How to Stop Recruits Ghosting You

The first call went great, the recruit agreed to coffee, and then your texts and calls went unanswered. I think we’re the ones that forced Wikipedia to define ghosting. It was never a word until about a decade ago. It means we recruiting leaders, we continue to harass people that have said, I’m happy where I’m at.

So when a recruit goes quiet, most leaders read it as rejection, and I read it as feedback on how we pursued them. If I treat you like you’re warm or you’re hot and you’re cold, that’s where the word ghosting comes into play. We’re the ones that have defined it because we just haven’t had enough EQ to pursue people correctly. Here are the five moves I teach recruiting leaders to stop recruits ghosting them, and to win back the ones who already have.

Read the temperature before you pursue

Tension is healthy when you’re recruiting. Every recruit sits somewhere between cold, warm, and hot, and your pursuit has to match where they are today. It’s okay if someone’s like, I’m not interested, you’re at 32 degrees, that tells me exactly how I need to be pursuing you moving forward very passively. Someone says I’m somewhere in between, means that I need to continue inspiring you so that you want to aspire to my team.

The cold recruit is where most leaders get burned. If I am aggressively pursuing you and you are cold then I position myself to be ghosted. So if they are cold I will pursue them through passive communication, where I have a value equation and I pursue you very thoughtfully when I am bringing value to you. I am not going to stop in saying are you happy, are you interested.

End every call with a real next step

You can’t read the temperature if you never test it, so every conversation ends with an invitation (the full first-call script is in the loan officer recruiting script). I’m gonna purposely insert some tension with a strong next step so that I know exactly where you are. A face-to-face coffee or lunch works well, because the way a recruit answers tells you whether they’re cold, warm, or hot. You want to leave every recruiting conversation having gained agreement on the actual next step, not just gained agreement on planning a next step.

There’s one more early warning sign worth tracking, and it’s how long the call lasted. We look for this thing we call call duration, and call duration is, did the call get to four minutes? Because if it got to four minutes, I don’t even need to listen to the call recording. I already know that that person said yes, and that at a high probability, they’re going to show up to the meeting that they said yes to.

Give them a reason to show up

One mortgage company I worked with was losing about half its recruits before the first meeting, so we tested one line. 18% out of a hundred people showed up because on the first message we said, PS, the leader’s active on LinkedIn. Here’s the URL to his LinkedIn profile. It was just social proof. Like this is an interesting person. I should have a conversation. We’d cleaned up a thin profile first, so the link led somewhere worth seeing. Your brand affects everything.

Remove the tension they created

Recruits move away from tension. Well, they do dumb things and create their own tension, like no-showing a meeting, right? They created it by no-showing. So they’ll just stop responding. So you got to remove that tension for them that they self-created.

The fix is a message with some grace in it that gives them an easy way back, with no judgment attached. And humor is a fantastic way to get someone that hasn’t messaged you back to message you. I’ve left voice messages for people. Hey, I thought about dialing 911. I’ve also considered looking underneath some rocks. I haven’t been able to get a response from you. I purposely will leave a message like that and remove all the tension. I save that for the fourth or fifth touch with no reply. When you insert yourself as a recruiter you’re inserting tension. One of the best tools you have to relieve that tension is to incorporate humor, not take yourself too seriously, because that creates a safety space to go build relationship.

Let go of the offense while you’re at it, because a recruit can feel it when you’re keeping score. Recruit like a dog, not a cat. A dog whose tail gets caught in the door still comes back happy to see you, and a cat holds a grudge for days.

Stay in it with extravagant value

When you show up one time a month, the word I always use is extravagant value. Extravagant means beyond reasonable. It has to be something they’d want even if they never join you, like a market update, and a just-checking-in text doesn’t count. Once a month until they leave the industry, they say stop sending me awesome stuff, or you leave the business yourself.

Here’s a real life example: a branch leader verbally committed all three of his teams to me, then the move fell apart inside his company and he went silent for six months. Six months in, a picture pops up of some awesome family vacation. I took that picture, sent it to a website that printed it as a canvas, and I sent it to him. I wrote a note about the five-year vision of handing the keys of the kingdom to your son, and that if I ever had the chance to partner with you, I’d be honored to help you create more moments like this. Within minutes of signing for that, he called me back. That canvas worked because it came from a dream he’d shared with me long before anything went wrong.