Mastering Pricing Strategies for Elite Recruiters with Jon Brooks

Intro [00:00:00]:

Welcome to the elite recruiter podcast with your host, Benjamin Menna, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership, and placements.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:18]:

The elite recruiter community launch date got moved to December 1st, so please stay tuned, and I can't wait for you guys to listen to this awesome podcast. I'm excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast. I have a special guest, John Brooks. And the reason why I'm excited about John Brooks being on the podcast is because We are going to talk about pricing. Pricing your business for success. Pricing it your business so that way you can win. And John Brooks is the absolute genius on the 1,000 different ways that you can build your business, But the right way for you to price yourself to win. So, John, welcome to the podcast.

Jon Brooks [00:00:59]:

Thank you, Benjamin. Great to be here, and wow. What an intro.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:03]:

I I I've had quite a few people recently, like, kind of, like, hit me up, like, asking me about having A focus on pricing and how you should set up your business. So it was just like, you know, definitely a blessing to run across you on LinkedIn. So I'm so glad that we were able to connect and so glad that we could chat for Everybody. So before we get started talking about pricing yourself for success, how did you even get started in the recruiting business, and then how did you get into the Pricing side of our our amazing business.

Jon Brooks [00:01:32]:

Yeah. Most people get into recruitment. Very few people do recruitment into pricing. So, yeah, fair enough. Almost 2 decades ago now, the uni and then a bit of travel, I wanted to get into, yeah, a good company. Meanwhile, I was temping, and the company I was temping for were like, Hey. You could come and work for us. So classic.

Jon Brooks [00:01:52]:

That was actually Reid, 1,000,000 of the biggest recruiting brands in the UK. And so that did lead to much bigger opportunities than perhaps if I'd been at At boutique, I was lucky enough. One of my early roles was to work with Alec Reed, the founder of the Reed Group. Oh, wow. So he he founded back in 1960. So he taught me a thing or two about recruitment and business. So that was definitely A handy start in life. I end up doing a lot of, yeah, operation stuff, building stuff for other consultants to sell.

Jon Brooks [00:02:28]:

Okay. Looking on our services, how we sold them, some marketing angles as well. And then when you create different services, you have to think, well, How we gotta price them? So I started doing more of that. Long story story long story short, we then got a pricing, A a management consultancy specializing in pricing. So, again, well, as niche as me. To come in, well, I was like, oh, yes. These are the answers. This is, Yeah.

Jon Brooks [00:02:56]:

I was kind of fumbling around in the dark being like, hang on. If we create more value, where does price go? And they just had so much theory. They work with, hey, across all industries. So it's really about learning from other industries and applying them to recruit. And then When it came to the right time, set up on my own, so I now run a very, very niche pricing consultancy.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:20]:

That's one of the things that I love about the space. When you first, like, enter the space as a recruiter that you think that is just recruiting is just the one thing that you could do. But, really, it's just there's so many things that you can do within the recruiting community and within the recruiting industry that I find fantabulous. And So your company explain what your company does.

Jon Brooks [00:03:41]:

Yeah. So I now help specifically recruitment owners With their pricing strategy. Now I say pricing, some people you'll have heard phrases like productization, Tiered services, things like that. Obviously, it's not just saying, hey. Can we hike our prices? As much as that would be great if we could. It's about okay. Well, in order to improve our prices, improve revenue, profit, you know, what do we have to do? Well, we have to present our value really Clearly, maybe differently. We have to stand out from the competition.

Jon Brooks [00:04:18]:

So putting all of that together Yeah. Strategically, and then, of course, recruitment consultants have to take that and run with it.

Benjamin Mena [00:04:27]:

That that's crazy. That's awesome. So You've probably, in your industry, have seen, like, a 1000 different ways to price a recruiting service. And I know one of the things that I've seen, Alisa, out there in in the US is some people charging, like, 5, 10% direct placement fees. Maybe that's a good way to get your 1st placement, but it's not a good way to keep a business going. How many different types of, like, pricing structures have you seen across the entire industry and the entire space?

Jon Brooks [00:05:02]:

It's a good point. The the good news is for anyone who's feeling a bit overwhelmed, that that it's not 1,000. It's maybe there are thousands of Possible models you could use, but it comes down to, you know, recruitment is b to b sales. It it's consultative. So selling it that way, clearly, if you are more high volume transactional, the RPO type stuff, you can take slightly different models, but, yeah, there are some core models that just, talk to human psychology. And, actually, you know, I studied psychology at university, and that kind of comes back, has come to be much more useful than I thought it would be. Yeah. We buy the psychology of buying.

