Hey. Hey. And welcome to this, the four d recruitment method podcast with me, Jeremy Snell. Join me as we unpack ideas, tactics, and processes to help you grow your business. Hey.
Speaker 1:Hey. Welcome to this. It's another episode of the four d recruitment method podcast with me, Jeremy Snell. Firstly, an apology. I've been absent.
Speaker 1:I've been remiss. There hasn't been any episodes for the last couple of weeks, and that all sits with me, guys, and I totally apologize. I got distracted by this thing called work. And with best intentions, I didn't get back to the plan. And we know what happens when we don't get back to the plan.
Speaker 1:Distraction becomes our worst enemy. And, unfortunately, that was the same with me. Human beings and all that. Right? Some of you have given me a niggle.
Speaker 1:Some of you have given me a bit of a needle about the fact there hasn't been any episodes, and I am back with an episode for you that I would consider to be well worth the wait. Because today's episode is all about the subject of trust. And trust is something that we are told consistently is one of the foundations of getting good at recruitment, building relationships, building trust. We hear it linked to social selling. We hear it linked to candidate generation.
Speaker 1:We hear it linked to client development. Pretty much everywhere we turn, the subject of relationships and trust seems to be so ingrained in the narrative. Yet weirdly, I find it very difficult to find anyone who is talking about how do you build trust. And in fact, many of the things that people share as being methodologies, they're kind of low level builders of trust in my opinion. And I feel that there are more sophisticated ways to do this.
Speaker 1:I think that there are more valuable ways to be able to do this that will help you to be able to continue on the journey of being suitably different from others who claim to be your competitors so that your prospects, your candidates, your clients will find it more difficult to draw comparisons other than differences. Does that make sense? So I have 10 things that I'm gonna share with you that I would consider to be the tools and the weaponry that will help you to be able to build trust. Now this comes with a cautionary note. Right?
Speaker 1:We're not in an industry of manipulation. As much as there is a corner of the industry who seem to think that it's okay to be manipulative to make deals happen. We are here to be able to serve our customers to the best of our ability. And by doing so, we help them to make the best decisions that they can for themselves, which quite often leads to placements. Right?
Speaker 1:So this whole subject of trust, what I wanna unpack with you are these 10 tools. These 10 tools, I would also consider the order I share them in to be levels of ascension. At the most basic level, all the way through to what I would consider to be the most sophisticated method to be able to build trust. And it's for you to decide based upon the relationships that you do or you don't have with the people that you wish to work with as to how you start to use these. I know that when we are doing anything which is outbound, we're starting from a position of zero.
Speaker 1:We have two things that we're constantly trading. We are trading attention and we are trading trust. So when we interrupt somebody, we capture their attention. The moment we have their attention, we need to do something to build trust. And as we do something to build trust, it means that we can maintain their attention.
Speaker 1:And it means that when we interrupt them again, we get a higher percentage of their time that we would call their attention. So for example, if we send a stranger an email, the chances are that if that stranger looks at it at all, they will probably consume it for a maximum of two seconds before they make a decision. So we have two seconds to be able to establish trust. If we are sending a message to somebody who is an acquaintance, then I would expect that they spend nine seconds looking at it. So we now have nine seconds to be able to build some trust.
Speaker 1:So the relationship between those two things, we're on a mission to be able to keep capturing people's attention, and every time we do so, establishing a level of trust that earns us the right to capture their attention again in the future and to hold it for longer. So I would recommend that somewhere within your eyesight, you have a little poster that simply has the word attention and below it the word trust and a couple of arrows to show that they cycle around each other. And then what I'm gonna share with you now are these 10 tools. So let's get into these 10 tools. Right?
Speaker 1:At the very bottom, this builds trust. Right? In my opinion, it gets a little bit overemphasized and a bit overused. But tool number one is liking. When you go out on a mission to be likable and you allow other people to describe you as being that, they find you inoffensive.
