SEO and Business, what you need to focus on.

Some years back, I was approached by a company to help them in their SEO campaign to get their company listed in Google so that they would have good traffic and potentially receive more leads and, of course, more sale revenues.

I gladly accepted the assignment as I am an SEO freak, and, wanting to show the world how good I am, I took on the assignment at a fee of $9,000. Then I started to help them in the SEO campaign.

What happened was that when I visited the client’s place, I had the shock of my life! 

The main doorway and the main office area was totally dark, and the whole team actually worked in a smaller room that was only able to accommodate up to 10 people.

I asked the boss, “Err…how come the lights in the front are not switched on?” He proudly said that he needed to save money on the electricity. I scratched my head.

How much could he really save by doing that? One hundred dollars per month? Hmm…

Further, to my surprise, while I was helping them in the SEO campaign, he actually looked at the long light bulb in the office and calculated the wattage.

Out of curiosity, I asked him again, “Why are you looking at the bulbs?”

He proudly told me that he had done intensive research on light bulbs and found that the lower the wattage, the lesser the consumption of the electricity.

“Ooo…that is something interesting,”

I replied, trying to be polite.

Then he told me that he could switch off this bulb, that bulb and this…to save some money…

Hmm… I asked myself, “What is happening here?

Why is this bloody idiot, who has an MBA, focusing on light bulbs, when he could be using the time to do something better and more productive?”

My goodness! I went to the restroom and started to bang the walls in order to vent my frustration. Aarrhh! Luckily, the toilet was far from the office and I don’t suppose anyone in the office heard my banging noises!

After successfully getting their company website to the top three position in Google, I ended my project with the reputation in that company of being the SEO Guru because I managed to tear down the old SEO analysis done by another company (which was supposed to be the expert), and showed them that what they were doing was 100% wrong.

I got it done for less than $400 in two months using all white hat techniques. If you were to give any other SEO engineer $400, it would unlikely work out very well.

Anyhow, back to the MBA-CEO of the company: although the company was receiving very good traffic from the website, the last I heard from ex-staff was that the company is no longer in operation because the boss had used all his funds in focusing on MINOR things that were not productive and did not yield any sales results.

Although this example is very extreme, it actually happened in real life.

My key point is this: the bulb is not important, the sales are important. Without sales, even if you use a candle, you will still not be able to survive.

For the sake of the business and everything else, focus on major things and not the BULB!

Question: Do you invest MAJOR time in MINOR things?

How to Find Good Clients as a Recruitment Agency

I was amazed by the number of searches on Google that point the traffic to my website www.dougleschan.com  where “Finding Clients” for Recruiter or “Recruitment Consultants” or "recruitment agency" are intensively being searched by many people.

It seems that there are thousands and thousands of people who are having this challenge. If you are looking for an answer, I might have the answer for you:

You see, as a recruiter or a recruitment consultant, having good clients is very important, isn’t it? If you have no clients, you will have no job order, and when you have no job order, you will not be able to hit the KPI or sales target. That would be terrible. Right?

Fear NOT. Help is on the way…read on…

My question is: if you are that bloody good in the recruitment industry, do you think you will have a problem getting clients? The answer is NO. You will NEVER need to search for clients; the clients will search for you.

How can you really do that? You will need to raise your level much higher than ALL the other thousands and thousands of consultants out there. Do not just be another one of them, because if you position and label yourself as one of them, you will end up like them – dying quietly in desperation.

Eventually, you will quit your job as a recruiter or consultant and move on to another industry….

The strategy is actually very simple – Make yourself in high demand.

Here’s what you need to do.

1) Positioned yourself as THE expert in a specific industry – Read a lot of books, magazines, newspapers, and trade e-zines. Attend industry networking, trade shows, major conferences.  Interact with as many people of the SAME industry as possible. Get to know a lot of people. Do not focus on anything else, I repeat, DO NOT do any other industry. FOCUS on only ONE industry.  Period.

2) Create your website under your own recruitment agency name. Do not use any free blog available in the public. The reason is simple: it’s all about branding. Every 1-2 days, write an article about anything related to your industry and put it on your blog. Make it something useful that has an impact. Let people know that you are REALLY GOOD at what you are doing.

3) Make your website easy to surf. Also, create a brand, a tagline, and a great logo.

4) Use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to the maximum; optimize your website so that people can search for you or related keywords in your industry.