Jon Brooks [00:05:49]:

The psychology of selling becomes really important, and we're we're all the same at that level. Mhmm. In terms of, yeah, the number, I think there are there are some trends. You know? People talked about, you know, Mini RPOs, multi month retained models, and things like that. There are always different people Trying different things, but I think there are a few core ones. Well, only I should say. I think the traditional model that most people use, yeah, a percentage of salary. There are some good things about that, and there are some Things we could definitely improve about that.

Benjamin Mena [00:06:34]:

Let's let's pause right there.

Jon Brooks [00:06:35]:

And I wanna kinda break

Benjamin Mena [00:06:36]:

it break down into, like, the different, like, vehicles of Pricing your business, but let's just go with the contingent model or the retained model on a percentage of the salary. What are the good things about that?

Jon Brooks [00:06:49]:

So one of the good things and one of the reasons we're not very good at then talk price increases is percentage of salary is Salary inflation is baked in. So our dollar fees, our pound fees go up year on year Because wages over time go up. So if we were selling something yeah. If you sell a can of Coke for a dollar, 10 years later, You're unprofitable if you're still selling a can of Coke for a dollar, so you need to think about that. You need to push through price increases. If you can manage to take a the same percentage of salary over a decade, Your dollar fees go up over that time. So that saved us having to be good at pushing through price increases. The downside is when clients decide to push us on that percentage, we lose out.

Jon Brooks [00:07:41]:

Now a few issues with, And if if you run the issues Yeah. A few of the downsides. Working in percentages, we think Yeah. If we drop 1 percentage point, we're like, oh, that's not too bad. Yeah. So if we drop 20% down to 19%, we're like, yeah. It's like it's only 1%. It's not 1%.

Jon Brooks [00:08:05]:

It's 5% of your revenue.

Benjamin Mena [00:08:08]:

For those that are, like, listening to this, I'm mentally, like, writing the math, and John just, like, gave me a look like, jeered the headlights as I was, like, trying to run the math in my head.

Jon Brooks [00:08:16]:

Super simple. Let let's keep it easy. You're at 20%. You dropped to 10%, which is horrible. Yeah. It's not 10% off. It's 50%. Oh, yes.

Jon Brooks [00:08:28]:

And we forget to do that. Yeah. And we rarely drop 20 to 10. That's a horrible Discount. Yeah. Well, lots of people I see dropping from 20 to 15, for example, and that's a quarter of their fee, but it doesn't sound like it's a quarter of the fee. So Some consultants can get tricked into thinking, oh, yeah. It's not too bad.

Jon Brooks [00:08:49]:

I only gave away 5%, You didn't. But also clients like, well, 75%, why are we arguing so much? It's like, hang. You've taken 25% of my revenue. That's What whatever my dollars were, I've just lost a quarter of what I was gonna bring in. You do that across your year, across all your placements. Yeah. You go from being a great consultant to an average consult.

Benjamin Mena [00:09:13]:

Oh, may it's I I you know, as a recruiter, I've caught myself in that trap, you know, Where I'm negotiating with a client and, you know, I'm I'm mentally looking at that as, like, a 1, 2% drop to win the business, Not a 5 to 10% drop of what it really is on revenue coming into our company. Mind blowing. Sorry. Thank you, John. Well, I hope

Jon Brooks [00:09:33]:

that's interesting. We need some solutions. We need some answers to get us out of this problem. The other just out on the traditional stuff, do you use salary increments? So you charge a higher percentage If you got over a certain salary level?

Benjamin Mena [00:09:51]:

Like, I know some people that have. It's not something that, like, we typically do, But I do I do know some people that are in that, like, the space that have talked about that kind of structure.

Jon Brooks [00:10:02]:

Yeah. So that's that's pretty traditional in the UK.

Benjamin Mena [00:10:06]:

Okay.

Jon Brooks [00:10:06]:

And it's a really good example of, but we've always done it this The problem is so if you've got a salary at, Hello there. $49999. That puts you in that bracket Where you charge yeah. You you look at your terms, and it says, oh, then I'm gonna charge you 20%. Mhmm. The client says, okay. Actually, I'm gonna pay them 1 pound more. Oh, you're in the bracket where it's, 5% more.

