How to Get the Most Out of Your Recruitment Team
RE-Posted with written permission By Jay Zaidi
How do you gain the most value from your recruitment staff? It’s a vexing question that has cost recruitment firms of all shapes and sizes untold Millions every year in Canada. The ART of Recruiting is refined through years of experience and proper management of resources.
External recruitment firms are motivated by delivering employers the top candidate with the quickest turnaround in order to make a placement and earn a fee. It’s a multi-Billion dollar year industry in Canada ranging from temp firms through to executive recruitment companies. A good recruitment firm (or recruiter) will not only have brand recognition but a stable flow of job orders to work from. Read below - some of these tips could be of value to you.
1. Understand that your “leadership” will determine how well the team is going to perform. Are you a manager who is hands-off and expects results without guiding your team members or are you a hands-on leader who has a vested interest in overseeing and bringing out the best out of every staff member?
2. Review your corporate culture. Is your working environment one which experiences a voluntary turnover rate of more than 10%? That can certainly be a problem which could cost you up to 3 times as much as the salary of the team member who just left. The number one reason why people leave their job is because they do not like their manager. Is your company reputation one of a churn-and-burn environment or does a good percentage of your staff have tenure? When was the last time you took your team out for lunch - or brought in a box of doughnuts in the morning? Little gestures mean a great deal more than you can actually account for.
3. What kind of recruitment process do you have in place? Are you a firm that enforces meetings with every candidate prior to representing them to your clients? Do you live on job boards to find candidates or is there a specific % of time utilized to proactively engage passive candidates? Do you partner and consult with your clients or are you taking orders from them and trying to fill it, as is?
4. What kind of proactive recruitment metrics do you have in place? If you have none then you and your team will not be running at full potential. What is a metric you ask? For recruitment staff it’s the amount of activities that are measured leading up to a placement. There are several industry standards that seem to come to mind - for example expect that 33% of all candidates that interview with a client/employer will receive an offer (based on the assumption you are the sole vendor, of course).
5. Train your staff. Pick one person on your team to research a topic regarding recruitment and spring for a lunch and learn monthly - rotate your trainer every month. Aside from providing ongoing mentorship you need to set aside a percentage of revenue for professional training. Gurus like Peter Leffkowitz and Jeff Skretney are extremely valuable performers who can offer outside perspective on best practices.
6. Ask how! Ask your staff what they like about what they are doing and what they would change if they could. You might not like the answer but it will hurt you more if you don’t know what the challenge is. Does your staff “brag” about working for you? A sure sign they are happy is when they have friends and family drop by to check out the operation. Unorthodox I know but it is probably the biggest single litmus test regarding staff engagement and how happy they really are. It’s also a great way to find like-minded future stars.
7. Do you exude PRIDE in your team and live and breathe their successes and failures? When you can empathize with your staff you will engage them on an emotional level rather than the arms-length distance they are accustomed to. You need to be confident in the fact that they are all potential high performers in-the-waiting (assuming you screened them properly to begin with).
By reviewing and acting on some of the above points you will start turning things around for the better. Ultimately the success and failure is determined by you, the Manager. If your staff isn’t producing then look at yourself and ask how you can inspire them to achieve more. It is only when you decide to ask yourself that question that you will take steps to start moving in the right direction.
Precision Recruiting 70 Springwater Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K2M 1X6
Phone: 613-287-3767 E-Mail: MyResume@PrecisionRecruiting.ca Web: www.PrecisionRecruiting.ca
