Selling and Closing Recruiter Training

virtual or in-person training for teams

Selling training and closing training for corporate recruiters

Good recruiters know how to pitch their company, their jobs, their culture, and their compensation programs.  Great recruiters, though, know how to go beyond these critical fundamentals.  They know how to uncover the candidate’s unique acceptance criteria, build and deliver a tailored pitch that’s coordinated with the hiring manager and aligned to your EVP (Employee Value Proposition) and A-player motivators, pre-close the candidate, negotiate compensation and offers, prepare candidates for their counter-offer, and – most importantly – close the deal!  

“I present offers all the time, so I know the basics really well. But this took it to another level, and gave me some great new ways to approach offers, both with the hiring manager (pre-closing) and the candidate (uncovering their motivators and tailoring my pitch and offer). 5/5! Great stuff.”

– Senior Recruiter, T-Mobile 

Today, finding candidates is often easy relative to the hard work of engaging, selling, and closing them.  If you’re looking for ways to improve the selling and closing skills of your recruiters, we can help.  We believe closing starts early in the process, when candidate acceptance criteria is uncovered, and continues throughout the sourcing, interviewing, and offer stages, ending with negotiation and final acceptance.  Closing is a process and a team sport, not a one-time event.   

Our custom-built closing labs are built around the challenges and opportunity areas of your team, with scenarios, role plays, and practical, how-to closing guides to help your recruiters close the kind of candidates your team needs to hire.  Our training a very practical, how-to workshop – not death-by-PowerPoint best-practices presentations.   

Typical agendas include a focus on…

  • How to uncover and leverage a candidate’s acceptance criteria (monetary and non-monetary motivators).
  • How to leverage your EVP when engaging and selling leads and candidates.
  • How to dissect a candidate’s current compensation package or compensation expectations.
    • Note: It’s not legal in many states in the US to ask about current compensation, and many US Headquartered companies have adopted this practice globally.
  • How to weigh different compensation variables: internal equity, budget, external market/market intelligence, candidate’s current compensation, competing offers, cost of living, etc. when crafting an offer.
  • How to build a custom pitch and leverage the hiring teams to help close tough-to-close candidates.
  • How to pre-close candidates and hiring managers so that the offers you make are accepted.
  • How to overcome the 5 most common non-money barriers to acceptance.
  • How to successfully negotiate the offer.
  • How to prepare candidates for counter-offers, and coach them through the resignation process.
  • How to close more deals!

We custom-build the training content to align with your goals, your culture, and development opportunities.  We can deliver the training in-person in your offices over ¾ to 1 full day, or virtually, via a tool like Zoom, over multiple days, broken into 2.5-hour modules.

The training workshop includes presentation, scenario-based practice, role plays, and small group discussions, all credibly delivered by one of our Senior Consultants, who each have 12+ years of experience in corporate recruiting.  We kick off the engagement to build your training with focus groups to learn more about your current state, challenges, existing internal best practices, and biggest development needs.  The focus groups include calls with hiring managers, recruiters, and recruiting leaders.  This gives us insights we can use to tailor the scenarios so that your recruiters work on immediately-actionable challenges, and walk away feeling more skilled, more confident as they elevate their selling and closing capabilities

During the training, recruiters work on building their recruiting selling pitch for critical roles, practice gathering candidate acceptance criteria, role play offer presentation and negotiation, and learn how to engage hiring managers/teams in the closing process.  After the training, they head back to their desks with easy-to-use tools and guides to help them better close and recruit the right talent for your organization.  This helps the training stick, so that your recruiters use what they learn.

  • Candidate Closing Worksheet
  • Offer Prep Checklist
  • Offer Presentation Checklist
  • Negotiation Best Practices

This custom training is designed for teams of 12+ junior- to senior-level corporate recruiters and HR generalists who play a role in presenting offers and closing candidates. 

We conduct focus group calls with your recruiters before we design your training. This helps us to customize the content – especially the real-world exercises your recruiters will work through – to the skill level of the recruiters who will participate.  We get feedback from new recruiters to very experienced recruiters that the training was practical, highly relevant, and credibly delivered. 

This training is built for corporate recruiting teams only.  If you work for an agency or RPO firm and you like our approach, or if you’re looking for individual training, you can check out our resources for solo recruiters, agencies, and small teams here.

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“5/5!  Excellent!  Learned how to pre-close, negotiate, and speak to the candidate’s specific needs when selling.”

– Senior Recruiter, EMEA, Booking.com

Who hires us?

T-Mobile. Booking. International Monetary Fund. ThoughtWorks. Booz Allen. Nestle Purina. Leading organizations around the world choose Recruiting Toolbox as a partner when they’re looking to up-level the capabilities of their recruiting teams.

Why choose our custom interview training workshop for your hiring teams?

All of our training is custom-built to align to your recruiting team’s challenges, goals, skill gaps, culture, and process. The actual workshop agenda is developed in partnership with you, the recruiting leader. We leverage real-world closing scenarios to ensure that recruiters leave with practical, actionable selling/closing strategies and tactics. We build these scenarios after conducting focus group calls with your team, so that we’re sure they’re on target.

We understand the type of corporate recruiting environment your recruiters work in. We ensure that the strategies and tactics we share are realistic given your current compensation practices, hiring manager engagement, public perception as an employer, priorities, recruiting culture, and budget. We teach recruiters how to build the right offers for your talent and your internal constraints around internal equity and budget, with a heavy emphasis on selling to non-money motivators.

