Stocking the employer pipeline to build consistent employment outcomes
Editorial by Christian Saint Cyr
National Director / Canadian Job Development Network
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Imagine it’s October 21st and the month is nearly three quarters complete. You have a goal of seeing 20 clients go on to successful employment this month and barely 10 have actually started new jobs. What can you do?
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All too often it’s instinctive for job developers to conduct a rash of employer outreach, trying to find any employer who might be hiring and make desperate pitches for your clients.
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Just as our clients don’t present very well from a place of desperation, employers are turned off by end of day calls, client pitches that are blurted out and an unwarranted sense of urgency.
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Salespeople have something called a ‘sales pipeline’ and in keeping with this notion, I’d like to introduce you to the ‘employer pipeline’.
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The sales pipeline proposes the notion that the sales calls you make today will likely result in sales you will close a month from now. From this perspective it takes into consideration that it will take some time to connect with a sales prospect, share information with them, schedule a meeting, allow for them to do their own due diligence and ultimately make a purchasing decision.
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In this same manner, it will take some time to connect with an employer, share the employment supports you have to offer, discuss potential candidates, allow the employer to consider how this will impact their recruitment plans, provide time to interview the candidate, check references and ultimately make the hiring decision. This process could take as much as 30 days.
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For this reason, it is likely the employers you contact today, will be the employers which may hire your clients 30 days from now. It means that you need to be contacting employers every day and if you suddenly take a break, your employer pipeline will dry up or slow to a trickle four or five weeks later.
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When people are acting from a place of desperation, whether they are job seekers or job developers, they are looking for results right away. By adopting a big-picture perspective, job developers can invest the time and attention on a daily basis, knowing they are continually building up good will, employer contacts and job leads that will produce results in the near future.
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Establishing and maintaining an employer pipeline is intended to reduce the stress of employer engagement. It gives job developers routine daily activities they can engage in with the confidence that this will produce results in the long-term.
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To establish an employer pipeline job developers will need to determine how many employers they should contact each day. Perhaps it’s just new employers and perhaps it’s a combination of new employers and employers you already have a relationship with, but the goal is to determine how many employers you’ll connect with each day.
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This can be done by calculating how many employment or placement outcomes you need to make in a month and multiplying this by the number of employer contacts it typically takes to achieve just one employment outcome.
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If your goal is to place 20 people over the course of the month and there are approximately 20 work days each month, if you estimate you need to connect five employers to achieve just one employment outcome, you’ll need to contact five employers each and every day.
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From here on, if you meet your employment goal, you may choose to keep it up and if you fall short you might want to increase your daily employer contacts to six or seven.
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It may be tempting to avoid calling every day. You may choose to call 25 employers every Friday instead of five every day. You may also be tempted to skip days and call 10 the next day. I’d like to caution you against doing this.
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Ultimately, you may be forced to play catch-up due to sickness or something outside of your control, but consistently calling every day, will help build the habit of reaching out to employers and ensure you're reaching out to them in your best mental and emotional state.
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As employers flow through your pipeline, you might want to identify predetermined points of contact. This is not the only approach, but here is an example:
- Telephone or drop into the employer to share information about your services
- Send a follow-up email
- Call to see if you can arrange an in-person meeting
- Make follow-up calls and emails until you can secure a one-on-one meeting
- Pitch potential clients in-person, by phone or by email
- Follow-up to determine if the employer has made a hiring choice
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You would then do each of these steps for every employer in your pipeline.
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This is not to say you need to adopt this approach, although it is helpful to have a routine method of connecting with an employer until you achieve one of four results
- they choose to hire your client(s);
- they hire another candidate;
- they specifically state they do not wish to use your services; or
- they state they will not use your services now but may in the future
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Similar to sales professionals, it’s important to consider where each employer is in the hiring process to help guide your communication with them. The following are some of the places where you might find employers within your employer pipeline:
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Awareness: The employer realizes they have a role to staff.
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Consideration: The employer defines the role they wish to fill, identifying the skills they need, creating a job posting, writing a job description, etc.
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Decision: The employer understands the services and supports you provide, they’ve been introduced to clients and must choose between hiring your client(s) or recruit from the public at large.
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As you begin your sales pipeline, be sure to clean it out regularly. If you’re continually leaving messages for employers and they are not responding, remove them from consideration. It’s doubtful if an employer doesn’t reply after four points of contact that they will be any more likely to reply positively after 10 points of contact.
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The idea of the employer pipeline is to give you clear unambiguous tasks to do every day which lead to employment outcomes. By consistently reaching out every day, you’re not weighing your success or professional sense of self worth on any single employer engagement. You’re just systematizing your approach and once this is in place, you can then craft your communication with employers to ensure you make the most positive connections possible.
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We’ll be discussing the 'Employer Pipeline' and how you can implement it in your work at our #MotivatingMondays meeting of the Canadian Job Development Network, Monday Oct. 21st at 8:30am Pacific; 9:30am Mountain; 10:30am Central; 11:30am Eastern; 12:30pm Atlantic and at 1pm in Newfoundland.
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On the morning of Monday October 21st, 'Click this Link' to join the session LIVE.
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