Recruiting like an underwriter

In this issue:

• Intro to recruiting like an underwriter

• The story of how I had two declined offers in one week back in 2015, which prompted me to seek advice from a top billing mentor. That mentor coined this phrase and stuck with me since.

• The logic & how process on recruiting like an underwriter

Intro

As most of you know, I had the pleasure of having multiple mentors early in my career.

Two top billing sales reps, my sales manager, and the President of the company.

In today’s issue, we’ll go over one of the best pieces of advice that one of the sales reps told me early on in my career:

Recruit like an underwriter.

Recruiting a qualified candidate is only half the job. Anyone can do this, and this is the easy part.

Calculating the “risk” of said candidate is the hard part.

• Is this candidate active or passive?

• What other interviews do they have going on?

• What stages of those interviews are they in?

• What pain points are they experiencing that’s causing them to look for a new role?

• What motives are they looking for in order to accept a new offer?

These are only a few of the questions that we need to ask ourselves before deciding if we should work with a candidate or not.

Because at the end of the day, we work off of commission. So our time is valuable and as important as anyone else’s. The last thing we want to do is push a candidate to a client, only for it to fall apart at the very end.

Of course, rejected offers happen, but we want to mitigate that risk as much as possible up front and throughout the process.

Story Time

So how did this phrase pop up?

Simply put, in one week I had two declined offers back in 2015. I was obviously distraught and wanted to seek advice.

So I asked my one mentor - let’s call him Jay.

Jay went over both situations with me one by one.