I hear it all the time.
Recruiters ask, “What is the one thing I can do to hit it big?”
Managers say, “Can a hopeless wannabe transform into a superstar?”
Like rubbing the jeweled bottle and waiting for a genie to pop, out we hope someone, or something, will grant our wishes. But recruiters are lucky. Because in the recruiting industry, there is a magic answer. It is metrics.
Hitting your metrics’ targets is the single most important success factor in executive recruiting. It doesn’t matter if you’re a new recruiter struggling to make your first placement or a million-dollar producer striving to become a multi-million dollar record breaker: metrics work career magic.
When I look at recruiting analytics, whether one of my employees, a peer, or a client in my executive coaching program, I can tell if they are going to win big or fail miserably. There are many measurements out there, but 20 percent of the metrics get 80 percent of the results.
Quantity and Quality Metrics are the primary indicators I can utilize to help recruiters improve overnight. (In this blog post, I’m going to focus solely on Quantity Metrics in recruiting. I’ll address Quality Metrics in my next post.)
Quantity Metrics are the raw numbers you must hit on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. By keeping a close eye on your quantity, you will never have an unpleasant surprise at the end of the month. You will know if you have the sustained volume of activity to meet your goals. Quality Metrics are ratios, numbers that don’t lie. They tell us how good we are at what we do.
Time is money. In our industry, it is the absolute. A successful recruiter has got to have quantity, the hours on the phone, to earn. Four is the lucky number. If you have four hours per day of phone connect time, you have enough time in the marketplace to be successful. If you don’t, chances are you won’t meet your goals.
I know there are recruiters reading this thinking, “I bring in $500,000 annually, and I am only on the phone two hours a day. I don’t need to make any more calls.”
Admittedly, with high numbers and low phone time, there is strong quality in the work being done. But if a recruiter has been getting by on two hours a day, imagine what could be gained with four hours of daily connect time. Doubled productivity and income? If you don’t have the discipline of strict time management, you simply aren’t realizing your potential. What are you doing the other six hours per day?
In a strong market, recruiters may be able to get away with limited phone time. We call it a false positive—the ability to get significant results in under four hours a day. Because while it may work when the economy is humming, it will not when the market turns or a recession occurs. Develop a four-hour-a-day habit now, so you won’t go out of business like half the industry did during the last recession.
As Kathy Lonneman, a long-time manager with the MRI Network said, “Imagine you own a retail store in a prime location. Obviously you want your store open as many hours as possible to get customers to come in and buy from you. Recruiting is no different. When you are on the phone, you are open for business. When you are off the phone, your store is closed.”
Does your store have the operating hours to be successful? Are you open long enough to serve your customers?
I’ve employed and coached hundreds of recruiters. I’ve seen too many people try to hide behind sheer call volume. It is the measured Market Connect Hours—the time on the phone with the people who have the power to get you closer to a placement—that count.
Hours worked, number of phone calls made, time spent chatting with your buddies, repeatedly checking your voicemail: these aren’t the meaningful connections with professionals who matter. For real success, limit the $5 activities like data entry, and increase the revenue-generating phone time with customers and candidates.
Planning is critical to productive phone time. To hit four hours, most people need to make in excess of 100 calls over the course of the workday. It’s about focus. Stay on the phones. Don’t sift through emails or get distracted by office chatter. It takes hard work, but those who plan well and stick to high-value activities will reap the rewards.
Although there are other key Quantity Metrics, including New Market and Candidate Presentations, Job Orders, Job Orders Converted to Search Assignments, Employer Presentations, Send Outs and Placements, Market Connect Hours is the single MOST crucial metric to recruiting success.
If you don’t have call-accounting software, or a recruiting software that tracks your outreach, get it now. Measuring connect hours is the most critical metric of them all. Not knowing these numbers is like a professional ballplayer not keeping his stats. It’s a no-win situation.
Now that I’ve addressed Quantity Metrics in recruiting, in my next blog post, I’ll examine Quality Metrics in the same detail.
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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 December of 2012, Bartos joined trustaff Solutions as the president. Founded in 2002, trustaff Solutions has been distinguished nationally five times by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest-growing, privately-held companies in the country. Click here to visit Bartos’s website.