FROM MY DESK
I was speaking at a virtual summit this morning on the topic of BD and where the market is heading. One thing I shared that felt worth bringing here too.
Right now I see two camps in recruitment. The first is going all in on AI and automation. Every workflow, every touchpoint, trying to automate as much as possible.
The second has stripped things back. Thin tech stack, core tools only, and a real commitment to sales strategy, phone culture, and going to market with intent.
Both camps exist. Both have people making it work. The danger is the middle ground. Bouncing between the two depending on what you last read on LinkedIn.
This edition is squarely in camp two. The fundamentals. Done properly.
THE DEBRIEF
There is one thing that separates recruiters who consistently win new business from those who grind through BD and wonder why it never quite gets easier.
It is not confidence. It is not the number of calls they make. It is not their pitch.
It is what they know before they pick up the phone.
Most recruiters approach BD the wrong way round. They build a list, they block out time, they pick up the phone, and they push through the discomfort.
They tell themselves it is a numbers game. They keep going until something lands. And sometimes it does. But it is inconsistent, exhausting, and, deep down, they know there has to be a better way.
There is.
I sat down with Luke recently on the pod. He runs Circle, a contract recruitment business he built from 2K in the bank to over £100K weekly GP. When I asked him what the most common bottleneck he typically finds on a recruiter's desk during his one-on-ones is, he did not hesitate.
BD to A job. Every time.
And when I dug into what sits behind that, he told me about a one-to-one he had recently. He looked at the numbers first, then asked one question.
“What percentage of your BD calls are you making off the back of candidate intel versus cold with no information at all?”
The answer was 80% cold.
That is not unusual. That is most recruiters, most weeks. And the reason it matters is not just that cold calls are hard to convert. It’s that they put you in the weakest possible position before the conversation has even started.
You are asking someone to trust you with one of their most important problems while knowing almost nothing about their world. You have no context, no hook, no real reason to be calling that specific person on that specific day. You are hoping timing is on your side.
Luke's words for it were spray and pray. Anyone can hit a list of 150 people and at some point pull a job. But that is luck. It is not repeatable. It is not scalable.
If your BD efforts have always felt harder than they should, or the results have always been more inconsistent than you would like, this is almost certainly a big part of why.
The recruiters who consistently get results from BD are not necessarily more talented or more resilient. They are more informed. They go into those conversations knowing something. They have a reason to call. They have something worth saying. And they earned that before they ever picked up the phone.
That work starts with how you show up to your candidate conversations.
Most recruiters go into those calls with one of two mindsets.
Either they are working a live role and the conversation is transactional, or they are keeping the relationship warm, and the conversation stays surface-level. Both have their place. But neither of them is where the real intel comes from.
The best recruiters operate with a third mindset. Commercial. Open. Inquisitive. They are not just asking about availability or checking in. They are getting underneath the surface of every conversation.
Asking smart questions. Name dropping to see what reaction they get. Digging into what is happening inside businesses, not just with the individual they are speaking to.
What have you heard? Who is moving. What is that business actually like to work with right now? What is going on with that project everyone was talking about six months ago.
They are treating every conversation with their network as a source of market intelligence. Not in a way that feels like an interrogation. Just with genuine curiosity and commercial awareness running in the background at all times.
Luke calls these bits of information BD bullets.
Specific pieces of intel gathered from your network that arm you before you go to market. A reference. A project lead. A name that keeps coming up. A business that is apparently about to kick off something significant. When you go into a BD call with one of those in your hand, everything is different.
You will not get that intel if you go into every candidate conversation with a fixed mindset of ‘I’m now speaking to a candidate’. The mindset has to be open. What can I learn from this person today that I did not know about my market yesterday?
When you are armed with that intel, you are not cold anymore. You are not hoping. You are targeted. You have a reason to call that specific person. You already know something about their world before they pick up.
If none of this sounds like your current routine, the fix is straightforward.
Block your mornings for candidate and network conversations. Not just to work your live roles. To ask better questions. To understand what is happening in their world. To listen more than you talk and connect the dots between what you are hearing. Build up your intel deliberately. Then use your afternoons for BD, armed with what you have learned.
Candidate conversations in the AM.
Business Development in the PM.
It sounds almost too simple. But most recruiters never do it with any real intention. They treat candidate work and BD as two separate activities that happen to share a desk, rather than recognising that one should be feeding the other every single day.
The recruiter who goes into their BD sprint at 2 pm knowing three things they heard that morning is in a completely different position to the one opening a cold list and hoping today is the day their luck holds.
Do this consistently, and your BD will feel like a different job. Not easier necessarily. But more targeted. More of your calls will have a point to them. More of your conversations will go somewhere. And over time the results will reflect that.
You are not changing how much you do. You are changing the order in which you do it. And that changes everything.
THIS WEEK ON THE POD
This week I sat down with Jack Hayes from H&P Executive.
We covered a lot of ground. How Jack built his reputation in the legal market from scratch with no database and no experience in the space.
The hybrid model sitting between contingency and executive search that has powered H&P's growth.
What it really looks like to transition from startup to scale-up. And the hard lessons learned along the way.
If you work in or around executive search, or you are a founder figuring out how to grow past the early stages, this one is worth your time.
STEAL THIS
Most recruiters finish a candidate call and move on. The best ones finish a candidate call and immediately ask themselves: what did I just learn that I can use?
Next time you are speaking to someone in your network, go in with these in mind. You are not interrogating. You are just being curious with a commercial brain switched on.
Who is the busiest person on your team right now, and what are they working on?
If you were going to make a move in the next six months, which two or three businesses would be on your shortlist and why?
Who have you worked with in the last year that you thought was exceptional?
What is everyone in your space talking about right now that is not making it onto LinkedIn?
If you were hiring into your team tomorrow, where would you be looking and who would you be calling?
Which businesses have you seen grow quickly recently that most people would not have on their radar yet?
Each of those questions is a potential BD bullet. A clear hiring need. A new decision maker. A project lead. A reactivated opportunity. Every one of them is a commercial outcome waiting to be uncovered. You just have to ask.
LEAVE WITH THIS
Do the people in your market think of you as one of them, or just someone who calls when they need something?
Keep smashing it & honing your craft!
Hishem x
Know a recruiter who needs to hear this? Send it their way.