Jon Brooks [00:10:39]:

And suddenly it's like, woah. That's, yeah, that's potentially a couple of $1,000. It's like, wow. So the client's like, the fee has no the that increase clearly has no relation to value, no relation to work. Again, we just get sucked into thinking, oh, boy. It's what my last company did when I yeah. Like, I'll set up my own recruitment agency. I'll do the same as my old recruitment agency.

Jon Brooks [00:11:06]:

It just it goes on forever Without us thinking, hang on. That's we don't wanna have those fights with clients. There are more there are smoother ways to talk to our clients about Value and the the relative price.

Benjamin Mena [00:11:24]:

And that kind of shifts into the conversation. What are some of the ideas or the things that we could be doing Better.

Jon Brooks [00:11:31]:

Yeah. So I mentioned tiered I think I mentioned tiered pricing earlier. Tiered pricing is Having tiered service is really powerful. One of the important things here is If you only have 1 service so we'll talk permanent for the moment. So a client has a permanent vacancy and you say, okay. I can recruit for that role. Here's the price of me recruiting for that role. Very black box.

Jon Brooks [00:12:01]:

You might explain what you mean by recruitment, but, Clearly, you've only got 1 service, which is recruiting. By definition, you are 1 size fits all. Yeah. It doesn't yeah. If it's a higher role, if it's a harder role, if it's a lower role, you're like, yeah. I'll recruit for that too. I'll recruit for that too. So it's 1 size fits all.

Jon Brooks [00:12:22]:

The problem there, first of all, is It's a very binary decision. It's it's yes. No. Secondly, there's no choice about the services. There doesn't seem to be any flexibility in service, but with B2B, clients know this flex on price. So we say, okay. Great. You know, great job for you.

Jon Brooks [00:12:43]:

It x percent, and they go, oh, cool. It's negotiation time. We've led them. We're encouraging them to negotiate with us, Which clearly isn't what we want them to achieve. We'd like to steer them away from negotiation. Now one of the models I really like and I recommend quite a lot, is what I call the good, better, best model. So it's having 3 services, which is why I thought tiered services. And what you get there is a choice of services where The the value, what you're getting goes up through the tiers, and the prices go up.

Jon Brooks [00:13:28]:

So Suddenly, price is part of a conversation around service and value. So we're not immediately jumping to, How low can we go? Let's negotiate. We're saying, oh, good question. What's the right service for us?

Benjamin Mena [00:13:43]:

So You're trying to guide so the client is always gonna try to negotiate most of the time. So you're really just using a a good, better, best model To negotiate within those windows rather than a hard negotiation straight to your percentages.

Jon Brooks [00:13:57]:

Yeah. So it really good, better, best In negotiation terms, it's really powerful when a client says, oh, yeah. I I wanna work with you. I wanna drop the rate. And you're like, okay. You can clearly see the less you pay, the less you get. Well, let's say the more you pay, the more you get. So, therefore, we're framing the whole conversation around.

Jon Brooks [00:14:22]:

Okay. You're telling me you need to pay me less Well, I presented my services in the format of price goes down, service goes down. And, actually, that captures Some of the nicer clients, the better clients to win where they're saying, oh, hang on. No. I I want a good service. So you say, oh, hang on. I'd yeah. I'm not gonna hit you hard on negotiation on fees.

Jon Brooks [00:14:46]:

Let's work out Value for money. Literally. How do I get value balanced with money?

Benjamin Mena [00:14:53]:

And so I got a question there. Like, when you're you're doing the initial pitch, are you coming in with The the middle tier, you're coming in with the top tier, and then you're just going up or down.

Jon Brooks [00:15:03]:

So it doesn't oh, yeah. There's a lot of research on this, which is handy. So it's nice The answers? You should present all 3. It doesn't matter too much if you start with the the top one or the bottom one. There is specific research around, something called anchor pricing, which is if you have Three options and the clients say, wow. One of your options is double the price of your your your your best option is double the price of your Your your good option, your entry level option. Mhmm. That kind of sets an expectation.

Jon Brooks [00:15:38]:

It's like, right. This is what expensive looks like, The work with Benjamin Mint. Right? Mhmm. Oh, that's expensive, and there are other options that are less expense. So can you see there's a kind of you can relax into that and say, okay. Yeah. Maybe I need the expensive option. Well, I'm in that I I might be able to find other ways to work with Benjamin.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:01]:

And real quick, I just wanna throw Throw this out there for the listeners. In the show notes, I'm gonna have the link for John's substack where John does an incredible job breaking this down on a weekly basis. But because I know, like, I feel like I can't capture everything about pricing in this conversation. And, you know, I just I'm excited about this because it's really, like, always Opening my eyes, and I think it's gonna open the eyes for a lot of other people too. So make sure to, sign up for his email, Substack that'll be in the show notes. Okay. Flipping back to this. Can you give some, like, good ideas of what a service would be between good, better, and best? Yeah.

