The Major League Baseball season may have just begun, but as happens every year, the season will eventually wind down. When it inevitably does, separating the teams in the pennant race from other teams is not a difficult task. It seems that year after year, the same teams are vying for the top. Meanwhile, many others are struggling to remain competitive. How does this relate to your recruiting team?
With hopes long gone of any chance of a winning season, what happens to a baseball team’s morale? How frustrating is it for the owners who spend millions on key talent? Or for team managers who spend countless hours coaching? Or for players who have given the game their heart and soul? Do they continue with a great attitude, knowing their ultimate goal will not be achieved? Or do they accept the situation and go through the motions of playing out another average season of effort and performance?
The real question is what do the successful team managers do that give them more wins, while many managers struggle to keep their teams alive with mediocre results year after year? Can’t we ask the same of our industry? Why do some offices see recruiting success and enjoy strong growth and profitability on a consistent basis, while others just struggle to survive?
Like a professional baseball team that can never get the right formula to be in a pennant race in the middle of the season, let alone at the end, the problem ultimately lies in ownership and accountability.
Measuring recruiting team performance
Who owns the responsibility for performance in your office? Is it you, the owner? Is it your team manager? How is performance measured? Are you positioned for a perfect game or to get shut out?
Recruitment performance is NOT measured just in the size of an office or solely in the number of annual placements made. Bigger is not always better. Many owners have taken small teams and built them into large ones, only to scale them down again due to the lack of performance and profitability. Recruiting performance is based specifically on the “batting average,” or efficiency, of the individuals.
There are many ways to measure this, but the simple way is to use a metric called PDA (Per Desk Average). PDA is determined by taking the total annual revenue and dividing it by the number of producers. (Producers are the individuals who are involved in revenue production. They are those doing business development, recruiting/sourcing, or research).
Like a Major League hitter who bats over .300, a $300,000 PDA ranks in the top 10% of our industry. In baseball, a batter averaging .100 may see limited time in the Majors. However, the $100K PDA is considered to be on the low end of recruitment performance.
So how do we hit a grand slam? The answer is simple—increase our PDA. What’s the game plan for a winning season? Get everyone to be personally responsible, accountable, and committed to their individual performance. Then formulate a strategy to help them attain their goals and objectives.
The key role of accountability
This is easier said than done. Optimizing performance is tied directly to accountability. That leads us back to who is managing the recruiting team.
Who in your office truly “owns” recruiting performance and is accountable for it on a monthly basis? If you’re having a bad month and your recruiting team leaves the office at 5 p.m. on the dot while you’re still at your desk making calls, who is responsible? The answer is YOU.
As an owner or manager, you are the one who “owns” performance. Are you tired of being the relief pitcher month after month? Wouldn’t it be nice if the lineup was changed?
What if your key players had complete accountability and commitment to achieving their individual and team performance goals on a monthly basis—with or without your help? It’s no easy task to get an individual to accept personal accountability and commitment to hitting their own performance goals consistently.
A strong team manager can often use stats or technology like recruiting software to enhance skills and encourage an increase in production, but the recruiting team itself still ultimately drives performance.
In my next blog post, I’ll discuss how leadership can make a tangible impact on that performance.
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Jon Bartos, a guest writer for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog, is a premier writer, speaker, and consultant on all aspects of personal performance, human capital, and the analytics behind them. In 2010, Bartos founded Revenue Performance Management, LLC. The RPM Dashboard System is a business intelligence tool used worldwide for metrics management for individual and team performance improvement. In 2012, Bartos achieved national certification in Hypnotherapy, furthering his interest in learning the dynamics behind what motivates others to achieve higher levels of success. Click here to visit Bartos’s website.