Picture this: You’ve gotten to the finish line with a recruit. They’re ready to join you, and you’re preparing to sign them on.
And then you lose them to a competitor who offers a higher bonus.
In the last moments, you lost them to a big check.
Sound familiar? I’ll bet most (if not all) recruiters have experienced this at one time or another.
This industry has created what I would call mercenaries. They’re the people who will just go with the biggest check offered to them. So how do you compete with that?
You do that by setting yourself apart. By showing that you will provide the recruit with the bigger value (beyond money) in the long term. And that’s where your vision comes in.
If I were to sit with this recruit, I would ask them:
- Was this other leader able to articulate their vision for the market, and where they were going to build for the next ten years?
- Are you clear on what the leader’s top values are?
- What are this leader’s behaviors, actions, and how do they lead their team?
I’d dare say that almost any recruit would have no idea what I was talking about. Instead, they would say, “We talked about products, culture, compensation, and the sign on bonus.” That’s it.
There will always be bigger check offers, and sometimes we can’t compete with that. So to set ourselves apart, we need to talk about our values, our greater “Why,” and why we leaders do what we do. This is outside of money, and out of the transactional component of the industry.
So we need to ask ourselves: Am I casting a clear vision for these recruits?
We do this to set ourselves apart. We do this to show our recruits who we are. And we do this to learn about what the recruit values, and what makes them “tick.”
When we show recruits that we can offer them value beyond the dollar sign–value that is important to them and speaks to their desire, we immediately stand out from the crowd.
When someone sits with me for our first meeting, I’ll say to them, “Let me share my vision.” I’ll explain that we started this company in 2017, and at that time our ten-year vision was that we would impact 10,000 Recruiting Leaders by the year 2027. And each year, we’d help those leaders live the ideal life and lifestyle. We’ve mapped that out over a ten-year journey to show how we will get there, and we have this broken down to seven crucial steps. And I can tell them exactly where they are going to fit into this plan.
That way, the recruit is clear on what they will be doing, what they would be involved in, and where we will be going together.
When I share a vision with you, I can conjure up a ton of energy that I’m excited about. I’m almost out of breath. I can see it, I can feel it, and it’s coming because we’ve got the roadmap for this.
This isn’t a sign on bonus. It’s not a product list. It’s a real, believable, and actionable vision–and the excitement for that is contagious. When we talk about vision with our recruits–our vision for the future, how they fit in, and how we can help them achieve theirs–we put our competition at a serious disadvantage. If they’re just offering a sign on bonus, that says nothing about the future or about their dreams and goals as an individual. If your vision is clear, it’s big, it’s hairy and audacious–you’ve established yourself as a major cut above the rest.
