I love questions. If you are a regular reader of my content you will have already worked that out.
If you know you need to ask better questions already here is a link to 3 questions that will help deliver almost immediate results.
If you are not yet convinced read on. I need to warn you I am on a mission this year to get recruitment owners, managers and consultants to ask better question and stop making assumptions.
I came to appreciate the power of questions when I invested in business coaching during the time I ran my own recruitment business. I then took this to another level of understanding when I decided to study how the mind and body work together to produce our results.
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Is your questioning technique rusty?
If you are a busy billing manager possibly; let me explain. How many times have you made assumptions in your life? I am sure we all have hundreds of examples from our personal lives; yet what about business?
Cast your mind back to when you first started in recruitment. Remember when you were trained and how you were encouraged to ask questions of both candidates and clients to uncover their needs? To listen to the answer, perhaps dig a little deeper and respond?
It was amazing what you could discover wasn’t it? And just using some classic open and closed questions. Are you still using them where they work best?
Possibly not and it isn’t your fault. What happens as we become more ‘ingrained’ in what we are doing is we make assumptions about what our consultants are thinking and doing.
As a general rule of thumb recruitment managers are a dynamic bunch with a dominant style that can get a bit too enthusiastic. This often results in leading questions being asked. Let me demonstrate the impact of doing this.
Jane: “So Andy how is it going…2 second pause then………….have you spoken to Tempelhellis yet about that admin role? Also I have been thinking about foilco and that BDM they are looking for and wondered where you are at with sourcing…………………………..??
Umh, have you ever been on the receiving end of this ‘style’ of questioning? So exactly what question did Jane want Andy to answer and how specifically was she going to uncover, how it was going?
The answer is she won’t and potentially she’ll never find out what is going on for Andy; which could mean she will miss an opportunity to coach him to a whole new level of success.
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Exactly What You Need To Cover In The Initial 8 Weeks To Successfully Train and Onboard New Resourcers…
Don’t make assumptions on limited information
Something I learnt early on in my NLP studies was that as human beings we are bombarded with information. Far too much to ever retain in its raw form, and make sense of. That is why our amazing brains help us; well of a fashion.
They help us process information by ‘filtering’ the data that comes in. We then do a number of things. We:
- Generalise……………” all consultants start coasting the minute they hit their target!”
- Distort……………….. “When I was a billing consultant I made 30 calls every morning. Said in a smug voice “
- Delete………………… “You didn’t ask me for this afternoon off?! I never received an email.”
Any of these sound familiar? They should as they are all natural patterns that we human’s exhibit. Don’t panic help is at hand. Drum roll, enter our friend the question.
Here is where questions can help
That is why I love questions so much because they help us uncover missing pieces of information.
Picture the scenario of one of your consultants working their socks off with six jobs on the board and still not getting anywhere. Both of you are frustrated. The solution? You need more information about what is going on and the best way to uncover this is to ask some appropriate questions and then WAIT FOR THE ANSWER.
By taking the time to do this you will uncover where the issue is. Having seen situations like this hundreds of times you will soon have an answer that you can deal with and guess what; it is normally straight forward.
If you are going to set one goal this year, make it asking better questions.
I hope you found this article useful.
If you want to learn how to set up your business, so that it stops under-performance once and for all, then join my free webinar: The 5 Secrets Our Clients Use to Build 7 & 8 Figure Recruitment Businesses
Warmest regards,
