The Big Biller Summit
Posted by Mitch on 22nd October 2013
You can find out more about The Big Biller Summit here.
For those of you who don’t want to listen to it all (or worse, pay for it), here’s a condensed version, kindly presented by Alex Brock via Twitter.
alexonrec</a> Ground-breaking. When I first started in the industry, I learned that shit in the first hour.</p>— Mitch Sullivan (mitchsullivan) October 22, 2013
My response is an added bonus. Like those extras you get on DVDs, only worse.
I’m not a fan of The Big Biller Summit. I think it dumbs the industry down – and right now the last thing the recruitment industry needs is dumbing down.
A big part of my problem is that most of the recruitment trainers featured on this and previous years “summit” haven’t recruited for more than 10 years. Some of them even failed as recruiters, yet claim to have the secrets of becoming a “big biller” and sometimes even “a millionaire”.
Street corner trading
To me, their promotional methodology seems to be designed to appeal to a recruiters greed and/or laziness (lots of money, easy to do, etc.) and at worse, it’s contributing to some agency delusions about what really needs to be happening in the recruitment market.
And pretty much all of it is driven by email marketing, which is why they ask for your email address in exchange for revealing their “secrets” for recruitment success.
And if that doesn’t give you a clue as to the kind of selling philosophy they’re going to teach, then you probably don’t care about client retention, marketing …and probably recruitment too.
Here’s the deal
Many recruitment trainer’s interests are best served by recruiters having to always cold-call for business and only deliver on about 20% of the jobs they work on – which in turn feeds the need for more cold-calling.
This is fine for trainee recruiters or those with less than 3 years experience – but for everyone else, it’s very circular. It may partly explain why so many people leave the agency world – because eventually they just get incredibly bored going round in circles.
The bottom line
Cold-calling or business development training drives most of the recruitment training industry’s revenue.
It’s one of those Munchausen By Proxy relationships, where the person supposed to be caring for the patient needs the validity of that patient always being ill. That kind of relationship is not a lot of fun to watch happen.
The Big Biller Summit is the poster-boy of that philosophy.
Comments
By Chris D on Tuesday, 22 October 2013My big issue with the ‘big biller’ club is the
misconception that being a ‘big biller’ has a direct correlation with being a great recruiter & in my experience & even in my case it wasn’t true.
By Mark Burton on Wednesday, 23 October 2013
Mitch, if you’re not careful you’re going to end up with a reputation as a cynic!
Greg’s contribution was great. I also listened to Bill Radin, who still recruits and he was focused on moving from contingency to exclusive/ retained. He made some really interesting points and reinforced some of the things you said. I’m convinced this is the way forward and will talk to you more about it soon. He was also kind enough to send through some terms and another document he uses which looks interesting.
I don’t know about the others and I certainly don’t like the “explode your earnings and millionaire recruiter stuff” but Bill impressed me.
By Mitch on Wednesday, 23 October 2013
Hi Mark
Please don’t confuse Bill Radin’s approach to winning retained-fee work with mine.
My understanding of his course (based on listening to his CD of the same name) is that it tries to teach contingency recruiters to win retained-fees by moving much further up the salary scale by taking on search assignments for senior execs.
That isn’t what I do. My course is about moving your existing clients from contingency to retained without changing the types of jobs you already fill for them.
That is a lot less risky than moving up to larger salaried positions which the recruiter probably won’t fully understand.
By Mark on Wednesday, 23 October 2013
Hi Mitch.
Bill didn’t go in to real detail about his methods and didn’t promote his own services. Lots of what he said echoed what you said about the thinking behind moving from contingency to an exclusive/ retained model and the benefits that brings for everyone, as long as you actually fill the jobs.
I am still working out the best time for us to start the work you talked me through. It’s purely a timing issue though as it’s something that I certainly intend to do. The more I’ve thought about it, the clearer it’s become that I need to do it.
At the minute, I’m thinking that we should get started either in December or January but I’ll keep in touch.
Mark
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