Have you ever panned for gold?

To us, recruiting is a lot like panning for gold. Everything looks like mud until you look closer.  While most of your pan’s contents are mud, there may be little bits of gold in there, too.

Don’t Prejudge

It isn’t wise to make judgments about people when you first meet them in regards to their future performance as a representative.  It’s best to view recruiting as panning for gold.  There are nuggets in every pan, but you can’t tell at first glance what is mud and what is gold, and it may be months or years before they shine.

Recruiting Vs. Hiring

Sometimes we forget that independent representatives are not employees.  Recruiting is different from hiring employees.  Understanding the differences is important.

How You Find Them

Most employees are hired by placing an ad (online or in a printed publication).  Recruiting is most often done in person or online, with people talking with people.

The Approach

Hiring most often requires a response from a candidate who may be looking for a job.  Recruiting is approaching a candidate and selling him or her on the benefits of becoming a representative with your company.

Hiring employees is like looking for one rock.  Recruiting is like collecting thousands of rocks, looking for a few that will contain gold.

A Recruiting Culture

Your company will have a recruiting culture when you have a high rate of early recruiting.  Having a recruiting culture will help your company to grow faster.

Without recruiting, your direct selling company’s sales force will shrink.  To grow or to stay the same size, all direct selling companies need new recruits.

At Sylvina Consulting, we improve compensation plans, but before we can improve a plan, we analyze the performance of the plan.

During compensation plan performance analysis, we look at not only the counts of active consultants and the percentages of active consultants who recruit but also at the characteristics of the recruiters.

To have a recruiting culture, a company must do all of the following:

1. Provide enough information and support early in the life of new representatives so that they feel comfortable enough to consider recruiting others.
2. Teach representatives how to recruit.
3. Share the methods of your top recruiters with others.
4. In your compensation plan, don’t provide higher titled representatives with big rewards for recruiting, while offering lower titled representatives comparatively little.
5. Include in your compensation plan the right rewards for helping new recruits to recruit early.
6. Encourage and reward recruiting through an attractive Fast Start Program in your compensation plan where your fast start goals are set properly.
7. Recognize recruiting separately for both new and established independent representatives.

In some direct selling companies, the majority of those who recruit are those who have been in the business for a long time, while in other companies the recruiters are mostly newer consultants.  In your direct selling company, do you know the most important details about your recruiters?

To know how they’re measuring up, companies need to measure their rates of recruiting over time and examine who is doing the recruiting and when recruiting is first occurring.

Recruiting And Social Media

Interestingly, when it comes to social media and recruiting, the advertising rule book offers the wrong advice.  As a result, independent representatives of direct selling companies make key mistakes when they try to recruit on Facebook.

These mistakes were shared at the 2015 Go Pro Recruiting Mastery event in Las Vegas in October 2015 by four independent representatives of network marketing companies, each of whom had recruited more than 200 people using social media.

What Are The Mistakes?

1. Responding with an overload of information.  When people comment on your posts, don’t reply with hundreds of words of information or links to websites, videos, or documents.  Start an online conversation with the person.  Keep your responses as short as they would be as if you were texting them.
2. Including a call to action.  While the advertising gods may be smiling upon you, this is the biggest mistake you can make if your goal is to recruit.  Absolutely don’t have a call to action in your posts.  Instead, let those people who are curious about what you are doing make the first move to ask you about it.
3. Mentioning your company’s name.  At this stage, engagement is more important than full disclosure.  Keep the name of your company a secret at first; it will raise curiosity.  Then, when your readers ask for more information, you can private message those who ask.  It is fun to start a conversation and see the interest build.
4. Sending unsolicited links or messages to friends.  Don’t try to recruit by sending messages to people you know.  Let them learn about your income opportunity by reading your posts.
5. Recruiting friends of others.  Don’t try to recruit by sending messages to people you don’t know, either.  They will consider you to be spam.  You don’t want to be spam.
6. Writing posts that are very long with a link to watch a video at the end.  Most people don’t read long posts.  For the ones that do, they won’t have the patience to watch a video afterward.  Keep posts short.  If you want to include a link to a video, make sure you upload the video to Facebook directly (as Facebook shows posts with links to videos outside Facebook less frequently than videos that are uploaded to Facebook).  Keep your video short as well.  Make sure your video is not a commercial for your products or your income opportunity.
7. Promoting products.  If your goal is to recruit independent representatives, blasting information about products isn’t going to work.  The time to talk about products is later when you are having a conversation with your prospect.

What Should You Be Doing On Facebook?

1. Be real.  Make sure that your profile picture, whether on your personal or business page, is a photo of you.  People want to see what you look like.  Keep your profile photo consistent, changing it perhaps once or twice a year at most.
2. Make your business posts and “About” pages public.  If people are interested in getting to know you better, the last thing you want is to be a secret agent.
3. Don’t put your company’s logo in your cover photo.  Instead, put a scenery photo there.  Don’t make it so easy to know which direct selling company you are with.
4. Include photos and a bio with adjectives.  Describe yourself in positive terms.
5. Be multi-faceted.  Pick five interests to post about, one of which is direct selling.
6. Be consistent.  Post at least every day and sometimes even two to five times a day.  Be encouraging and upbeat about things you post.
7. Express emotions.  Post about how things make you feel.
8. Online, then offline.  After interacting on Facebook and seeing their interest, private message the person and start a conversation.  When you know they are receptive, send a link to a short video for them to watch.  Then, ask if 6 pm or 8 pm tonight works well for a call or in-person meeting.  Build the relationship on Facebook; then take it offline as soon as possible.

Conclusion

Are you satisfied with your company’s rate of recruiting?  Does your company have a recruiting culture?

If you need help to increase recruiting or to understand more about recruiting cultures, contact us.  Helping direct selling companies is what we do best.