Jon Brooks [00:16:37]:

It's a good point. If I Just put it into context first, and I try and do this in the emails. Thank you for the play. There are so I talked about learning from other industries. Now good, better, best is relatively new to recruitment. But if you think in in a b to c sense, as a consumer, we see it all the time. So If you're buying insurance online or any software online, they're gonna give you choices and levels of Right? And insurance is quite dull. They always get bronze, silver, gold.

Jon Brooks [00:17:09]:

There's not a lot of flair or imagination to it. It it proves the point. International airline, yeah, airline travel is a good example. So you got first class Business club, some kind of premium y thing and then economy. And what you've created on any of those things is trade offs. So for peep people who are purely cost driven, if you're a student trying to fly from New York to London, They they can give you a menu of a 1000000 things that you'd love, but you haven't got the money. You're getting economy. You're gonna Even give traders, you're gonna buy at the cheapest time.

Jon Brooks [00:17:50]:

You might buy early to, to do it or fly a bad time to get that price down. So you you're Cost driven. That's fine. Some people are like that. Same with our clients. But once you've got some money, When you've got those tiers, it becomes about trade offs. So you start thinking, well, hang on. So I'm pretty tall.

Jon Brooks [00:18:12]:

You can't tell online. So I'm always like, well, leg room. How how do I fit into an airplane Without paying too much, but I'm willing to pay a few $100 more to to be able to stand up at the end of the flight. So it's that kind of trade the the the deep answer is or bringing it back to recruitment. You've got to understand what's what your clients value. And I'm a big fan of finding your niche and really Doubling down on it. And when you then apply that to things like creating levels of service, you can really understand you really know who your audience is, And you can say, look. This is important for my audience.

Jon Brooks [00:19:03]:

So as an example, engineering projects, Construction projects, cash flow is really important. It's actually playing with payment terms. Yeah. If if if you want cheaper service, pay me quicker, for example. Or if you're paying me more, you you get more benefits and Longer payment as a industry specific example, whereas lawyers, I imagine, would say, We've we just got money all the time. Doesn't make any difference whether we pay you in 7 days or 30 days or 90 days. Like, That's not an issue for us. But lawyers, I'm stereotyping massively here, But they might actually go for something which is status driven, or it might be Something that there there are challenges.

Jon Brooks [00:19:56]:

I was gonna say something that they're aware they're not good at. The challenge there is ego. When a client says, like, no. No. No. I'm I'm good at all this stuff. And you're like, Yeah. How are you, Ruud?

Benjamin Mena [00:20:10]:

If you were that good, that position would already be filled.

Jon Brooks [00:20:13]:

Exactly. How do you frame that? And I think that's beyond Beyond pricing. But, but again, understanding your audience. If your audience have egos, you can you can price that in in in certain ways.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:27]:

Awesome. Well okay. So we we've talked about percentage driven, you know, based on a percentage of the income Or that a person would have. What other, like, types of pricing models are there in the recruiting industry outside of that?

Jon Brooks [00:20:41]:

Yeah. So I like percentage driven, like, they, yeah, they the tiers based on salary, you can really have some awkward conversations when When clients say, hang on. If I pay them $1,000 more, I have to pay you $3,000 more. And so I think stepping away from part of it is important. Fixed fees, I've talked about the problems. You fix your fee, you have to factor inflation in. You have to keep going back to your clients. I think the other big one to talk about is contingent, and contingent, retained.

Jon Brooks [00:21:20]:

Both those words should only be used internally. We should never use those words for clients. That horrible technical jargon, Clearly, retainer also means what you put on your teeth, and it also means what you pay a lawyer just to be able to pick up the phone to talk to them. So retainers mean very different things in different to different peep So, yeah, don't go, running out saying, hey. We're contingent recruitment or we're retained recruit Package it again in a way that your audience is gonna get excited about that package. My my issue with contingent, I I hope you covered this. I hope your audience are wet, is you might only get paid yet the the industry averages are you fill 20 to 30% of the roles you which among other things, it's a really painful way to run a business, But you also lose that value. You lose the ability to to really connect with a client, Commit to them.

