In my previous blog post for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog, I discussed “Getting Your Recruiting Team to ‘Own’ Its Performance.” With this blog post, I’d like to discuss the crucial role that leadership plays in that process, because leadership leads to the key ingredient for recruiting success.
Leaders instill ownership in the employees and get them committed to achieving their goals and objectives. Leaders are not focused on managing; they set minimum levels of expectations and establish performance goals based on the individual’s own goals and objectives.
Determine baseline: set minimum levels of expectations
To initiate this transformation, it starts from the beginning with an employee. Prior to any individual joining your organization, it is critical that you know the key metrics for your organization and industry and set the minimum levels for performance based on what will yield the desired results for the year. This is very important because your expectations for your players may be different than others. These must be shared with all potential new employees in advance with the understanding that the minimum levels of performance are a key expectation of the job and must be met.
Results and activity-based minimum levels of expectations
Results expectations are the minimum performance outcomes expected on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. These often include the number of placements and the total dollars billed. A leader shares with their employees minimum expectations because that is the minimum amount an employee is expected to produce to remain a profitable part of the organization. And profitability is the key. Offices can no longer afford to have unproductive players in the dugout.
A conversation may sound like this, “In our organization, we set a minimum level of performance in the number of placements per month. We do this because we need to remain a viable business and we know what it takes for our office to be profitable. Every individual has a cost and is responsible for covering that cost in production. At our organization that means that you need to commit to producing a minimum of one placement a month after your initial 90 days. We under- stand that is below your personal goal that you have set however this is the number that will pay for your cost as an employee. If you choose not to perform at that level, you are choosing not to be part of our team.”
Activity expectations are the minimum activities needed to achieve the desired results. These would include everything from send outs to quality candidates to presentations to the number of calls made on a daily and weekly basis. Since activities lead to results, leading and managing by the activities is the single most important management duty in recruiting.
Activities are the key ingredient to success in recruiting.
If you do the right activities and you do enough of them, your chances of success increase exponentially. In order to establish the mini- mum activity levels, an office must have a system in place for tracking metrics and ratios for performance. You have to know how many presentations it takes to get a send out, how many send outs it takes to get a placement, and so on. Ultimately these will be based on the individual skills of your players, but in establishing minimum levels, you must use your office averages.
Your conversation with a new employee may be, “We expect you to make 80 calls per day. 80 calls per day will lead to 15 candidate presentations a day which will lead to three quality candidates to be submitted to our clients on a daily basis. If you do not hit 80 calls per day, we don’t achieve 15 presentations and will not have three quality candidates. If you choose not to make the 80 calls per day, the bottom line is that you are choosing not to achieve your three quality candidates per day.”
By using the statement “If you choose not to . . .” it creates a clear understanding that the employee is responsible and has a choice in their success or failure in the business. They have choices to make every day. They can make good choices, they can choose to plan, they can choose to make the calls or they can make bad choices and fall short of achieving their goals. It is important that the employee fully understands the batting order and who owns their personal 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.