Salmon Fishing for Agents

In a post from the archive, my son taught me an important lesson about recruiting while watching a fishing video years ago. Dad, that looks like the most boring type of fishing I could possibly imagine! It’s true. When salmon fishing in a river, the objective is to get your lure directly in front of a fish that really has very little interest in eating. At this stage in their lifecycle, the fish are primarily focused on spawning. So, unless you put something in front of their nose that is particularly annoying, the fish swim past without taking notice. The same is true for recruiting. The people who you’d most like to recruit are focused on doing their job and will not pay much attention to your recruiting efforts. Success happens when you’re in the right place at the right time. When a prospect gets upset by something in their current role and decides to leave their organization, they typically move to a broker who has systematically built trust and credibility with them over time. As a fishing guide once told us: This type of fishing is not difficult, and you will catch fish if you follow the system. The variables are not that complex. Just follow the system, and you’ll be successful. Why don’t more managers execute recruiting like this? Maybe they don’t like to be bored.