Jon Brooks [00:22:32]:

If they're not committing to you, so you can't commit them, so you can't give them The highest level of service. So therefore, coming back to price, It's hard for them to appreciate, oh, I'm paying this price because I get such a good service as I want. Hang on. If you had to give everyone an exceptional service just to fill 1 of 5 roles, It it's exhausting. I know I know it's normal. It's it's industry standard. It's exhaust Yeah. No.

Benjamin Mena [00:23:05]:

It it yeah. A 100% of that.

Jon Brooks [00:23:09]:

Sorry. Just just nodding up. So I think a lot of people get yeah. You see it on LinkedIn. A lot of people get stuck between, oh, contingent's good, maybe. Retain's good. People then get sucked into, like retainer has to be search has to be 3 part, has to be boutique. For May, from a pricing perspective, a retainer, so let's just define that, Part of the fee being paid upfront is just how most other industries do things.

Jon Brooks [00:23:43]:

And they don't make a song and dance about it. They don't give it a brand. They don't call it. Hey. You're getting my retained service. You're getting my Hey, me here and then here service. They just say yeah. You get my service And I'll invoice you when I invoice it.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:02]:

And I I think, like, I I kind of, like, a few years ago, I I heard the perfect, like, rebuttal to that. It was like talking about CPAs and, yeah, taxes in the US are just out all over the place. Disaster. There's, like, so much that goes on. Would you hire Four CPAs and then only paid the one that was the best one that got you all the write offs. Like, it doesn't work that way everywhere else, but we just, Oh, yeah. Cool. Like, I know you're with, like, 17 other recruiting firms.

Benjamin Mena [00:24:29]:

Yep. We'll yep. Agree the rates. I think I saw somebody yesterday. They got a rebuttal at The month refund. Wow. 6 0 months.

Jon Brooks [00:24:42]:

Jeez. Like, I mean But I don't I don't know what to do with that. If if you're giving them a view you know, even even if you made them CEO, CEO is only Us 3 years on average. Just

Benjamin Mena [00:24:55]:

yeah. But, back back to what you're saying about going into retained, like, you know, it's it really is. Like, We are the only industry where we are, as a community, willing to go work for free So much of the year.

Jon Brooks [00:25:10]:

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, well, there are famous other examples, you know, no win, no fee lawyers, which certainly in the UK, They only take on pretty bad cases, and you don't expect much from.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:24]:

It's I think the ones at the US are, like, they take, like, 40 or 50% to win.

Jon Brooks [00:25:28]:

Right. Yeah. I know. Whereas, yeah, we don't even do that. We agreed to 15, 20%, 25%, and it's like, yeah, maybe I'd be less worried about contingent if we were taking 50% of the so, yeah, it's just I it comes back to a much bigger point about valuing our service, and recruitment is a really valuable service. Yeah. You can't have a successful business without people. Yeah.

Jon Brooks [00:25:55]:

You read any Famous CEOs' autobiography, Steve Jobs or whoever, they all say, The most important part of my business, part of Apple or whatever, is the people. And often the CEO says the most important thing for me to do is to hire the right pea you know, to get the right people around me and to Get the right people around them and so on. So I think at the top, our clients are saying, yeah. Yeah. We we know we need the best peep But somehow, it it comes to actually then them bringing in an expert hiring the best people for them, and there's a disconnect. And they're like, I don't really value what we do. Maybe we don't as recruiters. We don't always value what we do.

Jon Brooks [00:26:42]:

So we end up agreeing to, you know, big discounts or To work, yeah,

Benjamin Mena [00:26:47]:

for free. Well, before, like, we jump into, like, the next part of the podcast, what are some Actionable things that recruiters can do right now to start adding value so that way they can work on increasing their fees.

Jon Brooks [00:27:05]:

Think yeah. It's a good point. I adding value can be important, but I think you probably have that value In your service already, it's about understanding what it is. And and there's a risk and uptime before you You list out everything you do, and you you read the list out to the client. And they're like, uh-huh. While they think, did I leave the oven on? My like, My answer is over due. Well, yeah, whatever is on their mind. It's about engaging them with the one thing that's important to them.

Jon Brooks [00:27:35]:

So, again, spending that time to work out What your clients value, what they really what their biggest pain point is. And then talking about that, I think, yeah, like I say, We provide enough value. I think it's probably signaling to our clients that we believe we provide value. So if they say, oh, can you discount? You say, no. No. No. My fee is what I've just told you. Yeah.

