Securing new clients (and business from current clients) is what makes your recruiting business run. Once you find leads, it’s up to you to turn those leads into paying clients. Read on to learn how to convert leads into clients.
How to convert leads into clients
Nobody likes spending time enticing customer leads to no avail. If the lead is a good fit for your services, you need to convince them that your offerings are what they need.
Use these tips for more effective lead conversion.
1. Be attentive
To increase your lead conversion rate, you don’t want to be pushy or desperate. On the other hand, you don’t want to be inattentive and elusive. You need to be attentive to the needs of your potential clients.
When a lead contacts you, don’t wait for days to get back to them. Make sure you are quick to answer any questions or concerns they have. If you keep them waiting, they could spend that time finding a different recruiter.
Being attentive to a lead’s needs means you listen to what they’re looking for instead of diving into what you can give them. First, you need to recognize the problem they are trying to solve. Pay attention to what their company needs and make sure you can deliver.
2. Use your resources effectively
Juggling dozens of different leads can be difficult to manage. But, you don’t have to do everything manually. You can invest in tools like recruiting software to increase conversion rate.
Use a recruiting CRM to organize contact information, schedule meetings and calls, and streamline email marketing.
Recruitment email marketing lets you initially promote your services and develop relationships with potential clients. Using different templates, you can save time on drafting emails from scratch. However, keep in mind that you still need to personalize emails so leads don’t feel like they are the recipients of mass emails.
3. Detail the value of your recruiting services
Now comes the time when you can promote your services. What can you provide that other recruiters cannot?
Target exact pain points the potential client has and discuss your general recruiting plan—don’t go into too much detail or the lead could take your information and run.
The lead may even send you a request for proposal (RFP) document to learn more about your services. RFPs let companies ask questions about how your services would benefit from them. An RFP response gives you the opportunity to discuss how you would handle the recruiting process for their particular job order. You can also include other information, like your recruiting fees, in your response.
4. Use recruiting metrics
Quantify your accomplishments with statistics. You can use recruitment metrics to back up your claims about your services, skills, candidate placements, and general recruitment successes.
Three recruiting metrics you can use to convert leads into clients include:
- Response rate
- Average time to fill
- Passive candidate conversion rate
If you’re unsure how to calculate the above rates, take a closer look at these popular recruiting metrics.
Response rate
You can use this metric to show your leads how well you get candidates to respond to you. It might be most beneficial to categorize your outreach (i.e., responses from reaching out via email, phone, social media, etc.).
To find your candidate response rate, divide your total responses by your total outreach attempts. Then, multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage.
Response Rate = (Total Responses / Total Outreach Attempts) X 100
Let’s say you want to find out your email marketing response rate for the first half of the year. You sent out 10,000 emails and received responses from 6,500 people. Your response rate would be 65% (6,500 / 10,000).
Of course, if you have a low response rate from one outreach category, you might want to focus on the categories you have a good response rate in.
Explain to your leads how your healthy response rate helps you to recruit and place top talent for your clients.
Average time to fill
Potential clients want to know that you can place a candidate quickly and efficiently. They might be hesitant to hire you if your recruiting process lasts months when they have an urgent job order to fill.
You can show leads how long it takes you to fill job orders by using the average time to fill recruitment metric.
Time to fill represents the total days the job is open. To find your average, add together the days it took to fill all your jobs and divide that number by the total number of jobs.
Average Time to Fill = Total Days to Fill for All Jobs / Total Number of Jobs
For example, a potential client needs to hire an accountant. You had five job orders for accounting positions during the year. You spent 40, 30, 35, 42, and 28 days filling these five job orders. Add together the days it took you to fill the jobs (175). Next, divide 175 by the total number of jobs, which is five (175 / 5). Your average time to fill for accounting positions is 35 days.
Passive candidate conversion rate
In some industries (e.g., technical industries) there’s a shortage of qualified candidates. To expand your candidate pool, you might need to recruit passive candidates.
Potential clients might be interested to know whether you are able to encourage passive candidates, who are people not actively searching for a job, to apply for jobs with your clients. You can show leads your passive candidate conversion rate.
Your passive conversion rate shows leads how effective you are at recruiting passive candidates. To find this percentage, you must divide the number of passive candidates you reached out to by the number who are interested.
Passive Candidate Conversion Rate = (Interested Candidates / Contacted Passive Candidates) X 100
Let’s say you contacted 400 passive candidates this quarter and 200 were interested in the open positions. You would have a passive candidate conversion rate of 50% (200 / 400).