Speaker 1:They find being in your company is relatively comfortable. They are in danger of liking you. And when we deploy liking, it helps us in the early stages. I guess at a really basic level to not be repellent. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:So as we endeavor to become a little more likable with people, I think that's about allowing ourselves to relax, allowing ourselves to focus on talking to people about things which may have common ground, things that may demonstrate that I too am a human. And as I demonstrate I'm a human to somebody else who is a human, we move from being a job title talking to a job title, and we start to become a human talking to a human. Places where people overuse this, places where this becomes the primary way of building trust is when we start to see emails beginning with, I hope you're well. Right? This fake friendship that is over crossing the line in my opinion of liking and starting to do the opposite.
Speaker 1:But let me move on. Right? Because it's such a basic thing. Either you are doing things and being likable or you're doing the opposite. The second thing on the list is benevolence.
Speaker 1:Now benevolence is you're willing to share without expectation of something back. This is a big part of of many people's social selling strategy. This is a big part as to why marketers are very keen to make sure that we use things like lead magnets. When we are seen to give something away of value and we are benevolent with our ability to be able to do that, other people become appreciative. So it creates a trigger that is linked to something called reciprocity.
Speaker 1:So with benevolence, if I give you let's go for the classic here, people. Let me give you my salary survey. Here is my salary survey. When with benevolence, it is entirely yours. And if somebody consumes it and it proves to be a value, then they would consider me to be trustworthy on a specific topic, which might revolve around salaries.
Speaker 1:And and this works really well. And it works so well, in fact, that there are many people whose entire relationship building process revolves around being benevolent, arranging events, creating white papers, sharing information and insights. It's great. If it is not done with enough consideration, we may end up being the world's most famous event organizer who doesn't seem to get the level of business that they would like on the back of it because there isn't a sales process that is embedded in the benevolence. But benevolence is great.
Speaker 1:Benevolence is up the list, above liking. Right? And just above benevolence, we have authenticity. When you become authentic and you become yourself, you are the person who they will do business with. And this isn't about people buy from people.
Speaker 1:Right? This is about authentically allowing yourself to have your tone of voice, to show your beliefs, to show your values, to show people what pisses you off, to show people what matters. Because when you are authentically doing those things, publicly or privately, people will declare that they have similar feelings. It's how movements are created. Right?
Speaker 1:So if you have an authentic voice about what you believe recruitment should be, If you have an authentic voice about what you believe recruitment shouldn't be, and you share that in the right way, you will gather an audience of people who agree. And if you gather an audience of people who agree, who are in the right profile of your ICP or your ideal candidate profile, you'll start to be able to make money on the back of your authenticity. Number four on the list, empathy. When people feel understood. When people feel understood and then you are going to give them some advice on the area of being understood, they are more likely to take that advice because they believe that you understand their situation.
Speaker 1:It's a great referral generator to focus on helping people to feel understood because they will say to other people, you should work with this person. You should work with Jeremy because he gets me. He really sees me. He understands the situation. So when you can start to show some empathy in your asynchronous and your synchronous communication that might revolve around how you talk about the symptoms that they're suffering of common problems, that might revolve around how you show your understanding of what it's like to be them having worked with other people who are similar to them.
Speaker 1:Things like social proof starts to create empathy. So can you see that in these lower tiers of how to be able to build trust, liking, benevolence, authenticity, empathy, these are the foundations of what we hear the most that revolve around things like social selling. And guys, they work. They work really well. What we then move up into that I would consider to be the higher tiers.
Speaker 1:So when we get to number five, number five is significance. When you can help people to feel significant like they matter. How we change our language so that as we are talking to a decision maker about a role, we're talking to them about their personal perspectives on this, how they see this job evolving, how they see this hiring process going, rather than talking about the company's process. The more we position people as being significant in the conversation, the more they wanna turn up because they believe that they matter. They believe that you believe that they can add value to the conversation.
Speaker 1:There is power, people. Power in helping people to feel significant. You know that moment when you find that candidate? That candidate? And I call them the candidate because that's what you might call them.
Speaker 1:I'll call them an individual. When I find that individual on LinkedIn, I have no idea what their level of candidacy is. But what I do know is if I make them feel significant, like they matter, they're far more likely to respond to me than if I treat them like product and I start to sell to them. I know that when I make a sales call and I talk to a hiring manager or a decision maker, they will have experiences that will create their perceptions of me. And it will be their perceptions of me that could become the biggest objections to us doing business rather than the reality of me.
