A Trainer Who Has Heard the Same Cold Call for Thirty Years
Dan Fisher has trained staffing salespeople for over a decade, and the observation Haley Marketing quotes him on is not a complaint about any one recruiter. It is a pattern he has watched repeat across an entire industry: "We're still applying sales practices we were doing when I got into the industry in the mid-90s." He follows it with a sharper line: "I've worked with salespeople in the industry for 10+ years, and some of them still sound like it's their first cold call."
That is a specific, testable claim, not a vague generational complaint. It says the industry's outbound conversations have not evolved meaningfully in three decades, even as the buyers on the other end of those calls have changed how they screen vendors, research options, and decide who gets a meeting.
Why the Default Model Never Had a Reason to Change
The structural root is simple: most staffing firms never built a dedicated, trained business-development function. Recruiters and account managers do their own outbound between candidate-sourcing and placement work, which is the actual job they were hired and trained for. Outbound becomes whatever effort survives after the real work is done, run by people whose skill development is entirely focused elsewhere.
A dedicated BD hire, by contrast, gets better at outbound because that is the whole job. A recruiter running cold calls as a side task has no equivalent feedback loop pushing their pitch to improve year over year, which is exactly how a script from the mid-90s survives into 2026 largely unchanged.
The Touches Problem Layered on Top
Industry commentary on staffing sales strategy describes decision-makers now requiring an average of 7 to 10 touches to get a meaningful response from a new prospect, a figure that should be treated as directional industry consensus rather than an audited statistic, since it traces to a single aggregated source rather than a primary study. Directionally, though, it lines up with what anyone doing outbound in 2026 already knows: fewer buyers respond to a single call or email, regardless of industry.
Stack that on top of Fisher's stagnant-practice observation and the problem compounds. A part-time outbound effort, running a script that has not evolved since the 90s, is being asked to clear a bar, multiple touches across multiple channels, that keeps rising.
Multi-Channel Is the Fix Trend, Not Abandoning the Phone
Cold calling remains the highest-converting channel in staffing when it is done well, per Haley Marketing's own analysis, corroborated by every appointment-setting vendor serving this space, all of which sell some combination of call, email, and LinkedIn rather than any single channel alone. The lesson from the stuck-in-the-90s critique is not that the phone stopped working. It is that a single channel, run by someone doing it as a side task, is not enough to clear a 7 to 10 touch bar on its own.
Even newer voices in the industry are questioning the old playbook out loud. A thread in r/Recruitment titled "What is the best way to do business development in Recruitment in 2026?" shows a newer recruiter openly unsure whether cold calling or cold email still works under current conditions, a sign the uncertainty Fisher describes is not confined to veterans defending old habits.
Where a Dedicated, Multi-Channel BD Function Actually Fits
The fix Fisher's critique points toward is a dedicated function running consistent, multi-touch outreach, not a recruiter's leftover time. Human + AI SDRs run that outreach over SMS, texting hiring decision-makers directly and qualifying interest and fit against your criteria before a meeting reaches your calendar, freeing recruiters to do the job they were actually trained for. It is $300 to set up, then $300 to $550 per held, double-confirmed meeting, with no retainer.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Haley Marketing, cold calling for staffing agencies (citing Dan Fisher)
- Reddit r/Recruitment, best way to do business development in recruitment in 2026