Cold Never Stays Cold: The Truth About Persistence in Recruitment BD

Jeremy Snell has a way of cutting through the noise. Recorded on his farm — lambs wandering into shot, plaque proudly displayed — the RecTalk conversation with Nitin Sharma was one of those episodes that sounds casual but lands hard.

The topic: what actually wins business in recruitment. And Snell’s answer challenges a lot of received wisdom.

“Everything starts cold. Even your 30-year marriage started cold.”

— Jeremy Snell, on RecTalk

It sounds simple. But the implication is significant: the recruiters who give up after two ignored emails aren’t failing because cold outreach doesn’t work. They’re failing because they stopped too soon.

Where Your Best Clients Actually Came From

Snell asked Nitin to do a thought experiment: trace your top ten clients back to their origin. Not where the relationship is now — where it actually started.

“It originated at three ignored emails and ‘thanks, we’ve got a PSL.’ That’s always the origination. It’s never, ‘Oh my god, I’ve never heard of you, but wait, we hire 10 engineers a quarter and we want to smack you bang in the middle of that.'”

This is one of those observations that’s uncomfortable precisely because it’s true. The client relationship that now generates £50k a year almost certainly started with a no. Or silence. Or a polite brush-off.

The recruiters who are winning aren’t the ones who got lucky with warm inbound. They’re the ones who were still there when the timing finally changed — because they’d stayed visible, stayed relevant, and stayed in the game.

The Familiarity Factor

Snell introduced a concept that reframes how recruiters should think about their BD activity: familiarity.

The goal of early outreach isn’t to win business immediately. It’s to exist in a prospect’s peripheral awareness — so that when they do have a need, your name doesn’t feel cold anymore.

“The point is, I know that somebody called Jeremy Snell exists in the recruitment space. And so when I do get an outreach from him, I go, ‘Oh yeah. I think I know you. I kind of know you. I’ve heard of you.’ Doesn’t feel so cold anymore. It’s a familiarity thing.”

This is why content, LinkedIn presence, podcast appearances, and even just consistent thoughtful emails matter — not because they directly generate calls, but because they slowly shift your status from “unknown” to “familiar.” And familiar is a completely different conversation to cold.

What Most Recruiters Get Wrong About Rejection

One of the sharpest observations in the episode was about how recruiters handle early rejection in a sales process.

“If they get fobbed off or rejected early in a sales process, they take it too personally — when actually it’s the persona being rejected based upon the assumption as to what the persona represents.”

In other words: when a hiring manager doesn’t respond to your first email, they’re not rejecting you. They’re reacting to a category — “recruiter cold outreach” — based on every bad experience they’ve had before you showed up.

Your job is to gradually disrupt that assumption. To prove, through consistency and relevance, that you’re not that recruiter. That takes time. It takes multiple touchpoints. It takes not giving up after the first silence.

The Practical Takeaway

If you’re serious about winning new business in recruitment, here’s what the Snell framework looks like in practice:

• Don’t measure BD success by immediate responses. Measure it by whether you’re building familiarity with the right people over time.
• Stay visible between the asks. Share useful content, engage with their posts, comment thoughtfully. Make your name recognisable before the next outreach lands.
• Trace your wins backwards. Look at your best clients and count the touchpoints it actually took. Use that number as your persistence benchmark — not two emails.
• Don’t personalise rejection. Early no’s are about the category, not about you. Stay in the game long enough to prove you’re different.

Cold never stays cold forever. It just requires the patience to still be there when it warms up.

This post is based on the RecTalk episode with Jeremy Snell: Recruitment Myths & Farm Wisdom: What Actually Wins Business. Watch the full episode on YouTube.

Explore the UK recruitment supplier community at rectools.io.