In a sales-driven recruitment market, you need to spend more of your time canvassing for new business instead of sourcing candidates.
Searching for the right leads takes time if you’re going to do it properly, so anything that can automate this part of the process is going to make your life a lot easier right now.
Here are some go-to tools that’ll set you up with relevant recruitment leads so you can focus on warming them up and converting them into new business…
Set up Google Alerts
Google alerts is a free service that notifies you via email when it finds new search engine results that match your search parameters, such as news articles, blogs or web pages.
How to use Google Alerts to generate recruitment sales leads
To use Google Alerts, you set up notifications for words or phrases you’re interested in hearing about.
So for example, you could set up alerts for the brand name of a current client or a prospects on your BD hitlist, so you’ll be notified any time that company posts a new job or a piece of content. This will help you learn more about your target company and give you better grounds for warmer conversation when you reach out.
You can also use Google Alerts to flag prospects that aren't on your radar yet, by setting up alerts for job titles you recruit, for example, ‘Hiring developer Glasgow’.
Google alerts also helps you stay up to date with current clients and gives you something to message them about, rather than a generic ‘just checking in’ email or phone call.
To organise your alert emails, set them to go directly into a ’Google Alerts’ folder, so they don’t clog up your inbox. That way, you can begin every recruitment BD hour sifting through new alerts to learn what’s going on with your potential clients at a glance.
How to set up Google alerts
- Go to google.com/alerts
- Enter your search parameters in the ‘Create an alert about…’ search box (e.g. your prospect’s company name). Google will then start to display content referencing your search term in a preview box
- Enter your email address if you aren’t already logged in with your Google account
- Click ‘Create Alert’
- This will start to build your list of alerts, using your search criteria as the alert name.
You can choose to receive your alerts once a week, once a day or instantly under the ‘more options’ section.
Use LinkedIn job alerts
The LinkedIn job alerts function notifies you when new jobs are posted on the platform. LinkedIn scrapes jobs onto its site from all over the web, so it’s an easy way to stay up to date with jobs from many different sources.
How to use LinkedIn to generate recruitment leads
Set up LinkedIn job alerts so you’re notified when a new job in your sector is posted on LinkedIn. You can filter your alerts by region, company and salary level, so you’re only notified about jobs that fit your recruitment niche to a tee.
You can also follow different hashtags and individual companies to keep track of what’s happening in your niche. Just search for the company or the hashtag and click ‘follow’ to add the company or hashtag to your follow list.
If you have a larger network and find your feed is getting bogged down with irrelevant content, you can click unfollow on companies or contacts without offending anyone by removing the connection. This won’t flag to the other user and will only put content you are interested in on your feed.
How to set up LinkedIn job alerts
- Go to linkedin.com
- Search for a job inside the search bar or click the ‘Jobs’ icon in the top menu bar
- Click the ‘Search jobs’ field and enter keywords or a company name
- Enter the job location that you prefer in the ‘Search location’ field
- Use the ‘filters’ options at the top of the search results page to filter the results
- Click the ‘job alerts’ button at the top of the results page
- Choose whether you want to receive these alerts on a daily or weekly basis, through email, app notifications, or both.
Set up RSS feeds
An RSS feeds allow you to keep track of any new content getting posted on websites you choose to follow by automatically aggregating them in your feed reader. RSS feeds have got more sophisticated over time (they now included video and images) but it’s still a very condensed format to receive updates in real time straight to your feeder of choice.
How to use RSS feeds to generate recruitment leads
Customise your RSS feed so you see content and latest job postings from companies you’re working with or targeting for new business. For example, you can follow company jobs pages, so you’re notified the moment your prospect posts a job on their website.
You can set up different feeds to follow different types of content. For example, you can have one feed to follow new job postings and another to follow your client’s news pages. This way, you can stay up to date with all your client’s and prospect’s recruitment and business activity in one place.
How to set up an RSS feed
There are a few different ways to set up your RSS feed, depending on whether you’re using a laptop, smartphone or iPad – it even changes depending on which browser you use. Each option is easy to set up; you just have a slight change in features depending on your device.
Follow this easy guide which explains how to access RSS feeds via…
- Safari
- Internet explorer
- Firefox
- Android
- Chrome
There are different feed providers to choose from too. I use Feedly, but there are a number of different providers that have different interfaces that you might prefer.
These automation tools will also help you keep tabs of what your prospects are up to, and this is the kind of information that will help you make excellent warm calls that convert.
Download the eBook below to learn how to turn your warm calls into cold calls… 
