Just before Christmas I made the decision to pay more attention to my health, not that I wasn’t healthy far from it I was training regularly and getting back to a more respectable weight and most importantly I managed to get rid of the beer belly.

What was concerning me is that this year I will hit 46 and from now on the dreaded cancer becomes more of a possibility, you just hear about it all the time. So after a little research it becomes obvious that by changing your diet, you can reduce the chance by at least 50% or more.

Now I am not writing this article to tell you how to loose weight or prevent cancer, it is the side affects of making two changes to my lifestyle that has impressed me most.

The first change I made after Christmas was to cut out coffee and drink 2 ltrs of water a day, within a week I was feeling more energised and most importantly I was able to work harder and longer without feeling tired and the second was to eat more vegetables and fruit, which I have to say was hard to do, but when I found that yellow kiwis have nearly 3 times more vitamin c than oranges I was on my way.

So when it comes to recruitment, we all know how hard it is at the best of times and now that it is getting more competitive, only the fittest will survive.

“So if you want to beat your competition, it isn’t just about your ability to do the job better than anyone else, it is about being fitter than anyone else.”

So if you are not doing it already cut out the coffee and tea for 2 weeks and replace with water, it will be easier than you think and let me know how it goes.

For some interesting info on the benefits of water read The Water Cure and this article on prevention of Cancer with diet.

And since I have become obsessed with diet, you may want to follow this blog Natural News by the Health Ranger who got me started at looking at my health differently!!

I know it has been a while since I have posted, but like many of you it is really a case of getting your head down while things are a bit tough!

Still I was just sent an email from Recruitment Juice prior to their official launch of their new recruitment video training series, again it looks like it is of a superb standard, except this time it is dedicated to candidates rather than new business, which I reviewed last year.

You can see some clips posted on YouTube here and a little teaser is below, just to cheer up the work place for a few minutes.

Oh and how many of you have a placement dance?

A very good friend of mine Sarah Bennett, whom I have worked with for a number of years, has after some trepidation finally started her own recruitment training company called Xpanse Recruitment Training.

The reason I say with some trepidation, is that she has always been very dedicated to the companies she has worked for, in fact I worked with Sarah at Opera Holdings and she only left after close to 15 years of dedicated service, so starting out on her own was a big step.

So when Sarah asked if I would post her “Top Tips for Developing Your Recruiters” I couldn’t refuse.

1.You don’t know what you don’t know
Like everything, when it comes to training, we don’t know what we don’t know.  Evaluate your teams training needs and create a personal development plan for each member.  Find out where their strong points are and which skill gaps need filling.

2.Use what you’ve got
If you have got an excellent ‘closer’, why pay an external trainer to come in and teach the rest of the team?  Develop all your staff into mentors and trainers and get them to share the knowledge.

3.Tailor the training
Each person learns and works differently.  Make sure the training and development your team receives suits them best.  For some people this might involve traditional ‘stand-up training’ but people might respond better to one-to-one coaching, peer learning or interactive role-play style workshops.  Find out what is best for your team before investing in something that might just go in one ear and out the other.

4.Reinforce the Message
There is not much point sending your staff on an expensive training session for them to come away excited and enthused, only to forget half of it the next day.  Make sure you know what will be covered in the training, take time to find out what each staff member has got individually from it and then spend time with them over the coming days and weeks to make sure they are utilising their new skills.  One-to-one coaching can be great for this – as can post-training refresher sessions and evaluation.

5.Crystal Clear Commitment
Make sure that your staff know you are committed to developing them and what rewards are on offer for them in addition to personal development.  Do you have a clear and attainable commission structure, a retention strategy, and clear routes for potential promotion?  Make sure these are communicated.

6.If it ain’t broke…
Don’t try and introduce new methods of working, reward schemes or change initiatives where they are not needed.  Concentrate on the things your company does well and build on these.  It might sound a little flimflam but every member of staff wants to be part of a successful team, not one constantly changing to fit in with new industry fads.

So to summarize, to get the best out of your training budget;
What’s out? Off-the-shelf, stand-up training with no follow-up
What’s in? Investment in bespoke, personal training plans and on-going development.

In uncertain times it is even more important to make sure your recruiters are the most skilled, best trained and are highly motivated.  Your people, and the way they perform, are the only thing that sets you apart from your competition.