Speaker 1:Because their perceptions of me will be based upon their experiences of not me. And they might gather all those experiences together and start to frame it as being all agencies are the same or all agencies fish in the same pond or all agencies don't really listen. And as they start to glue those things together to create a single entity that is all agencies, their perception clouds their vision of me. And until I deal with their perception, I can't introduce them to the reality of me. And the only way that I can deal with their perceptions of me is to help them to feel significant and talk to them about their experiences of not me and talk about how those experiences have created their current belief systems and how those belief systems now drive their current behaviors.
Speaker 1:And as they start to feel like they matter, like their opinion matters, I'm not here to argue with their opinion. Their opinion is their truth. I'm here to make them feel like their opinion matters because it does. And as we do that and they feel more understood, we can now elevate the quality of trust that we have. And as we elevate the quality of trust that we have, that elevation is because everything that we're doing is we're putting money into a bank account, but it's not real money and it's not a bank account.
Speaker 1:It's trust. And it's trust that we are investing in. And every time we invest in the trust account, the credit increases. And as the credit increases, the level of trust increases. And as that increases, the level of commitment increases.
Speaker 1:The level of belief, the level of faith starts to increase. Then when we look at number six, number six is transparency. This is something that recruiters feel that they bring to the table in abundance. They believe that they are honest. They believe that they're transparent.
Speaker 1:Yet compared to the perceptions that the audience has based upon not working with you, there may be question marks around this. So the best way to show your transparency is to consistently share agendas. Open agendas on the tabletop. Reduce the perception that there are hidden agendas under the tabletop. And anytime that you encounter resistance, anytime you encounter somebody who doesn't appear to be a 100% comfortable having the conversation right now, share an agenda.
Speaker 1:Challenge their thought processes. Show your transparency that this is a mission of working together rather than two isolated missions of someone looking for a job and a recruiter trying to fill a vacancy. Because without the transparency, we're in danger of going back to being a job title talking to a drug title. So we've gone liking, benevolence, authenticity, empathy, safety, significance, transparency. Now we get into the top three.
Speaker 1:At number eight is ability. Your ability will inspire trust around that thing. If you're really good at throwing darts at a dartboard and others can see that and they can see it happen consistently, they will start to trust you if they want to learn how to throw darts better. So the trust, the trust in terms of ability is very contextual. They will trust you on one thing and potentially not another.
Speaker 1:If you are forever talking about your dog on LinkedIn, and you're talking about the health of your dog, and you're talking about your own mental health in walking your dog, you are building trust on that subject. It doesn't mean that they will turn to you the next time that they are looking to hire an anti money laundering expert because that's not where you're establishing trust. So it may be that your social selling is so focused on things that are in the lower tiers of what builds trust, such as liking, such as authenticity, such as empathy. We're building an audience of other people who like dogs. But actually, we need to do more to help us to be able to improve people's perception of our ability.
Speaker 1:Videos of us throwing some darts might help. Right? But only if we wish to instruct people on how to become a better darts player. And we can showcase our ability in all communication. And the greater we showcase our ability compared to the ability of others that they could choose from, trust on the subject increases above that of our peers.
Speaker 1:And when we become trusted above our peers on that subject, we're seen as the subject matter expert. And as we arrive at becoming the subject matter expert, we may be able to take more command of the market, become more dominant, and start to set the pricing strategies for our own business rather than finding clients and our competitors are setting the pricing strategies because we're all the same allegedly, and we're not. Oh, we are actually. Many of us are. Maybe the top 25% have recognized that they're different.
Speaker 1:And maybe somewhere in the top 25%, Half have worked out how to be able to prove it, whilst the other half are getting stressy about the fact that no one's willing to listen. But, hey, that's another podcast. So at number eight, we have ability. At number nine, we have authority. Now authority authority is how well you take command of being able to interpret what you do to start to be able to show its value.
Speaker 1:This creates things like value propositions. This creates all of the narrative that is required to create followers. You simply look at something like your LinkedIn connections people. Look at how many LinkedIn connections you've got. Look at how many followers you've got.
