Recruitment and humor ?

We all go through different challenges in life and try to think of different options or methods to solve a problem. A few years back I was going through different challenges in recruitment. My candidates would ask for higher salaries and I would take all the pain to ensure their expectations are met. Candidates would fail to commit to take up our offer and take up other offers. Sometimes, the candidates who had amazing work experience would fail to appear for interviews resulting in a corresponding impact on the weekly hiring targets. I would come back home dejected and go googling, searching for a solution. I found very less content on the internet which specifically would address my issue. Hence, I started going through YouTube Videos on sales hoping to solve my pressing problems. During these times I came across one of the greatest salesmen of the current times, his name is Jeffrey Gitomer. His sales humor philosophy created a great impact on my mind and I started using humor in almost all the conversations with my candidates.

These were my key goals when I spoke to a prospective jobholder for a new opportunity at my company:

A. Ensure I create enough excitement about the role I am selling.
B. Creating an environment where I try to get to know the candidates well during the conversation and see if humor can be injected for achieving better results.
C. In turn, create a connection with the job prospect by inducing humor.

Humor helped me to create liking and trust with my candidates and no show and offer decline ratios started dropping drastically. I was also able to negotiate salaries and provide win-win situations with strong negotiators using humor and was able to bring down their high salary expectations. Besides, humoring candidates, I was also able to better myself as a person and impact my customers by building long-term relationships.

If you are still serious after reading this article, it’s time to think about the quote by Charlie Chaplin “A day without laughter is a day wasted”.