Testimonial of Paul Hawkinson

TRAINING PRODUCT REVIEW
“YOUR DESK AS A MANUFACTURING PLANT”
Mastering the Fundamentals of
Search and Recruiting

Bob Marshall is one of those guys whose masterful grasp of the recruiting and search business comes from working the daily grind in the trenches. Entering this business as an Account Executive for a Management Recruiters office in 1980, he quickly became as a billing superstar, winning national awards and recognition for his production. MR was so impressed with him that he was made Western Regional Manager over 60 offices where he became MR’s top trainer. In 1986 he went into business for himself where he developed The Marshall Plan, a well-known and highly regarded methodology for becoming an above average search and recruiting practitioner. Bob has written occasionally for The Fordyce Letter as well as other publications in the industry and his contributions demonstrate his insights into the process that are often overlooked by others. Bob’s training program emphasizes the formula approach to success and his comparisons to the manufacturing business put an interesting twist to the writings in his new training manual.

Presented in eight modules (with exams at the end of each module) this 150+ page training program is ideal for rookies as well as tenured veterans. It puts a new spin on many of the tasks confronted by the recruiter and Bob’s extensive use of checklists, charts and graphs makes them easy to understand and assimilate. The information is highly detailed with no stone unturned; obviously the culmination of 20+ years of trial and error. Scripts (and the reasoning behind them) are not the typical “I’ve got a guy who will knock your socks off.”

Here’s the Table of Contents:

I. Your Desk As A Manufacturing Plant – The Analogy; Recycling; Ratios; Send Outs & Decisions; The Parts of an Account Executive; the 4 PM Board Meeting; Rapport Building (Like, Believe, Trust & Understand).

II. Your Commitment to the Business – The Himalayan Poem; Three Ways That We Work; Desk Progression To Ensure Success.

III. Your Position As A Recruiter – The Interview As A “Demo”; What Hiring Managers Think About Us; The Concept of Inverted Cones.

IV. Your Marketing Call – The Feature-Accomplishment-Benefit Presentation; The 80:20::20:80 Principle; Answering the Hiring Manager’s unasked question, “What do you actually do?”

V. Your Planning & Organization – Time Usage; Goals—quarterly & yearly; Don’t Let A Higher Authority Write Your W-2; Modularization & Blitzing; Monitoring Devices—daily & weekly.

VI. Your “Qualifier” Job Order (The Proper Set-Up) – The Qualifier Job Order—Contact Information, Duties & Responsibilities, Salary & Fee, Hiring Process, Recruitment Information, Biography of the Hiring Manager; Critical JO Information; Mutual Exchange of Cooperation; Agenda Closing; Time Allocation.

VII. Your “Qualifier” Recruit Data Sheet (The Proper Set-Up) – The Qualifier RDS—Asking the tough questions, Pre-Matching and Qualifying the Candidate, Effective Candidate Prep; Ten Reasons To Not Accept A Counteroffer; Mutual Exchange of Cooperation; Agenda Closing; Time Allocation.

VIII. Your Overview of this course based on The Marshall Plan (©1990) Flow Chart – Reassess Your Risk and Opt for an LRO; The Flow Chart.

This is no-nonsense information that should be in everyone’s training regimen – a definite two thumbs up.

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(Email from Paul to Bob on February 9, 2005)

I read the article (“Negotiating Techniques Adapted For The Tenured Recruiter”) and it is excellent.  To reduce the length would be counterproductive since it is not redundant nor verbose.  I consider you to be one of the BEST writers in our industry and that is the reason we have frequently used and enjoyed your contributions to The Fordyce Letter.  Can’t tell you now many kudos we have received over your writings.  To tell a seasoned and professional writer like yourself to “dumb down” an article of such gravity and importance is like telling Ernest Hemingway to rewirte For Whom The Bell Tolls to appeal to uneducated dullards.  I don’t know the constituency of your newsletter but my personal opinion is if they can’t understand such a straightforward topic because of the use of multisyllabic words, they aren’t the folks you want to influence anyway.  Let them buy a Spiderman comic book.

Many of the major problems we have today are because of “dumbing down” at every level and I, for one, don’t believe that catering to stupid people enhances the level or quality of adult conversation.

My best,

Paul Hawkinson
The Fordyce Letter