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Welcome to The Solo Recruiter (TSR)! This is a weekly newsletter dedicated to providing actionable insights for busy recruiters who want to perform better and earn more. Not a little bit more, but more like 3X more at least.

Here’s what on the menu today:

Be A Thought Leader

Recruitment is sales.

Some people joked about us being human traffickers aka selling people to companies.

Jokes aside, it is technically a sales job in case you are still pondering. To be specific, it is categorically consulting sales where you guide your client to make an informed hiring decision.

This is why you need to be a thought leader in your work.

If not, you will just internalize all your clients’ concerns and accept them as they are. This is different from asking you to be argumentative as there are definitely times you will agree with your client’s assessment. Those cases exist and you should be quick to align.

Yet on most days, the perfect candidate does not exist. You know it, your clients know it. Yet they are still giving you that “The candidate doesn’t seem to be good enough." vibe.

If you are a pushover, you agree because you want to please them. Then that’s the end of the story.

However, if you are able to organize your thoughts and strategize around that, you can add a ton of value by injecting a different perspective - of course, one that makes sense but is uncommon to the client’s way of thinking.

This is how you make most of your placements because the ideal candidate won’t just happen. Even when it does, the percentage is less than 10%. I tracked this over 2022 and 2023 thus far. That’s a lot of work for a measly 10% chance of being paid for your work.

You can control that end result. Here’s how:

1. Do a deep dive of the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.

2. Prepare a report (one pager so that it’s targeted and not overwhelming) detailing why the candidate is a strong fit. Provide details such as relevant achievements, and bring out salient points that might be missed during their interviews.

3. Conclude with your opinion how the candidate fits in by focusing on strengths that complement the rest of the client’s team (Again, this requires you to understand your client’s structure relatively well!)

In other words, don’t skim the surface in your candidate and client engagement. You have done a lot of work till this point and the same goes for your candidate and client who invested time over several meetings.

With almost anything, the final 10% requires a 90% effort to nail it. This is where you don’t let up. Instead, plunge in, give your 101% and articulate the value of the candidate convincingly to your client.

Recruiters who do this consistently experience an above 50% closing rate and that’s significant. With experience, the success rate increases.

If you just internalize what you are told, you are at best a good recruiter who empathizes with your client’s concern. However, if you are a thought leader, you massively value add and that’s worth the placement fee they pay you. In fact, they want to keep paying you because you are so valuable to work with.

Earn your keep. Pursue being better. Be a thought leader.

Joo Kwang
​Author of Solopreneur’s Guide to Recruitment Business

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