Speaker 1:The difference between the two is a measure of your authority. Are there people who are choosing to follow you who haven't chosen to connect to you? So one of the greatest buttons that LinkedIn has ever released, in my opinion, is the follow button rather than everyone having to be connected. It shows the intent of LinkedIn to start to provide a process for true subject matter experts to be able to stand out. Those who are authoritative on a subject who can demonstrate high levels of ability should have a higher follower number than they do connections.
Speaker 1:And the bigger the gap between the two, the more authority I would suggest is being shared in the content. And then number 10, top of the list for me is collaboration. When you work collaboratively with your customers, true collaboration is the pinnacle of trust. When we are working together on a shared mission, When we have a psychological contract in place. When we spit on palms and shake hands.
Speaker 1:And we agree that together we are stronger. Only together can we hire the right people. Only together can we work a way to be able to find you the right role in the right organization. Only together will we be able to deal with some of the barriers we're likely to encounter. And as we create that set of rules of engagement, as we start to set the tone for what a partnership looks like, it's a fucking relationship.
Speaker 1:Right? It's the pinnacle of relationship. It's partnership. And when we have multiple partnerships that are in place with the clients who we know that we can serve to the best of our ability and they can see it and they can hear it and they can feel it, the trust is super embedded. It doesn't matter if a competitor knocks at the door and is using lower level trust based weaponry to try and lure them away because liking and benevolence, that isn't gonna do it.
Speaker 1:They already have someone who can do it. I was with some recruiters last week who were telling me when they do a presentation to some of their clients and they talk about market mapping, oh, we already have some search firms who do our market mapping. They're trying to get in at low levels of trust. And really they need to be talking about higher levels of trust that takes greater degrees of sophistication to be able to not just communicate, but then to be able to deliver, which is what we're now working on together. So this trust process, people.
Speaker 1:You may wanna rewind this part and listen to it again because I think that these 10 tools, they're superpower tools. Right? Superpower tools. The 10, if you have your pen and paper ready, in order from ten all the way up to the top, liking, benevolence, authenticity, empathy, safety, significance, transparency, ability, authority, and collaboration. You work those 10 tools.
Speaker 1:You start to look at how do I build a process that helps me to be able to deploy at the right moments each of these. And when I do them in combination and we have trust tool babies that we build, the power of it is incredible. So for all those out there who sing the lyrics to say that recruitment is all about relationships, amen, I am with you. For all those who talk about the power of relationships and people buy from people, amen, I'm kinda with you. But I'm not a 100% sure that truly people buy from people because liking is so low on my list.
Speaker 1:I think people buy from people that they trust. I think people buy from people where they actually believe there is an opportunity to achieve betterment. I don't think we buy from people who we like and we know because otherwise, we might find ourselves consistently instructing people to help us and giving money to people who aren't very good at what they do, don't have necessarily the level of authority to help us truly be able to fix our problems, but we kind of let them get away with it because we know them and we like them. And their people is the magic. That is where we start to be able to displace competitors from clients because their entire relationship revolves around liking and benevolence and authenticity and empathy, which is fine.
Speaker 1:It creates transactions. To truly elevate things, let's start to get good at the other six. So folks, it now sits with you. You do what you wish with the things that I have shared here. You look at your processes.
Speaker 1:You think about your interactions. You think about actually your working relationships where there is already trust baked into the system and start to look at, if I were to score the level of trust that I have between me and that person, what number would I give it on a scale of one to 10? And what is my evidence? And what is my plan to be able to incrementally increase that over the course of the next three months? Now I feel you have something powerful because perhaps for the first time, what's been shared here is the bandwidth of the tools translated into activities that actually builds trust.
Speaker 1:So let's go build some powerful relationships, people, and I'll see you on another episode soon. Hey. That brings to the end another episode of the four d recruitment method podcast. Thank you very much for your attendance, and thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed what I've shared, if what I go through in these episodes helps you to be able to challenge yourself in terms of what you're doing and how you're doing it, I've got good news.
Speaker 1:The four d recruitment method membership is now open, and I invite you to join. Together, we can work on structuring and planning your business so that you start to achieve the results that you really wanna see from the recruitment business that you own. You'll find more details in the show notes. And as always, if you have any questions, drop me a LinkedIn message, drop me an email, and I'm always here, and I'm happy to help. See you soon.