3 Great Lou Adler Recruiting Tips That Will Make You a Better Recruiter

[Joywtseo421]

Last week I had the opportunity to meet with and learn from recruiting legend Lou Adler. Lou has been recruiting for forty years, has written several best-selling books and currently does corporate training regarding his concept of performance based hiring. While there were many things I was able to take away from my full day with Lou, I wanted to share three things that I learned that will completely shift the way I recruit. Now while some of these may seem like simple concepts at first glance, I would urge you to really put thought into his tips and fully apply them. In recruiting, it's really easy to fall into a rut, get lazy and find yourself having formed a ton of bad habits. With that said, let’s get into 3 great Lou Adler recruiting tips that will make you a better recruiter.


Don’t sell the opportunity, sell the conversation
We have all been there. We get a passive candidate on the phone for the first time and we immediately launch into selling them on the role, or finding out about what exactly it is that would interest them in terms of an opportunity. Lou Adler doesn’t do that. In fact, he wants that first conversation to be extremely simple and straight forward. He simply wants to sell the potential candidate on having an additional conversation. In Lou’s training he must have said “don’t sell the opportunity, sell the conversation” thirty times. He uses the specific verbiage “would you be open to having a conversation about an opportunity if it was clearly superior to what you pakistan phone number resource are doing now?” That my friends, is what you call a loaded question. If you think about it, how can you say no to that? If they say yes, then you arrange a time for you two to talk at a time that’s convenient for them. Lou calls that “getting them on the bus”. You get as many good candidates on the bus as you can and you try to get the right ones to the final destination.


Salary doesn’t matter if it’s not a career move
When you get a candidate on the phone and you start talking about the opportunity, one of the things that usually comes up right away is salary. Candidates want to know. Frankly, it makes sense. There is no point investing your time in something if at the end of the day you will end up being 20k apart on money. Anyone who has been doing recruiting for a significant period of time has been burnt by this at least once. I know I have. Lou again has a very different approach to this issue. Instead of vetting this component of finding out if it’s a match, Lou does the following instead. When a candidate asks what the salary is he says the following, "Hey Ben, let’s be really frank here. If the position doesn’t offer you the growth you are looking for then the money doesn’t matter. So let’s figure out if this is a career move first and then we can figure out the money."

Lou does this for two reasons. The first is that he always believes the money is negotiable. The second is that he wants to get the candidate into the conversation. When you talk to a candidate, if money is discussed right away they are going to want a significant bump. However, if you can talk to them and sell them on what hopefully is a fantastic opportunity, the compensation becomes only a piece of the puzzle as opposed to an immediate disqualifier.