What do you do when you finally get a job order?
Now what? What do you do when you finally get a job order?
Seriously, that’s not a rhetorical question, what do you do!?
If you are a third-party recruiter and you haven’t asked yourself, or if you are a manager of a third-party recruiting or staffing firm and you haven’t asked your staff that question, then you need to do so right now. You may be very surprised by the answer (or lack of answers).
Let’s be honest, getting a job order is hard. You need to be assertive, sometimes to the point of being aggressive. You always need to be persistent and tenacious. You have to practice your pitch, hone your sales and marketing skills and work at developing relationships with your prospects. And sometimes, you need to get really lucky. All-in-all, getting a job order is a difficult task to successfully accomplish.
Knowing how much effort it takes to get to this point and that you are not going to get paid unless you fill the order, it makes sense that the next step should be treated just as importantly and given just as much attention as the sales and recruiting process. In my experience, however, recruiters and managers rarely have a system in place for what to do when they get a job order and almost never give that next step the same amount of training time and consideration as other areas of the business.
If you are to be successful as a third-party recruiter then a consistent, effective, measurable and replicable systems need to be in place for not only your business development and recruiting activities, but also for what you do when you get a job order. I urge you to think about the question. Ask yourself what you currently do. Is that the right approach? Is it what your clients expect? Is it better than what your competition does? Does the answer change depending on the client or the details of the order?
The actual answer is going to vary. Depending on your positioning in the market, the norms within your niche and the culture of your firm, you may transfer the job order to another associate on your team, drop everything and start presenting candidates immediately or put it to the side until after all of your business-development activities are complete. The fact is, it isn’t necessarily important how you answer, “What do you do when you finally get a job order,” but it is important that you have an answer.