Clients Ghosting You? Here’s What It Means For Recruiters And How To Fix It In 2025

Jan 7, 2025 | Marketing for Recruiters | 0 comments

QUESTION: I have been recruiting and career consulting gratis in the biotech industry for over 28 years. With the shaky economy, too many of our clients are resorting to anything possible: LinkedIn, company referrals, internal recruiters, other than external recruiting partners to find and hire candidates. I have a lot of industry contacts and current contacts with some of the top companies. I have a good business reputation, but am being ghosted by my clients, even with a bona fide top-tier MPC. Thoughts?

What Ghosting Means: Understanding Your Clients’ Needs

If your clients are ghosting you, they just do not need you right now, even with a bona fide MPC. If I am not hiring, I am not hiring. But using an MPC, or for those of you who do not know that term, the most placeable candidate, what I would recommend is that clients always want to be kept informed of great talent.

Improving Your MPC Presentation: Speak Their Language

First, make sure your description in writing of your MPC uses the words they use when describing what they are looking for in different roles. Avoid terms like “outstanding sales performer” and “great communicator.” That is all white noise. If they are excellent or a great communicator, what specific example do you have to back that up? What is the alphabet soup if you are in biotech? What is the alphabet soup they want to hear about that they have had trouble finding over the past few years? That is the way to tighten that up.

When you say your clients are ghosting you, that tells me indirectly you may not be reaching out to prospects. We have clients in the tech and biotech space, and up until now, things have been slower. One client used the metaphor: “There are openings out there, but the fish aren’t jumping in the boat like they used to. Now we have to go fishing.”

The Power of Daily Prospecting: How Many Conversations Are You Having?

My challenge to you is are you – talking to, not emailing responses – to three or four new prospects a day? Depending on the niche, our current metric is between 12 and 16 conversations leading to one search you will work on. You will find more openings, but generally, the quality you would want to work on is between 12 and 16 client conversations. You can use email, text, or any form of media to set those up. Or you can leave great old-fashioned voicemails. Those work, too.

If you are talking to three people a day, three prospects, let’s just go crazy, four a day, that’s 20 a week. You are going to take a search a week. I promise you will take a search per week, especially if you have been in the business for 28 years. You know what the business issues are. Whenever I come across somebody and, again, things are softer now than they were a year ago. That is a business development problem. But 99.99% of the time, it is an activity problem. We got spoiled a couple of years ago. Business was robust. People did not have to market. You could leverage. With your experience, you could leverage a client.

Fine-Tuning Your Recruiting Strategy: Next Steps

I would do a couple of things. One, audit your MPC presentation and make sure it is really tight. Two, develop a list in your niche of companies you have not worked with or have not worked with in ages and reach out to them. If your MPC approach is great, you can try to recruit them or flip the call into a marketing call. It is another great technique with a very high response rate. Make sure you have a plan to do that.

We have done, and I have talked about this, as evidence for you, where people out there say, nobody picks up the phone anymore, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It is hard to get a hold of people. Those are all limiting and fear-driven false beliefs. One of the things we recommend to our clients is to hire a researcher that can get mobile numbers, direct dial phone numbers, direct emails for the people you are trying to target.

Leveraging the Power Hour Technique for Effective Outreach

Two, we do this once a month with our clients, and the results are remarkable. We generally have an average of 50 to 60 recruiters on what we call our Power Hour. It is one hour. In this one hour, we do not use any other technology other than the old-school phone. All it is is reaching out to either candidates or prospects. The hour ends up being 45 minutes, a 5-minute ramp-up, 45 minutes of calling, and a 10-minute wind down with quick takeaways and people reporting in their numbers.

In 45 minutes, this is the average and remarkably consistent, 22 attempts and 4 conversations. When we hear that nobody is picking up the phone anymore, we have done this over a dozen times with our clients in the last 18 months. It is always 3.7, 3.9, and 4.2 when we average the calls and conversations in 45 minutes, meaning 5 an hour.

I recommend that you take these techniques and then put together a list. Have at least 30 people to call every day, and commit to going through that list for an hour to build up some momentum in that area.

P.S. Whenever you’re ready… here are 4 ways I can help you grow your recruitment business:

1. Grab a free copy of my Retainer Blueprint

It’s the exact, step-by-step process of getting clients to give you money upfront. https://get.therecruiteru.com/lm​​

2. Join the Recruiter Think Tank and connect with firm owners who are scaling, too. It’s our Facebook community where smart recruiters learn to make more money and get more freedom. https://www.facebook.com/groups/there​​…

3. Join me at our next event

3x a year, I run a 3-day virtual intensive, sharing the 9 key areas that drive a 7-figure search firm. Click here to check out the dates of our upcoming event. https://get.therecruiteru.com/live

4. Work with me and my team privately

And if you ever want to get some 1:1 help, we can jump on the phone for a quick call and brainstorm how to get you more leads, more placements, and more time. https://get.therecruiteru.com/scale-now​

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