

Alternatively, another way to reduce missing your leads when you contact them is to add a question to the lead form which asks what time works best for them. You may have to keep the phones on later to accommodate for some candidates, but you may also find that you can start contacting later in the day too. As we mentioned above, candidates respond better to evening calls, while clients respond better to morning ones.

Lastly, we recommend doing a full sweep of re-contacts at the end of every month. If you find that you have some leads who have missed your calls or not returned your emails up to three times in a month, you should just give them one last reminder that you’re there at the end of the month. It might return nothing eleven months out of the year, but one month you might find that you have gained yourself an extra recruit that you otherwise wouldn’t! Better than nothing, eh?

To recap, contact your leads as soon as you can, don’t wait for too long or they will look elsewhere. Make notes of the times and ways you’re contacting your leads, as it will help you understand how to proceed. Do a full sweep of your unsuccessfully contacted candidates at the end of the month. Sometimes, you have to do what is best for your leads and not what’s easiest for you!