Ross Clennett Article

A High Performance Framework for Recruiters

 

by Ross Clennett

 

This article originally appeared in Recruitment Extra (October 2007 issue).  It is an edited version of Ross's eBook, Succeed Quickly or Fail Slowly: A High Performance Framework For Recruiters, which is available free when you subscribe to Ross's Newsletter.

 

Recruitment Extra is published monthly and is the leading publication for the recruitment and on-hire industry in Australia. This article is reprinted with the kind permission of Loud House Communication Pty Ltd.

 

Do you want to succeed quickly, or slowly?

 

Sounds like an odd question doesn’t it? Yet when we examine our choices with respect to success and failure (at anything) we have the following four choices:

 

1)     Succeed quickly

2)     Fail quickly

3)     Succeed slowly, or

4)     Fail slowly

 

Clearly any rational human being when faced with the above four choices would choose to succeed quickly ahead of the other three choices, wouldn’t they? Yet, that’s not what I see in many workplaces I observe. Unfortunately what I witness in many recruitment companies are consultants, through their daily actions, succeeding slowly or even worse, failing slowly.

 

The most profitable recruitment companies focus on points (1) and (2), above. The least profitable recruitment companies have no such focus and as a result many of their consultants, unwittingly, are spinning their wheels in categories (3) and (4).

 

My first experience of (1) and (2) was my first recruitment job, at Accountancy Personnel (now Hays) in London. When I joined, in February 1989, it was made absolutely clear that you were there for an initial three months and if you made the required minimum fees, you stayed on, and if you didn’t, you left - simple as that. Nothing personal, no hand wringing, no giving people ‘a bit more time’, if you didn’t make the number you were gone. Brutal? Maybe. Effective? Yes. Profitable? You bet!

 

The Hays way was to throw consultants into the job and to see whether they sank or swum. You improved your skills by watching other consultants do the job (there were 8 of us in an area of about 12 square metres) and just getting on the phone and making heaps of calls to make interviews and cause placements (client visits were the sign of a poor consultant – why couldn’t you control your client over the phone?). My formal training consisted of a one day induction program and then the next day I was on the desk making calls and interviewing candidates.

 

Whether you agree with this method or not, it was highly profitable.

At the time of writing Hays had just announced their previous full year results. A net profit of 211 million pounds from a gross profit of 633 million pounds – a phenomenal net to gross profit margin of 33% - a true money making machine. A result I would attribute to a focus of having consultants either succeed quickly or fail quickly.

 

Why would you want somebody to fail quickly?
It’s not that you actually want somebody to fail, what you want to find out quickly is whether being a recruiter is really the best career choice for that person.

If their competencies and motivations are not suited to recruitment then isn’t it best that everybody concerned finds that out quickly rather than slowly? Nobody likes to fail at anything but if failure is to occur then best that it happen quickly so the person can move onto a more suitable job or career.

 

A high performance framework is the best of both worlds in that is provides the best possible chance for a person to succeed as a recruiter and it also ensures that whether the person succeeds or not, it happens quickly.

 

Establishing a High Performance Framework

A high performance framework is like a map. You don’t have to have one to get where you want to go but it certainly helps.

Any rational person wants to succeed quickly rather than slowly, and certainly every business owner unquestionably wants their people to succeed quickly rather than slowly. Given this logic, surely wouldn’t every recruitment company in Australia have such a success ‘map’ for their consultants?

In my experience you would be lucky to find one in three with such a success ‘map’ or high performance framework. Why isn’t it 100%?

Very simply it’s because most recruiters, and a lot of owners, think having a high performance framework, or success map, means the dreaded ‘mm’, yes, they think it means micro management!

Please don’t confuse the two things, they are not the same. The difference is in the way a leader implements and leads their people in the use of a high performance framework.

I have provided a diagram of a high performance framework as well as examples in each category of the framework, roughly based on my time at Recruitment Solutions as a temporary accounting consultant, in the Sydney CBD.

Here’s a brief explanation of each of the components of the framework.

Purpose
Why does the job exist? This should be one sentence that captures the heart of the role.

Results
What exactly is the person to achieve that demonstrates that they are fulfilling the purpose of their job? These should be the key, measurable outputs of the role. In recruitment this will almost always include an annual billings or gross profit or net margin figure.

