Phone Fundamentals, Part I: Sound Advice

As a recruiter for RTG Medical, you’ll talk to healthcare travelers and healthcare facilities all over the country, so a great deal of your communication will be by phone.

That’s great for the week after you get a bad haircut, but many times, you’ll find that not being face-to-face makes it harder to convey emotion.

We rely a lot on visual cues during a conversation, so you’ll have to work harder to communicate over the phone because your facial expressions won’t be visible, you can’t use gestures, and nonverbal interaction like head-nodding gets lost altogether.

Good phone conversation skills are an essential part of being a medical recruiter, so you’ll want to make sure that you know all that you can about long-distance communicating if you want to work as a recruiter for RTG Medical.

Luckily, there are many things you can do to optimize this medium. Today, we’re going to cover some of the mechanics of speech itself that can affect your phone presentation.

• Posture. Ever wonder why public speakers stand at a lectern? When you stand or sit upright, you’re able to expand your diaphragm more fully so that you can draw deeper breaths and speak with more energy in your voice. That energy will make you sound more enthused about what you are saying and therefore help you gain the listener’s interest. Another advantage of sitting tall is that you will have more breath control. Being able to take a deep breath will help relax your vocal cords and will make for a more pleasant speaking voice.
• Articulation. You understand someone less clearly when they’re faced away from you, and some people swear they hear better when they’re wearing their glasses. This is because we unconsciously watch a person’s face and mouth in a face-to-face conversation, which helps us “see” the speech sounds (especially consonants) they make. When you can see the speaker, you understand the conversation better. You lose that advantage over the phone, so you have to make sure you consciously enunciate more carefully to help ensure you’re clearly understood.
• Speaking up. If you speak so softly that the person you’re talking to has to strain to hear you, you may not win out over the distractions competing for attention in their background. Plus, if the listener has to work hard to hear your words, he or she may not be able to focus the effort needed to properly process the information you’re trying to communicate. So speak up a little bit to make it easy for medical travelers and facility reps to hear you, and give your offer the attention it deserves.

Although sales skills and good communication skills are essential to being a good medical recruiter, those skills will be diminished if your phone fundamentals aren’t up to par. Recruiting over the phone is much different than recruiting in person, and the best recruiters at RTG Medical have a mix of sales skills, people skills, and phone skills.

Would you like to know more about working as a recruiter for RTG Medical? Reach out to us in the comments or on Twitter, and we’ll get back to you with more information.

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