5) Give free talks and seminars on related topics. Let the public know you are an expert in your field; take a lot of pictures of the talks and seminars and put them in your blog. Use sites like Pinterest.com, Flickr.com, Facebook.com, etc. Let everyone see that you exist and are active in the market.

6) Expose yourself to major social media and add a lot of friends. Update them often.

7) NEVER ever negotiate the placement rates with a NEW client; it is about your positioning. Tell NEW clients your fees are fixed. If you are going to lose this client, so be it. It is perfectly fine. However, do take note that you can negotiate the price with OLD clients. The objective is to filter out clients that constantly bargaining for cheaper alternatives. This will not be the type of customers you are looking to focus on.

8) Don’t save money on cheap things. If you need to get your website up, get a top web designer; if you need a good business card, get a professional to do it for you. Never try to save a few dollars to sacrifice quality–you will lose a lot of clients when you engage in such activities. There are plenty of available resources available that are able to create good quality websites, logos, etc at a very good price. Google them and you should be able to find them.

9) Spend a lot of time on your professional image: personal grooming, public speaking, and soft skills. You will need all of these to attract the top clients.

When you reach that level, let me know. I will write a book about you and further brand you to another level. Cheers.

An article by Dougles Chan - The Recruitment Guru. A Business Coach that specialized on coaching recruitment agencies & Staffing Agencies. Author of 8 books. 25 years in business coaching in recruitment and staffing agencies. Training recruitment business owners in Singapore, USA, UK, and Australia. He specialized business, sales, marketing, digital marketing, 360 recruitment process, SEO, SEM, and social media recruiting. For 121 recruitment coaching, kindly check here.

How to find clients using twitter for recruitment consultant

Many recruitment consultants are using Linkedin and Facebook for search clients and today I would like to touch base on how Twitter can really help a recruitment consultant to hunt and look for new clients effectively.

Twitter is a micro-blog of Facebook itself and it is can be very targeted if you know what you are doing. I can target all the Managing Director in Singapore or even CEO in Singapore if you know how to do it. Of course, if you want to target human resource personnel, it also can be done. The question is you must know how to do it.

The main advantage of Twitter is that it is under-utilized in Singapore and many people are not even on Twitter yet, not even heard about it. However interestingly some high flyers are using it for their own personal expression platform. Imagine if you are the only recruitment consultant to approach them and you will have no competition at all!

That will be very very very interesting.

If you are a consultant and had been cold-calling to potential clients, I am sure you had faced plenty of rejection straight to the face and usually it feels damn lousy after the rejection. With Twitter, you can add the potential clients as a follower and in turn they may add you as a follower too. Even if they do not add you as a follower, you can actually mention them in the tweet and they will receive the message in their twitter account.

If they were to accept you as a follower, you can send them a direct message and start to build a relationship from there. Some will approach them directly and ask for “job order” but some are smarter to build a basic relationship first. That will be a better approach.

Anyhow, once you established yourself as a reliable follower, you will get more people of that same level and it can more opportunities can be created from there.

Here’s the fun part – People said that Twitter needs to be managed and it takes a lot of effort to search for the right client, then they are VERY WRONG, in the course of my training to the consultants, I had shown them some software available so that they can AUTOMATE the entire process of Tweeting!

The Entire Process of Tweeting can be actually AUTOMATED!

Searching for people with certain keywords, such as, HR, Senior HR, HR Manager, MD, CEO,etc….it is up to your imagination.

Adding them as your followers
Mentioning them in your timeline
Sending them a direct message
Tweeting general topics

Can you imagine you have thousands of TARGETED followers, not just clients but potential candidates? The possibilities are endless! I have found many great clients and candidates from this platform itself using this platform, the market is still considered very raw, you should look into it if you want to have an edge in your search for clients.

Happy Tweeting!

An article by Dougles Chan - The Recruitment Guru. A Business Coach that specialized on coaching recruitment agencies & Staffing Agencies. Author of 8 books. 25 years in business coaching in recruitment and staffing agencies. Training recruitment business owners in Singapore, USA, UK, and Australia. He specialized business, sales, marketing, digital marketing, 360 recruitment process, SEO, SEM, and social media recruiting. For 121 recruitment coaching, kindly check here.

Hello I am looking for more sales

Hello..Hello…I am looking for more sales

This afternoon I received a call from a middle aged lady that ask me what is this Recruitment Guru all about and I advised her that I do consulting, restructuring, branding, training and coaching to recruitment agencies and after explaining to her for over 5 minutes, she told me that she is a recruitment consultant that is looking for more sales….