High Pay-off Activities
What activities will be the most important ones that contribute to achieving the desired outputs? In recruitment, regardless of whether it is temp or perm, white or blue collar, CBD or suburban or regional you fill find that the high pay-off activities vary very little.

I recommend that you identify your Top 5 High Pay-off activities and then identify the quantity of each activity that needs to be achieved over a specific timeframe. The timeframe you use will be one that is the most use with respect to that activity. As a rule of thumb the higher the volume of activity the more likely it is that a shorter timeframe will be useful to you.

In other words a weekly target is recommended for prospect calls whereas a monthly target for visits would be more suitable.

The key relationship with activities (inputs) is to know (by tracking) how they flow through to results (outputs). This enables you to understand your ratios and plan your time accordingly. For example, how many prospect visits, on average, do you need to go on before you generate a job? How many candidates, on average, do you need to refer to a job before you make a placement?

Ratios Ratios are critical indicators of effectiveness in a way that raw figures aren’t. For example filling five permanent jobs in one month, for a total of $38,500 in fee income isn’t particularly helpful in understanding a consultant’s effectiveness until we know one additional piece of data – how many jobs the consultant worked on during the month. The ‘job filled’ ratio shows you the opportunity cost (ie. missed fee income). In other words if the recruiter who filled 5/25 jobs, for $38,500 fees, had doubled their fill rate (ie. from 20% to 40%) it’s likely they would have generated nearly $80k in income, for the same investment of time! Exercise Add up the total potential fee income of all the jobs you (or your team) worked on in the past six months. Then subtract your actual fee income. The figure you have left is the value of the work you did for ZERO fee return (ie for free). Now – what skill improvement (not greater luck or more time), would have halved the work you did for free? Do you know what skill improvement that is? If not, you should because that’s where all your cream is! In other words, if you identified and rectified that skill deficiency then you wouldn’t have to generate a single new job to dramatically increase your fees and therefore your total remuneration (assuming you are on an incentive scheme). You just fill more of the jobs you already have!

Team Behaviours
What are the non-negotiable behaviours that constitute the team’s (or organisation’s) culture? It is critical to establish these explicitly. I will never forget the day I joined a new company and called an 8am meeting and when 8.01 ticked over I was the only one in the room. The culture I had come from ensured an 8am meeting commenced at 8am sharp, at my new employer it served as an approximate starting time. At Recruitment Solutions we called our team behaviours document ‘The Way We Do Things Around Here’ and it served as valuable benchmark for defining and measuring the standards we were committed to.

Accountability
How will performance be reviewed? In any role accountability keeps people focused and motivated. High performers love to know where they are going and how they are progressing on that journey. Weekly one-on-ones are useful for activity accountability but quarterly and annual business reviews, focusing on results, are even more important in continually raising the bar to ensure high performers are challenged and underperformers are managed up, or out.

Feedback
What’s working? What’s not working as well? What skill improvement will gain the greatest performance improvement? Ken Blanchard (co-author of The One Minute Manager) loves to quote ‘feedback is the breakfast of champions’. One of the best pieces of feedback I ever received was from Greg Savage, who came on one of my visits and, afterwards, said one sentence that reverberated around my head; ‘talk less, listen more’.

Target Market
What is the basic criteria we use to decide whether a potential customer is worth pursuing? Niche marketing is in, mass marketing is out. 21^st century technology allows us to gain vast amounts of information at a cost, and within a timeframe, that would have been unimaginable fifteen years ago. Smart recruiters define their market through skills, industry, geography, salary, employer characteristics, candidate characteristics and their own standards.

Points of Difference
Why would a customer chose you ahead of anybody else? High performers speak the language of benefits (what the customer wants to buy) rather than the language of features (what the recruiter is selling). In other words average recruiters talk about what they do whereas high performers talk about the difference they have made to their customers’ organisation and careers, respectively.

WARNING!
High performance frameworks are not one-size-fits-all templates. What I have detailed is one possible high performance framework. Based on my experience as a recruiter and coach of recruiters, I have suggested things that have worked for me, or my clients, but you may find it helpful to have more, or less, or different components to the framework.  The important thing is to find a framework that works for you.  

Remember - not having a map doesn’t mean that you won’t get to where you want to go but having a relevant and accurate map sure makes it a quicker, easier and more enjoyable journey.