We’re here to work and practice what we’re learning. Our workshops are not presentations, where learners sit back and passively listen while checking their email or Slack. Instead, we engage the team throughout the workshop by leveraging real-time Q&A, scenario-based exercises, role plays, speed round best practice sharing, and interactive discussions. We also bring a real-world humility that comes out in the – often comical – stories we share to reinforce the learning objectives.

Recruiters leave the training excited to close, with new capabilities and confidence to tackle their most difficult candidate selling opportunities.

Our workshops are credibly delivered by former corporate recruiting and sourcing leaders, not generic trainers. We have practitioner experience, and understand how to engage junior to senior recruiting teams, including skeptics who are reluctant to change or maybe even think they have little to learn. We know nobody wants some academic, preachy trainer telling them “you’re doing it wrong” – that’s not us. We get the challenges of recruiting, and it shows up in post-training feedback. Learn more about our team.

Your recruiting team will receive practical tools and guides designed to help them uncover motivators, negotiate, and close top talent.

After the training has been delivered, we work closely with your recruiting leadership team to recommend changes to ensure the best practices stick.  How do we get recruiters to use these new guides and tools, how do we drive adoption of these new closing practices, how do we hold them accountable for these new expectations?  We can help.

Our training delivery options allow you to choose the format that works best for your team:

  • Live, virtual delivery

  • In-person delivery

  • Online, pre-recorded training

  • Train-the-trainer delivery to help you scale internally

Download a PDF of our Training Delivery Overview document to learn more about each of these options.

Hear John Vlastelica explain how we help larger organizations scale training through our Train-the-Trainer program.

“I really liked the scenario and role-plays, as they were clearly pulled directly from our challenges. I also really liked the templates and closing worksheets – it made everything more actionable. Nice job!”

– Recruiter/HR Officer, International Monetary Fund

“5/5!  I love the templates – I used the closing worksheet right after the training.  Very practical.”

– Recruiter, Booz Allen Hamilton

“One of the best presenters I’ve seen for recruiting skills uplift.  Very knowledgeable, credible, and accomplished, informed about ThoughtWorks business and recruiting, action-oriented to help us learn long term – he had a plan for us.  I was engaged every step of the way.”

– Lead Recruiter, ThoughtWorks

“5/5!  Excellent!  Learned how to pre-close, negotiate, and speak to the candidate’s specific needs when selling.”

– Senior Recruiter, EMEA, Booking.com

“I present offers all the time, so I know the basics really well. But this took it to another level, and gave me some great new ways to approach offers, both with the hiring manager (pre-closing) and the candidate (uncovering their motivators and tailoring my pitch and offer). 5/5! Great stuff.”

– Senior Recruiter, T-Mobile

“Engaging, informative and thorough! Great energy and very knowledgeable about TA best practices. 5/5!”

– Recruiter, WeWork

“Great! One of the best trainings I’ve been to – I would highly recommend. Learned how to pre-close, talk through tradeoffs, influence, make offers, and leverage specific closing verbiage.”

– Recruiter, Nestle Purina

“5/5! Content was straight forward and easy to follow along with! I am going to take away a ton. I plan to immediately change the way I communicate with my hiring managers from the time a req opens to close by rephrasing things, asking more questions, and getting them to think about selling more. I also plan to reshape the way I communicate with candidates. ”

– Senior Talent Acquisition Representative, PepsiCo

Next Steps

Frequently Asked Questions

A typical workshop will have up to 20 corporate recruiters in each workshop, so that we can keep everyone engaged, and keep the exercises and small group work small enough so that everyone feels like they’re contributing in your in-person or virtual training.  If you have a team larger than 20 people, we’d deliver multiple sessions.

We really want and need a team of at least 12 recruiters to make this workshop engaging and – frankly – for you to be able to justify the investment you’d make in time and money to work with us to build the custom workshop for you. 

Yes, we work with big global companies like Booking, Google, EA Games, SAP, Adidas, Disney, and Atlassian. Sometimes clients will fly their recruiters into their regional hubs, and our consultants will travel there to deliver the training in-person over 1-2 days.  For example, this is what Booking did – they flew 75 recruiters into their HQ in Amsterdam, and we sent 3 of our trainers there to deliver their training in person.  Sometimes we’ll build out the training for virtual delivery, leveraging a tool like Zoom with virtual breakout rooms, and deliver sessions as modules of 2.5 hours each over many days and time zones. 

Sorry, it’s not.  This training is built for corporate recruiting teams only.  If you like our approach, you can check out some of our free resources here.

It depends on the scope, but fees start at about $25,000 for our 1.5-day training workshops.  

Our workshop facilitators are former corporate recruiting and sourcing leaders who have built and scaled recruiting capabilities in corporate environments.  We’ve all started out as handson recruiters, and have applied the techniques and best practices shared in this workshop to earn the right to be a strategic partner to the hiring managers and execs we’ve supported.  Your recruiters will know – right away – that our team has walked the talk. We’ll bring the confidence – and humility (no big egos here!) – that comes from years of working on unrealistic reqsin difficult hiring markets. 

Yes.  We also offer scalable, online video-based recruiter training (delivered by John Vlastelica, creator of our training), with content focused on how to be an effective talent advisor, how to screen and interview candidates, and how to sell and close offers.  Learn more about our online training, hosted by Social Talent. Companies like IBM, Intel, Uber, Oracle have leveraged our online training to upskill their recruiters.

Sorry, we’re not set up to offer 1:1 training.  We build custom training for teams of 12+ people.  However, you’re welcome to check out some of our free resources – including training-quality recorded webinarsbest practice articles, and expert pages.

Selling Training and Closing Training Workbook for Recruiters

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