Ok, I said….I told her that I do personal coaching and mentoring to address individual issues and also covert the person into TOP RECRUITMENT CONSULTANT and I told her there will be a one-to-one assessment after which then will decide how I can assist her and how she want to move on.

She asked what is my rate of coaching and I told her a rate that I know she will not be comfortable with (I deliberately do so because I know this kind of people is not the one I would like to train)

She further asked me what are the things I can teach her to make her sales even more and I replied her the following:

Multiple ways to advertise in jobsteets and jobsDB where even the expert do not know.
Using multiple social media to hunt for clients
Using EDM to mass email to candidates
Other special techniques not available elsewhere….
Plus many others…
The funny thing is that she asked me whether I can cover everything within 1 hour? I told her it is not possible because for one topic it will take me a few hours, she further ask me how old I am and a few other question that shows what “level” she is.

I asked her a question, how many job order are you serving every month? She told me about 10, I politely told her that 10 is not enough and I strongly believe with her skill level is (Just by talking over the phone I will be able to make a conclusion) she will be closing cases where many people are going through: which is well, sad to say is ZERO.

Point to note: if you are using tradition method in a 360 full cycle recruitment, having 10 job assignment per month is absolutely not enough, you will need at least 30-50 job assignments per month to close some decent case. (Not taken in account the Market Tumour in the Recruitment Industry)

Apparently many recruitment agencies and consultants that are tradition are still not able to open up their mind to new ideas and new system to make the entire workflow better and faster by at by least 200%-500% times, it is not surprising though because even the system I taught all the consultants who are even in the industry for over 10 years, I can see that their jaws dropped when I show them how easy they can accomplished things with just a click. The old system had been brainwashed into many agencies and consultants and they only believe what they are doing works like wonders but when things does not seems to turn out well, they work harder but things still does not turn around. When the time had arrived, either they will have to quit and raise the white flag….ans eventually the agencies will close down.

Apologised to the readers that I may sound arrogant but I just want to put across one point, the old system does not work anymore and no matter how hard effort had been put in it WILL NOT WORK!!!

Executive search consultant why most of them will resign in less than 6 months

What is an Executive Search Consultant – In a simple term, it is a higher level of a recruitment consultant when they focus on a higher level and charge higher fees?

They will focus more on the middle to high-level positions and apparently, they do not charge base on one month salary but charge base on per annum salary.

As far as I see from the current market situation, most of the Executive Search Consultants will not make it even up to 6 months, my saying might be strong but I have some valid points that one should ponder hard about it.

Here are some considerations:

1)      If the Executive Search company a new start-up or already in the market for a while? If it is a new setup, the chances of the clients giving them the job order will be pretty slim.

2)      The skills level of the Executive Search Consultants. Are they able to speak well? Do they have high EQ? Do they have good telemarketing skills? Do they have good socializing skills? Do they have good PR skills? Plus many others….To be honest, most of the new Executive Search Consultants are lacking in many of the skills above. Even those who use to be a recruitment consultant for many years, when they move to the Executive Search level, the platform, and the game rules are very different.

3)      The ability to communicate with the top level, this will take good solid corporate experience and people who are only 25 years old will have a hard time communicating with the top level because the top level candidates and the top level companies have that “attitude” where a young chap will not be able to handle. This will take corporate experience, industry exposure and plenty of “hitting the walls” to make it.

4)      Corporate Branding – This will depend on the budget available for the company, if the company believes that using the minimum amount of money can get the things done, I am sorry to say that it does not work that way in the real corporate world. You need to invest heavily in corporate branding, get a good brand name, create a great logo, build a super website, let a lot of people know the company exists and consistently let the public know that you are there…this will need money but it is important to do so to be successful.

5)      Personal Branding- Most of the Executive Search Consultants do not pay attention to their own branding in term of how they speak, how they dress, what they say and they do not even have their own website about themselves and not talking about their own social network of “FANS.” If you are not branded and famous in the market, you will be another one of them…

It takes experience, exposure, hard-knocking and a good mentor that trains you EVERYDAY to make it happen. Success does not come easy. You need to be smarter, more creative, with some luck and if you have a good mentor guiding you, it will make your path very much easier.

