Stop Trying to Be Liked: Why Being Useful Wins More Recruitment Clients Than Charm

Here’s a number that should recalibrate your entire BD approach: only 3% of buyers fully trust sales reps (CustomerThink, via SalesHive). Three percent. That means 97 out of every 100 hiring managers you’re trying to win are starting from a position of active scepticism — before you’ve even opened your mouth. And if you’re spending your BD energy trying to be charming and likeable, you’re fighting the wrong battle entirely.

Jeremy Snell joined Nitin Sharma on RecTalk — recorded on his farm, with a couple of inquisitive lambs as supporting cast — to talk about what actually wins clients in recruitment. His argument cuts through a lot of the noise: people don’t do business with people they like. They do business with people who are genuinely useful to them. And most recruiters are confusing the two.

People Make Decisions on Emotion — But You Have to Earn That First

Snell’s core point isn’t that feelings don’t matter. It’s that most recruiters try to trigger the wrong feeling at the wrong time.

“People make decisions based upon emotions. They justify those emotions with the facts. So if you decide to lean heavily into sharing data with people to get them to work with you, you’re not triggering the emotion. You’re trying to win business with logic.”

— Jeremy Snell, on RecTalk

The classic example he gives: a recruiter who calls a prospect and says “we’ve just done our salary survey, can I send it across?” The survey arrives. It looks like every other salary survey — job titles, regions, banding. Generic. Instantly forgettable. No emotional hook. No reason to care.

Compare that to a recruiter who calls and says: “Do you remember that time you were hiring and three times you went to offer and the candidate pulled out? Here’s data that explains exactly why that happens in your market right now — and what you can do about it.” Same data. Completely different framing. One triggers logic. The other triggers recognition, maybe even relief. That’s the emotion that opens a door.

Being Useful Isn’t the Same as Being Helpful

This is where Snell’s thinking gets sharp. There’s a difference between generic helpfulness — “we’re here if you need us,” “here’s our latest content” — and being genuinely, specifically useful to a particular person at a particular moment.

Generic helpfulness is noise. Specific usefulness is currency.

“I’m blurring between my marketing and my sales — I just did this update and I thought that this could be of use.”

— Jeremy Snell, on RecTalk

The recruiters winning the best clients aren’t sending mass emails with their latest blog post. They’re identifying something specific about a prospect’s world — a recent hire, a company announcement, a sector shift — and reaching out with something that’s actually relevant to that. Something the prospect didn’t ask for but immediately recognises as valuable.

That’s a completely different proposition to “I’m a great recruiter, give me a chance.” It’s: “I’ve been paying attention to your world, and here’s something that might actually help you.” The data backs the distinction — 73% of B2B buyers actively avoid suppliers that send irrelevant outreach (6sense, via SalesHive). Relevance isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the entry ticket.

The Persona Problem: Why Early Rejection Isn’t About You

Snell also reframed something most recruiters get completely wrong — how to interpret the silence or brush-off at the start of a BD 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.”

— Jeremy Snell, on RecTalk

When a hiring manager ignores your first message, they’re not rejecting you. They’re reacting to a category — “recruiter doing BD” — shaped by every generic, self-serving pitch they’ve received before yours. You’ve been filed away before you even had a chance to say anything useful.

The answer isn’t to be more charming. It’s to be more useful — quickly and specifically enough that you disrupt the category before they’ve made their mind up. The recruiter who leads with something genuinely relevant gets a second read. The one who leads with their credentials gets deleted.

Chasing Need vs Developing Want

One of the most useful frameworks in the episode is Snell’s distinction between chasing need and developing want.

“You’re forever caught in a cycle of chasing need until you understand how do I develop want in somebody else?”

— Jeremy Snell, on RecTalk

Most recruitment BD is reactive — you see a job advert, you know they’re hiring, you call. That’s chasing need. It’s crowded, it’s competitive, and you’re one of twenty agencies doing the same thing.

Developing want is different. It means building enough of a presence — through useful content, specific insights, relevant outreach — that when a prospect does have a need, they think of you first. Not because you were charming. Because you’d already demonstrated you understood their world.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

• Lead with their problem, not your credentials. “I noticed you’re scaling your engineering team in a market where senior candidates are pulling out at offer stage. Here’s what’s driving that.” Not: “We’re a specialist recruiter with 15 years’ experience.”
• Frame your data around their emotion. Make them feel something — recognition, concern, curiosity — before you back it with numbers. Data without context is just noise.
• Be specifically useful, not generically helpful. A relevant insight to one person beats a broadcast to a thousand. Do the work to make it about them.
• Respond well to negative replies. Snell made the point that how you handle a “thanks but no thanks” yields more business than waiting for positive replies. Return the handshake. It’s rare enough to be memorable.
• Develop want before there’s a need. Stay visible and useful in the periods where they’re not actively hiring. That’s when the relationship that wins you the exclusive mandate gets built.

Real Talk

You can be funny, warm, charming, and still lose the brief to someone less polished who was just more useful. The recruitment market is too competitive for charm to carry the weight most recruiters put on it.

Snell’s point — delivered from a farm, lambs in the background, no PowerPoint in sight — is one of the most grounded things said on RecTalk this year: stop trying to be liked. Start trying to be genuinely useful. Earn the emotion before you ask for the business. The clients worth having will notice the difference.

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

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