How I Made 107 Placements in One Week

In today's video, I'll be talking to you about how I made 107 placements in just one week and how 50% of those went temp to perm. For those of you who are new here, my name is Jessica Kimber. I've been a recruiter for over 16 years now, and I own my own recruitment agency, and I also own a company called Rare, which offers personal branding and training programs specifically for recruiters.

Okay, so casting all the way back to 2008, I first started in a technical recruitment agency...I recruited between 30 to 60 temp roles every single month.

Building Communities I was persuading people from everywhere in Europe...I was always very much used to headhunting, market mapping, finding out who had the right qualifications for what I needed, and then building relationships and building a community. Community is something I really want to speak to you about in this video as well because it's something I do to this day.

Leveraging Communities for Referrals Quite often what would happen is I would persuade a set of people to go out to Switzerland, fix these aircrafts, and then they'd get paid quite well. So then they'd go and tell their friends, and I would say, and I'd incentivize them to go and tell their friends...But the way I was able to maintain this was through LinkedIn community groups.

Same Principles, New Industry I then...moved to Australia and Sydney, Australia, and I got a role at Hays Recruitment...And what I did ultimately was use exactly the same principles that I had used to recruit engineers and blue-collar workers but applied that to accounting and finance.

Recruiting at Pace Again, took that over to the accounting and finance desk at Hays, worked at a fast pace, built a community, built a referral program, and followed my LinkedIn strategy where I would do consistent outreach and build all sorts of talent pools...

The 107 Placements in One Week In my first year, I actually placed 585 people into employment...What actually happened and the way I was able to recruit 107 roles in just one week is we had a catastrophic event...I had something like 200 roles to recruit instantly. What I did is what I usually do – I went out to my community...Out of that, I reached out to all of these people in the talent pool, and off the back of that, I was speaking to 30 to 40 people every single day... In the end, the first week after Christmas, I had 107 people start in that one week. The following week, I think I had something like 56 start. In theory, I had 160-odd people start in two weeks.

Temp to Perm Conversions Then, 50% of them actually went temp to perm, which was, of course, a very healthy commission paycheck...

The Keys to Success The point I'm trying to make is that I've recruited in engineering, aviation, accounting and finance, office support, project services, and insurance, but the principles and foundations of how I've recruited and been successful in all of these are exactly the same. Operating at that high pace, utilizing social media, and becoming the absolute go-to in that space, and preempting who you need to speak to because they're already in your network and they already trust you, and finally, building a community.

Importance of Communities
The other luxury of building a community is quite often you'll actually build a really solid referral lead generation strategy that way as well because these people already trust you. If you've already done goodwill and connected with them and built a relationship, people will return the favor and reciprocate your goodwill as well.

Accelerating with Content As many of you know, I have built a highly successful personal brand on LinkedIn in the last two years...For the 13 years before that, yes, I was using social media and building communities, but it accelerated due to my content strategy.

Final Thoughts Ultimately, the foundations of how I've recruited strategically have never actually changed...If you can put that in place, you don't need to just hammer the phones and speak to as many people as possible and have all these first touch points because you've got a pool of people that you can go to whenever is needed, and that will come back to you as well.

If you are interested in learning how to use social media, and in particular LinkedIn, to build a personal brand and automate the lead generation process for you. Please submit an enquiry via the “Contact” page and we will be in touch.