In my previous blog post, I discussed Quantity Metrics. In this blog post, I’ll now address how Quality Metrics in recruiting can increase billings.
The time spent in the marketplace paying your dues and building relationships is vital. Quality grows from experience and quantity. The key quality measurements are the following five:
- Dollars Earned Per Market Connect Hour
- Job Order to Placement Ratio
- Employer Presentation to Send Out Ratio
- New Market Presentation to Employer Presentation Ratio
- First Time Send Out to Placement Ratio
Your FTSP Ratio reveals the quality of your search assignment or job order, and the quality of your candidates. There is NOT a more important ratio in recruiting. The lower your ratio, the higher your earnings.
High ratios can be due to a poor understanding of your client’s needs (bad job order) or unsuitable candidates. For beginning recruiters, it can be both. I have seen ratios as high as 50:1—50 first-time send outs to one placement! Those are odds I wouldn’t accept.
On the reverse side, I have seen 2:1 ratios. These are the rare individuals who have developed a true understanding of their clients’ corporate culture and hiring needs. They only present the right talent to the right people—quality built on time in the marketplace.
To improve your ratios, define the search. Only work with well-developed job orders. If they aren’t that way, get them that way. Every search assignment should have a high sense of urgency, clear specifications, and realistic client expectations. When evaluating a potential send out, determine if the candidate matches the client’s specification exactly? 90%? 80%?
If you’ve done your homework and you’re still failing with a high ratio, call the client and re-qualify the search. Take a second look at your candidate’s skills and personality. If you have a client who demands to interview more than three candidates per search, you need to reset expectations.
You may want to try something like this, “I’ve sent you the best three out of hundreds of candidates we qualified. You’ve seen the A players, which of the B and C players do you want to see next?”
The value a recruiter brings to a client is only as strong as the talent they bring on board. That is why understanding and applying metrics, objective evaluations of professional time and skills, is so important.
Essentially, our profession is a science. Those who have the phone time and the excellent ratios earn the money. But Market Connect Hours and FTSP ratio metrics can work real recruiting magic. Minding your metrics will help you meet your career goals, and master the science of recruiting.
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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.