What Jerry Seinfeld Can Teach Recruiters About Job Orders

We’ve addressed the issue of qualifying job orders quite a bit in the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog, namely because being able to identify which orders are the ones worth working on is key to making more placements (and more money).

Just because a recruiter has a ton of job orders doesn’t mean they’re going to make a ton of money from those orders. Recruiters don’t get paid when they receive an order, of course. They get paid when they make a placement. Consequently, if they’re working on the “wrong” orders, then they could be wasting their time, energy, and resources.

In fact, as an example, we’re going use a pop culture icon and a seemingly unrelated—but ultimately applicable—fictional scenario.

“You know how to take the job order . . .”

As we’ve mentioned, the qualified job order is king. Illustrating this point more colorfully is an episode of the hit sitcom Seinfeld, specifically an episode in which Jerry laments to a rental car clerk in the following fashion when she informs him that the car he reserved is not available:

“See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation, and that’s really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody can just take them.”

If Jerry Seinfeld was a recruiting trainer, as opposed to a multi-million dollar comedian and actor, he might say something similar to this during his sessions:

“See, you know how to take the job order, you just don’t know how to qualify the job order, and that’s really the most important part of the job order, the qualifying. Anybody can just take them.”

So—are you just taking job orders . . . or are you qualifying them, as well. And if you’re qualifying them, to what extent are you doing so?

The answer to that question is crucial, because if you’re not qualifying your orders, you could be wasting your time. Of course, when a recruiter receives a job order from a client, they’re often so giddy at the prospect of the search that they take the order and run.

They run far and they run wide, not realizing all the while that they could be on what amounts to a wild-goose chase as opposed to a verifiable, 100%, grade-A search. (Although if a recruiter could score a search fee for placing wild geese, they might give it a shot.)

So this is the time to take a small step back, not to mention a deep breath, and make sure that the job orders you’ve been given are qualified orders. This will help to weed out the bad orders and create more time for you to spend on those that are most likely to result in a placement . . . and more importantly, a placement FEE.

In my next blog post, I’ll address the “4 Critical Components for Qualifying Job Orders.”