An article by Dougles Chan, SEO Singapore Master  

Things to remember when you are dealing with recruitment consultants

We’ve always stated how it’s not easy being a recruitment consultant when you have to screen so many applicants, match them with the needs of the clients and ensure that both parties do well as they promise. But on the other side, it’s also not easy to be the job applicant. Some of you may not have any prior experience to dealing with one. So it’s best to be informed.

We’ve narrowed down the list to 5 tips you have to always remember when dealing with a recruitment consultant. We know how it works. You may not. So it’s best to be prepared.

5 Essential Tips to Remember in Dealing with a Consultant

1. Be truthful. Never exaggerate or overpromise. In the same way that you should not overpromise or exaggerate yourself to a company’s hiring manager, you should be truthful to a consultant. A recruitment consultant is your link to numerous companies. These are companies that are out of your reach. If you do not tell them what you want, what you can do and where you want to go then, they may misrepresent you. A company may want you based on the traits you really do not possess. If you are found out, you will burn bridges and your recruitment consultant may not want to represent you anymore.

2. Never say no to an interview. We do not know you. All we have is your resume. You may have a good resume but the same goes for the rest. All consultants want to maintain a quality database of candidates. And if you are good to our eyes then, you may just be one among the rest. If you want to stand out, go to interviews. It’ll make all the difference. Your personality and the way you present yourself will help you stand out in the crowd and land that next job for you.

3. Do not misrepresent the facts. If you have a desired salary in mind, inform the recruitment consultant. The last thing you want is to say a low range to your recruitment consultant and ask for a higher compensation in your company interview. Your credibility is at stake here. Don’t be afraid to be honest about your compensation requirements to your consultant. Most of us earn a percentage of your fee so it wouldn’t hinder us in job negotiations. State the facts as they are. They’ll work for you, not against you.

4. Be accessible. You may get so many calls from consultant from time to time even when you’re not out there looking for a job. Answer their calls. Keep your doors open. Another thing, consultants won’t know your talent when they do not get any access to you. Join social networks like LinkedIn. Post your resumes. Search the job boards. Recruitment consultants are there to help you out but they can’t do that if you don’t help them.

5. Avoid getting behind their backs. Some consultants will tell you that they shortlisted you to one of their client companies. Some will tell you the name of the companies. If you don’t receive any call for an interview, don’t go behind their backs and submit your resumes to the companies yourself. There is a reason companies hire the services of consultants. They would not want to screen all the applicants themselves. They trust that the recruitment consultants will do that for them. If you hand in your resume to these companies, there’s a huge chance they won’t even take a look at it. Worse, you risk losing that relationship with your consultants who will open doors for you.


An article by Dougles Chan, SEO Singapore Master | dougleschan.comDigital Marketing Singapore Guru

How to Start a Recruitment Agency From Home

Want to start a recruitment agency directly from your own home? It’s really possible and with that kind of setup, you will not only enjoy decent income from the business but also a flexible schedule, so that if you need to take care of your kids or run errands, you will be able to do so easily. You can have the best of both worlds where you will earn income, be free from the routine of normal working hours, and spend quality time with your family.

Here are the steps to starting a recruitment agency from home.

1) Think of a great name for your business: something iconic, easy to remember, and not too long. When you have decided on the name of your business, register the name in your local business authority to make it a legal entity. Depending on your country regulations, you might be required to get a license for it. In Singapore, you will need to have a license, so please check the process to apply for a Singapore employment agency license.

2) Get your website domain name, make sure it is as close to your business name as possible. Get a web designer to build the site for you professionally. Also, determine whether you want to set up a general recruitment business or a specialized recruitment business.

3) Get your business cards printed. I believe your web designer will have also made your business logo. Please ensure you get it done professionally; your clients and candidates will know whether your logo is a DIY logo. A less-than-professional logo does not make a good impression.

4) Please ensure your business address is registered as a corporate address. A home address will reveal what level you are, even if your office is registered as a virtual office, which is perfectly fine. People do understand, but if you want to save money on these things, you will send out the wrong impression to other people and your business may not work out.

5) Generate clients and job orders; ensure you have 20-30 job orders to work on per person (monthly) so that your ability to close more cases will be higher. 

6) Work on your job orders with lighting speed- Be very careful of The Market Tumors In the Recruitment Industry.

7) Close as many cases as you can within your ability.

8) Last but not least, enjoy every month in life because you deserve it!

An article by Dougles Chan, SEO Singapore Master | Digital Marketing Singapore Guru