3 Tips When Canvassing

The art of canvassing, or presenting a specific candidate to a specific target company, has many stages. One of the most critical is the moment you reach your target – the decision maker.

If that moment is fumbled then all the work that has gone into making the call is wasted. Assuming you want to be a success in recruitment then the question has to be ~ “How can you maximise your impact at that moment in the call?”

There are a number of things you can do – let me present three:

1) Have a Powerful Opening Statement (POS) prepared about your candidate- This is literally the first thing that you say to the decision maker after they have answered the phone (see point number 2) – a good POS will be short, have a couple of facts about the candidate you are representing and end in an open question.

You keep it short because you want to engage the decision maker in a two way conversation and you can’t do that if you are doing all the talking. Also it’s about talking with, not talking to, the decision maker.

The facts about your candidate are to catch the decision makers interest and getting him to think about how great your candidate is and the open question is to kick start the real conversation where you will be able to achieve all your objectives for the call.

2) Go straight into your POS – I’m not one for ‘Hi, how are you’ or ‘Have I caught you at a good time?’. I prefer to get straight into the call. For me the softer openers simply alert the decision maker that this is a sales call and lose you momentum.

3) Say it with confidence- Consider your tone very carefully. If you don’t sound confident then the call will fail. You have to believe in what you are saying and say it with a convincing level of confidence.

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I trust you find the above helpful.

This is an extract from my latest recruitment advice blog – the full version with an additional Fourth Tip can be found at http://edenchanges.wordpress.com/2009/06/08/four-tips-when-canvassing/

Regards

Stephen Hart
Recruitment Trainer and Coach
www.edenchanges.com

PS In the hopes of helping the most recruiters I have posted this in each recruitment group on Linkedin that I am a member of. So yes you might have seen it more than once!