Jon Brooks [00:27:59]:

Stick to your guns. My fee is my fee. Yeah. And justify that by saying, I'm a good recruit. Now clients will, for example, say, oh, but another recruiter said they'll do, Yep. Whatever. Less. But you can say again, hopefully, you're in a position to say, oh, but, Yeah.

Jon Brooks [00:28:17]:

I've got 10 years experience in recruiting specifically in this industry. Have they thought it yet? Well, it's not before. I Well, I think people understand to ask some of those questions, but have more confident in in those questions, really. Yeah. Someone says, oh, can you match another recruiter? And most recruiters say yes. They don't say, who's the recruiter, and what have they done so far? And, actually, those 2 questions, they might say, oh, yeah. It's some it's some kid in, somewhere else. And, I I mean, they've had it 6 months now.

Jon Brooks [00:28:51]:

Like, okay. Right. Now let's yeah. I think I can justify why I don't have to exactly match Someone who's got less than 1 year's experience and hasn't failed in his.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:03]:

I I I love that that your answer back on adding More value is understanding the value that you already add, because I think that's one of the biggest challenges that many recruiters constantly have is understanding The what they bring to the table. And it's so normal in our world what we're bringing to the table for for somebody outside of our world. Like, you're saying we we can easily break down what we're doing, pick it apart, understand what we do, And be and actually find a way to repackage that to add that value.

Jon Brooks [00:29:41]:

And just to pick up on that, Yeah. That's a really important point. People then say, oh, don't we all do the same thing? And clients try and Push that on us. You're all the same. I run an exercise which we I'll go into now because it's 47 steps. Well, 47 points, but I break down the recruitment process. So 7 stages for me, 7 stages each with 7, 8 5, 6, 7, 8 points in each of those stages, and you can approach those in different ways. Now they're not binary, but if you even if you just said they're binary.

Jon Brooks [00:30:19]:

Right. Okay. Stage 1. Are you the kind of recruit who does this or this? Now you do that 7 times for each stage. You get to the point where, yeah, you have around 50 yes, no questions. The recruiter next to you, the agency that's competing against you, Does not answer those questions in the same way. So clearly you don't wanna sit down with a client and say, Hey, here are 50 things I do. But in doing that kind of exercise, as you said earlier, breaking it down and saying, right, how do I do this? I'm thinking from your client's perspective, What do they value most in s And then you can say, okay.

Jon Brooks [00:30:59]:

Here's here's my differentiation, and here's the value around.

Benjamin Mena [00:31:03]:

So for the recruiters that wanna do a deep dive and, like, break down those 47, 50 steps on how they're she adding value? How do they get in touch with you?

Jon Brooks [00:31:15]:

LinkedIn is the easiest way. I have quite a long email address. I think you can Write it out if you want, but, yeah, LinkedIn. So John Brooks, j o n. And if you put John Brooks pricing, you will definitely find me, because there aren't many pricing people, and there aren't many pricing people called Job Brooks. Yeah. And

Benjamin Mena [00:31:32]:

I I think that's I absolutely love that, like, what you're doing with that 47, 50 steps because Once again, it's you know, I've been having this conversation with people that have been calling me up. It's just like, hey. Like, understand the value that you bring. Like, companies can't win without you Yeah. Without a recruiter. So well, before we jump over to, like, quick fire questions, Sean, is there anything else that you would love to share about pricing?

Jon Brooks [00:31:56]:

Don't don't hate for that part. I hope other people are interested in this. I mean, My emails, that's when I really get to to go into detail and into more depth. No. I think just kind of Thinking back, giving clients choice rather than thinking it's 1 size fits all, that that is so key. And I hope now I've said it, you can see that all around you, the number of businesses that give you a choice. Yeah. Even coffee cup sizes.

Jon Brooks [00:32:27]:

Oh, do you wanna go? Do you wanna supersize that? You know, this people rarely Businesses rarely give you a single choice and just say, okay. So that's a really interesting concept. Maybe before that is just just really taking time to understand that we provide something that's highly valuable. And, again, if you're an agency owner with a team, spend time, build that into your training, Repeat that again and again because, of course, we go up against line managers, hiring managers, HR, Who it's in their interests to knock us down again. But that's their job. Our job is to make sure we're confident in what we do, and we understand the value of what we do, which is is clear. We just need to not forget it.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:19]:

I absolutely love that, John. Well, John, let's move over to the quick fire questions. And real quick, when I say quick fire, it doesn't have to be a quick answer.

Jon Brooks [00:33:29]:

I'll try and

Benjamin Mena [00:33:30]:

I I I think I had a guess one time when I didn't explain that part. I ended up having, like, 3 second answers for everything. I was like, wait.

