People Are The Only USP In Recruitment

This is a guest post from Fraser Hill, Founder at Bremnus, as part of our Recruiting Weekly Series. Fraser shares his thoughts on people being the only USP in recruitment.

I’ve lived and worked in recruitment over the past 23 years in different countries, including the UK, Hong Kong, Poland, Canada, and the US. No matter where I work, I always come across recruitment marketing literature and websites claiming that “We are different.” I’ve always wondered if the intention there is for this statement to be blindly taken at face value? Will potential clients really read or hear that and conclude, “Well, finally, a recruitment company that does things differently. I’m going to work with them.”

It seems that many, if not most, recruitment firms have an obsession, or at least care about making statements about their USPs. They’re especially worrisome when they are statements about some unique process that is unique to them and about them being different. As a general rule of thumb, if a company claims to have a USP that other companies are also practicing, then it’s not unique. That may sound obvious, but it’s clearly not well understood in our industry. The firm you work for may have one of the top cultures in the market; so do nine other companies. And, by the way, a top culture to you and your colleagues may not be a top culture to other people. Some people love dressing up and acting like they’re an extra on Wolf of Wall Street, while others prefer the perceived high-end management consulting style of firm. I’ve worked in both types of recruiting firms in my early days, and my personal preference is the latter. That is not a right or wrong observation; it was just my personal preference. Incidentally, I can name seven people I worked alongside at the Wolf of Wall Street place that went on to build recruitment firms with over 50 people. The latter, I can only name one. Perhaps it’s a coincidence; I’m not sure.

Back when I started in 1999, some companies had a genuine USP, which was a database of contacts. Especially with executive search firms who were, and still are, required to map out whole teams of people in selected target clients and gather information on the individuals in the team, their hierarchy, who is good, who the rising stars are, and who is to be avoided. That sort of data used to take a very long time to establish utilising very deeply ingrained relationships with insiders in the market who kept us updated. That all went out the window with the advent of LinkedIn. Not completely. Relationships and market intelligence are still very important and effective in many areas of recruiting, but they’re no longer unique, and it’s much easier for companies without such deep relationships to compete. Nowadays, you can build a skeleton map of a team just by using LinkedIn, and in a few days, with a few targeted calls, you have the full org chart. It was nowhere near that simple or fast in the pre-LinkedIn days.

I’m not even convinced that being different is a positive thing in many cases. Don’t companies want to be the same as the super successful brands out there? Look at what happened in the mobile market in 2007. Nokia owned something like 50% of the global market for mobile phones at the time. Then Apple came along with the revolutionary touch screen phone. What has happened since? Competitors haven’t tried to be different to compete. One could argue, convincingly, that they have, in fact, tried to be the same. Now, from a distance, you can barely tell the different phones brands apart.

In sports, if you compare different teams in cycling, football, or any team sport, in terms of their processes, they’re all doing the same thing. They work with as much science as it is available to us to work on fitness, strength, nutrition, agility, and the mind. They may do VO2 max training and zone 2 base fitness training to increase endurance and aerobic capacity. That will all be done in a similar way to the other respective teams because it’s based on science and what we know works. What really differentiates them is the way they work together, and the gifted individuals on those teams who were simply born to be better than others at their chosen sport. Of course, having the deepest pockets to attract these gifted individuals does also help, but not always. The process of training, however, is largely the same, no matter what team they’re on.

So who or what do we model ourselves on if we want to be the best recruiter? Well, it would be short-sighted to just look at the top performer in your company and copy them. They may have a style and approach that just doesn’t fit with your personality. Unlike in sports, where there’s a lot of reliable science to measure progress, that doesn’t exist in recruitment. There’s data, but it’s not science. Having blanket KPIs for everyone does not take into account the differences in how people approach their work. Any manager in this day and age who is telling you to “get on the phone” is only regurgitating what their boss told them years ago, or as in the case of some recruitment companies with more promotions than Aldi, months or weeks ago. That just doesn’t work for everyone.

Forget about recruiting and sports for a moment. If, as individuals, we want to improve our lives, what do we do? We try to model the behaviour of individuals who are doing well in different domains. We educate ourselves; we try to exercise; we try to build and maintain healthy and positive relationships; we try to make better choices. It’s much easier to do this when we are able to model the behaviours of specific people who are excelling at each constituent area of our lives that we want to improve upon. In recruitment, it seems that we’re all trying to be different when in actual fact, we should be focussing more on being the same; providing exceptional service, understanding the markets we work in, building long term relationships, being there for candidates when we’re not even about to place them, and the same for clients. Focussing on modeling the best behaviors rather than trying to convince people that you are different will do more for your ability to grow as a recruiter than reading off your company’s made-up USPs. Your clients, if you’re lucky, may love the brand you work for, but they’re going to go elsewhere if you’re just coasting on the coattails of the brand you work for and not emulating the qualities that got them there in the first place.

The bottom line is, in my opinion, the only real USP in recruitment is the individuals who make up the team. That’s all that’s unique about most recruiting firms, and that’s not just okay; it’s a great thing. It’s a group of people that can’t be replicated as there’s only one version of each of us, but they can all be replaced. No recruiting firm can replicate a competitor as they’re just a different group of people. We shouldn’t be so quick to try and present ourselves as something different, though. In every recruiting firm, there are great people and not-so-great people. That’s true for all companies and all industries. There will also be those who excel and those who do not. Incidentally, the great people and the high performers aren’t always the same individuals.

What recruiting firms should be doing, instead of trying to claim to be different, which no client is buying anyway, is to work at an individual level. If one of your team is at a client meeting, train them to focus on what they personally do and what they personally can deliver. Being authentically different in this market is saying to a client, “Over the past ten years at least, LinkedIn really has made us all equal in our ability to identify people. All recruiting firms nowadays have access to the same candidates. We all source them in roughly the same way. I’m not going to try and tell you we as a company are different in some magical way from all of our competitors. We’re more likely to be very similar to many of the good ones. However, I can say I personally know this market space very well. This is what I’ve chosen as a career, and I take it very seriously. My clients and candidates say that I’m genuine, I care, and I deliver. I’d be happy to share some personal references from my clients and candidates who will all have their own unique story about how I delivered for them.”

Now, this isn’t a training article, and that’s one small part of what you may go onto say, which will also be dependent on so many other things, like what level the role is, whether it’s retained or contingency, exclusive or with many other agencies, and so on the qualifying factors go. Think about the world of internal recruiting, though, or hiring managers. How many recruiters do they meet throughout their careers? What do they hear every time? Your rehearsed company pitch about why your company is different and how different your methodology is? How shocked are they going to be to hear you think your company is similar to the other great ones out there, but you as an individual is, the USP. Not only is this the only USP that truly exists; it’s also the most authentic and powerful USP you have at your disposal. Use it wisely.

Author Bio:

Fraser Hill has spent 23 years in the recruiting industry working all over the world including the UK, Hong Kong, Poland, Canada, and the US. Fraser is the author of a new book, The CEO’s Greatest Asset – The Art and Science of Landing Leaders, as well as an HR Technology firm, both due to launch in spring this year.