You probably heard the story about two shoe sales people going to a country where no one was wearing any shoes. One sales person wrote to the head office that they couldn’t sell any shoes in that country since no one was wearing any shoes.  The other wrote saying that there was a big potential to sell the shoes in the country since no one was wearing shoes yet.  A sales person sees the potential, right?

Once I had a call from a rep from a recruitment agency to inform that a brilliant candidate suitable for my business has just come out of a role in another company, where he was generating more than $900k per month in revenue and that he was interested in talking to me.  I informed her that I was not interested in that since we don’t use agents for our recruitments. That’s not part of our strategy.  She continued asking me questions and I replied to some.  Then politely told her that it would not benefit either of us since we don’t use agency services.   Period. She said that she was surprised that as a business owner, I was not interested in helping my own business.  I told her that she was talking nonsense and asked her to remove my details from her database so that I didn’t have to deal with them again.

Two weeks later, I had a call from another recruitment agent and started the conversation in the similar fashion to the above. I gave her the same reply that our recruitment strategy doesn’t involve getting people through agencies. She said that they maybe able to help with temporary or contract roles, if we can’t find the right person.  She asked for my details so that she could send some info for the future. Reluctantly, gave her my details. In a couple of months, I needed some help on a temporary basis.  When I looked through my files, found her details and got a person through her.

With these two agents, the second person saw the agent while the first didn’t.  Or maybe that is the way the first agent deals with everyone. I wonder if anyone converts a prospect to a customer by annoying them!