Jon Brooks [00:33:36]:

Wait. Well, we're talking about adding value. It's 9, maybe. Yes. No.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:41]:

Yep. What advice would you give to a brand new recruiter that's just getting started In our industry this year.

Jon Brooks [00:33:48]:

Get to know your market. And by that, I mean, try and have a niche. If it's so much harder to to become a generalist recruiter, and it's hard to be an experienced general generalist recruiter. Yeah. The more of a niche you have, the more you can understand. You there may be 3 to 5 role types that you're working. So the more you understand about that, the more valuable you are. You're not just coming across as someone who's only just started, in recruitment.

Jon Brooks [00:34:22]:

But, also, yeah, try and understand that, yeah, clients really need us. I was talking to a recruitment owner owner earlier today. Yep. Our clients fill plenty of roles themselves. They come to us with the difficult stuff. We're doing the hard work. They they do the easy stuff. There there is no easy stuff for us.

Jon Brooks [00:34:50]:

So we're doing the hard stuff. So we're adding value. Make sure you know that and remind yourself That. But, obviously, then do the work to build into that role and make sure you are adding value through insights and understand.

Benjamin Mena [00:35:04]:

Awesome. It's the same question, but for somebody that's been around the block, we'll say 5, 10, 15, 20 years, what advice would you give to them To continue to have success or to start seeing success?

Jon Brooks [00:35:18]:

I think that comes back to the kind of percentage points and, discounting and potentially matching competitors. First of all, you've made it. If you've passed 10 years, even 5 years, you've made it. You've done that really hard work. You deserve to get paid for it, and not just in terms of clients coming back to you giving you roles at discounted rate, but actually saying, No. My fee is a little more than if you went to someone else. Yeah. Be confident.

Jon Brooks [00:35:52]:

Again, your value as a 10, 20 year recruiter because you really know the market. You've you've done this before. So you've placed those people. So you can just you can confidently justify saying, to work with me Might cost a little more than it, than it costs to work with someone else. And you don't need to overdo it. Clients can pick up. If you've got 20 years experience, they will see that. They will understand that value.

Jon Brooks [00:36:27]:

But, yeah, if if you say, I've got 20 years experience. Sure. I'll I'll match anyone's rate. You've just devalued All that experience and devalued your service.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:39]:

I absolutely love that. Like, under like, once again, it's understanding the value that you bring. Has there been a book that's had a huge impact on your career?

Jon Brooks [00:36:48]:

Yeah. I'm you sent me that question, and I was, Obviously, I've got a load of pricing books. I think I'm not gonna recommend everyone goes out and read pricing books. They're they're they're pretty niche and Maybe go into too much detail. A great book that I would recommend for recruitment consultants It's picking up on the second half of the our job title. Consultant. So Alan Weiss, $1,000,000 Consultant. And he's talking to anyone who is a consultant.

Jon Brooks [00:37:23]:

His definition is, an expert in what they do, who Advises and helps other businesses. We are recruitment consultants. Now I'm a big believer we should really double down on that consultancy. It's a really good concept about the value consultants bring. It's also got some really good. I mean, I view I I am consultant. I I've used it, and I follow his tips. Yeah.

Jon Brooks [00:37:52]:

Literally how you behave. I mean, this doesn't relate to me so much, but he even as he's my step by step guide, if I'm flying to a different continent, or yeah. He's in the US, so He would fly to see clients in New York, for example. And he's like, here's how I invoice. Here's here's how I expense The airplane, if I'm gonna see 2 clients, I hire a car with a driver so I can turn up Looking like a $1,000,000 consultant. Not in a flashy yeah. That's part of his package, and that is Him presenting that he is value. So it's both a really good big picture inspiring book, and then just has some, Yes.

Jon Brooks [00:38:33]:

Some real step by step tips on you should do this, you shouldn't do this, Saruman.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:38]:

Yeah. Agree. Awesome. Phenomenal. What's your thoughts about AI and the future of recruiting?

Jon Brooks [00:38:43]:

No idea. I was what's my current fire on thing? I try and read Better experts than me who talk about it and, and they something's gonna change a lot. I think You can see I didn't prep this one. I thought about it. The the importance about AI, AI is tech. Let's take it as tech. LinkedIn is tech. Every hiring manager has access to LinkedIn.