Just a over a week ago I did a review on Recruitment Juice and their training videos, as I was doing so I couldn’t help but remember the ones

John Cleese did back in the early 80′s and if you are as old as me, you will remember them too. After searching Youtube, I did manage to find an old promotional video but unfortunately at best it was a poor reminder.

After a little research I did manage to find the company, which took over where John had left it, called Video Arts. They have an excellent range of training subjects including Managing People, Selling Skills, Diversity and Equal Opportunities to name just a few. The videos are supported by some high profile UK actors including Ricky Gervais, Dawn French, Hugh Laurie, Paul Merton and many more.

From their range of over 200 videos one in particular stood out, as it was related to our industry and was entitled Behavioural Interviewing, a short clip of which you can see below.

Interestingly the video cost £1,299.00 for a 25 minute DVD presentation, and therefore shows you how much of a good deal you get with Recruitment Juice.

Oh and if your interested I did finally manage to find a video of John Cleese, called “The Hidden Mind”, which covered the subject of creativity. For some reason it was supposedly only a 3 minute preview, but it ran for the whole 45 minutes. Wether I was just lucky I have no idea, but here is the link if you are looking for ideas on how to make your recruitment company stand out from the crowd.

PS I think its the same system Google uses!

After all the hype with the superb promotion videos for Recruitment Juice, I couldn’t wait to get hold of my copy to see if it lived up to all expectations, as I wanted to do a review here on Recruitment Views. So finally at the weekend I was able to sit down and watch the full set of DVDs without interruption from the family. The set is made up of 6 DVDs all on a theme of “The Juicy Bits of New business!!” Now as a self proclaimed expert on New Business, I had pen to hand to take it apart layer by layer.

Firstly the series is broken down into seven parts and is made up of about 2 hours of video, plus a very interesting document called “the Perceptions of the Recruitment Industry”, a must read survey if you want to be one step ahead of the competition.

The 7 sections were titled as below:

1. Its All About Attitude
2. Prepare & Plan For Success
3. Opening Calls With Impact
4. Questioning & Communicating with Confidence
5. Eliminate Objections & Close Intelligently
6. Strategies For Creating New Leads
7. Juicy Tips

In the end I couldn’t critise any of the training videos, as I came away feeling that Roy had managed to cover every aspect of new business as well as anyone could. For me what made the training videos stand out so well was not only Roy’s opinion on recruitment but the combination of the other 5 experts. Ben Doltis from the SJB Group, Kayode Dauda From Harrison Search, Lloyd Moore from Creative Recruitment, Angela Ashwell from Ashwell Forbes, Richard Bloom from Purple Consultancy and Helen Curry from the Spencer Group. In the end it felt like they were talking about their experiences and how they succeeded when it came to new business, as if they were giving away their trade secrets to me.

Intermingled with all this knowledge was a series of sketches, which emphasised the good and bad habits of recruitment consultants when it came to new business, transmitted in a style of the TV series “The Office”. Basically the sketches were set in an imaginary recruitment consultancy named Sunshine Recruitment. The two main characters were Wayne, who is the “I’ve been there done it all before” personality, with a wonderful cringe factor and the lovely Charlotte, who is the new recruit learning how to do the job, while making all the mistakes as we all did when we first started.

So I suppose the question is wether it’s worth the £699 or £649 if you use my promotional code RECVIEWS, which Roy kindly wanted to pass on to my readers. Well the answer I suppose will depend on you, because having watched the video I can guarantee you will feel that you will have had value for money, as the series had been put together so professionally, with insights from top performers, superb tips and tricks, humour and above all your consultants will perform to a higher standard and produce more revenue, which is what it is all about at the end of the day, rather than making more calls than anyone else.

In the end I felt Roy made sure nothing was missed and even an old campaigner like myself came away enthused. But for me if I was to pick one thing that had an impact or should I say summed up the training, it was the phrase “Remember you are judged by the questions you ask rather than the products you sell”, I couldn’t have said it any better.

So if you want to find out more then please visit www.recruitmentjuice.com

I have been meaning to write this post for nearly 2 months and since then Louise and Jim have already given them a mention. Still I do have some input, partly because it is Friday and a good recruitment friend of mine recently recommended them, so bugger it I will have my say.

Well, I will let the video do the talking below and you can read the comments from Louise and Jim.

PS you can watch all their clips at Recruitment Juice, easy viewing for a Friday afternoon, and for those of you as old as me, does anyone remember the John Cleese training videos?