Land and expand: The fast track to a successful desk

When I coach new recruiters, I often talk about Pareto’s law. You may have heard people call it the 80/20 rule. When you apply it to recruitment, it means that  80% of your work will come from 20% of your clients.

The law isn’t something that just happens. It is something that you need to make a reality. Every now and again, you may come across a client that will fully buy in to you and become one of, if not, your biggest clients.

If you look around your sales floor, you will see a bunch of recruiters that haven’t harnessed Pareto’s law. You will see recruiters who are doing well, but all of their work comes from 1 or 2 clients. You will also see recruiters who are making a good amount of placements, but they are all with different clients. Neither of these are sustainable or efficient.

In the first scenario, these clients are generally ones that have just fully bought in straight away, or just have lots of vacancies that need filling. There are a few red flags here for me. The first red flag comes from the only clients being ones that have fully bought in start away. There is a very high probability that the recruiter has no idea how they won this client over. For me, this is a red flag because they have no clue how to replicate this success with another client.

The second red flag is the client that has lots of vacancies to fill. Having lots of vacancies isn’t the red flag, the bigger picture is. Why do they have these vacancies? How long is the recruitment drive? What happens when they fill these vacancies? I have seen this happen many times. The recruiter wins a client that has lots of vacancies to fill, so they drop everything. Every time, this has ended up in a situation where the recruiter has a good year, their targets go up, and then the client stops hiring.

Due to the recruiter riding the cash cow, they haven’t won over any other repeat business and are now struggling.

If all of your placements are coming from lots of clients, then you are making life really hard for yourself. You are having to learn about all of the clients wants and needs every time you want to make a placement. You also then need to keep in touch with all of these clients. The chances are that you are always competing with other recruiters for these placements as you haven’t nurtured the relationships and won exclusivity.

So how do you make Pareto’s law a reality and avoid the common mistakes of recruiters?

Land and expand. This is a great way to unlock the full potential of all of your clients.

This process won’t work with all clients, but you will quickly work out if it won’t due to the size of the organisation. The land and expand method requires you build a strong relationship with one of the hiring managers. This isn’t the superficial relationship where you are friends, it’s the relationship where they trust you and have confidence that you will fill their vacancies with top talent. This way they will happily let you know who the other hiring managers are and maybe even recommend you to them. Once you know who they are, you can then start to replicate what you did with the first hiring manager.

You should know the type of vacancies that the first hiring manager has as you have been working with them. As you start connecting with the other hiring managers, you will be able to find out who is in their team. You will now be able to build a picture of the different hiring managers in the organisation and the types of candidates that they look for.

In the image above you can see that hiring manager 1 and 2 look for the same candidates.

You now have 2 places that you could potentially place candidates 1 and 2. You can see that there are 5 hiring managers that might want to hire candidate 3. You have opened up this account in a way that now opens the opportunity for 14 placement opportunities instead of just the 1 – 3 that you would have had with the first hiring manager.

You can start to do this with all of your clients, and uncover the clients that you can expand.