Jon Brooks [00:39:10]:

Hiring managers are awful are using LinkedIn for hiring, which is why they come to us. We think it's really easy. It's re we provide a huge amount of value in the way we use LinkedIn. So that's something to think about. AI can be considered in that way. There will be tools. Yeah. We're not individually gonna design something that's AI powered, But LinkedIn or Google or whoever will create some AI tools that are useful for hiring Is the hiring manager who doesn't spend the whole day hiring gonna say, great.

Jon Brooks [00:39:44]:

Oh, yay. More tools That I have to become an expert in 10% of my job. No. They're gonna say, I wish someone do they would do this for me. So I think we have to keep an eye on how can we bring those tools in And present them to clients in a way where or present the outcome to clients where we're saying that we can add even more value to Because we're experts at harnessing this technology.

Benjamin Mena [00:40:13]:

You're awesome. And kinda talking about tools, do you have, like, a favorite rec tech tool at the moment?

Jon Brooks [00:40:19]:

I go I've I've had this question a few times. My go to answer is still Calendly. Without Calendly, it's a back and forth. You know, you send an email to a client or someone else you wanna meet up with, and they're like, Oh oh, no. Could you do half an hour early? Oh, no. I can't do it. Oh, another client's just come in, now that's not there. Like, 50% sometimes.

Jon Brooks [00:40:43]:

Yeah. Certainly pitch stage. 50% of communication ends up being about, Can you do half an hour earlier or later? Calendly is just like, hey. Calendly knows my diary. Pick a time that is currently free that also would be job done. So it feels like 50% of my interaction with clients Used to be scheduling, and now it's less than 1% of my time. I'm talking about valuable things.

Benjamin Mena [00:41:13]:

That's awesome. Phenomenal. For you this is for you, John. What do you think has been a major impact to your personal success?

Jon Brooks [00:41:26]:

I think I was pretty fortunate, working with Sir Alec Reid now, who who was knighted for, his business work and his charity work, that gave me a huge Kind of such a high level view of business success. So, clearly, I am not building a recruitment giant or a Pricing consultancy giant, but it give me gave me such a good perspective on what success is And also help me understand people who run big successful businesses, which as I said, you could You can also get that by, you know, reading biographies of CEOs and things like that, listening to podcasts, videos, whatever. But, yeah, with that personal experience was was huge. And then, yeah, the the experience of then working with a management consultancy that specialize in what happened to tie into what I was doing that that I ran on. Yeah. That was it feels pretty fortunate Tell everybody.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:31]:

Phenomenal. Well and this is one of my favorite questions, John. If you can go back and, like, Have a cup of coffee with yourself at the very beginning of your career. What advice would you give yourself?

Jon Brooks [00:42:45]:

I'm I'm pretty happy with how things are turning out. If I mapped it out, map mapped out my kind of career journey, It looks it goes from place to place. So I think the advice is, you know, take those opportunities. I think I often did. I'm sure there were more opportunities. I didn't. Yeah. Things came up, and I was like, oh, I didn't I don't know where that will lead, but it's always turned into something good.

Jon Brooks [00:43:12]:

I guess the the additional advice is, of course, Take the opportunity even if you're not sure where a lead and double down on it. So if you're a new recruiter, pick a niche, find a good agency to work with, work under someone who's Inspiring, and then go all in with yeah. Don't don't yeah. Because you don't know where it'll go, but Trust your instincts. This is probably gonna go somewhat good, and then go for it. Don't leave 1 foot in a different camp somewhere. It's just No can

Benjamin Mena [00:43:51]:

work. Awesome. Well, John, I'm like I said, I I was excited about this podcast just because of, you know, pricing, And thinking about pricing is important to every recruiter out there. Like, I'd even as a a math person, I should have understood and always looked at the numbers of Going from 1% down from a 20% fee isn't 1%. That's 5%. 2% down, that's 10%. That's 10% of your fee, guys. And, also, like, you know, I love the idea about looking at your business with, like, a a good, better, and best option, like the tiered options.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:27]:

That's stuff I'm gonna work on implementing over the next few months. So thank you, John. And for the listeners, is there anything else that you would love to share with the listeners?

Jon Brooks [00:44:36]:

No. I I think just those 2 things you've summarized really nicely, and I've said it a few times, but recruitment is highly valuable. Sir, be confident in charging a fat feet point.

Benjamin Mena [00:44:52]:

Awesome. Well, thank you guys. And for the listeners, until next time. Keep crushing it, y'all.

Intro [00:44:57]:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the elite recruiter podcast asked with Benjamin Menna. If you enjoyed, hit subscribe and leave a rating.