If you’ve already researched how to start a recruitment agency and you’ve become a recruiter, then you’re probably also in the midst of finding out how to make placements.
As a recruiter, you’ll discover that once you find out how to make placements, you’ll want to know how to make more of them. And also how to make them more quickly. However, let’s “walk before we run,” shall we?
In the interest of doing just that, let’s start with a definition.
What is a placement?
You probably already know what that question might be. What is a placement? A placement is a situation in which an employer fills an open position with an interested job candidate following a hiring process that typically includes a phone screen and a face-to-face interview. For some placements, the situation also includes the involvement of a third-party recruitment agency.
And perhaps that’s why you’re here, because you’re part of a third-party recruitment agency. You might be the owner. You might be a recruiter. In the end, it does not matter. That’s because you just want to make placements!
Placement strategy: all about the sendout
When it comes to how to make placements, it begins and ends with the sendout. A sendout is an interview between a candidate and a client (or in other words, an employer that is interested in possibly hiring the candidate).
So the correlation in terms of a placement strategy is a simple one. The more sendouts you have, the more placements you’ll make. Of course, you want to make sure that you’re presenting your clients with qualified, on-target candidates. As long as the candidates are of high quality, then you’ll start making placements eventually. It will be almost inevitable.
And since the sendout is the single most important factor in making placements, you should be tracking that factor. Specifically, you should be tracking your recruitment sendout-to-placement ratio. That’s because once you start tracking this ratio, you can start improving this ratio. And once you start improving this ratio, that’s when you’re really “cooking with gas.”
According to recruiting industry trainer Gary Stauble, a good recruitment sendout-to-placement ratio is between 4:1 and 8:1. For example, a sendout-to-placement ratio of 4:1 means that, on average, you make one placement for every four sendouts to your clients. (You can see why that’s a pretty sweet ratio.)
If you have a solid recruitment sendout-to-placement ratio, then you need 10 sendouts or more per month. That would give you, on average, at least one placement per month. If the average fee for those placements is $20,000, then you would earn at least $240,000. And that’s if your ratio is 10-to-1. If it’s 5-to-1, then you would earn $480,000 during the calendar year.
Candidate placement questions about your sendouts
So, as you can see, focusing on your sendouts and the recruitment sendout-to-placement ratio is the best strategy when formulating how to make placements. With that in mind, there are some candidate placement questions that you should ask:
- How can I increase my number of high-quality sendouts every month?
- How can I improve my sendout-to-placement ratio every month?
The answers to these questions depend upon the candidates to which you have access. If you have access to an abundance of high-quality candidates in your industry and niche, then you can certainly increase your sendouts and also improve your sendout-to-placement ratio. Since that’s the case, you should formulate an effective recruitment sourcing strategy. Ideally, this strategy will allow you to source and recruit grade-A passive candidates who aren’t even looking for a new job at the moment.
These are the types of candidates that will increase your sendouts and improve your recruitment sendout-to-placement ratio.
(And if you’re like many recruiters in this candidate-driven market, you’re in need of more high-quality candidates. As such, you should consider membership in a split fee recruiting network like TE NetworkTM. In Top Echelon, recruiters share job orders and candidates in an effort to fill job orders and make placements as quickly as possible. In fact, Top Echelon’s MEGA Database sourcing tool contains over four million recruited candidates.)
Future career placements as a recruiter
Look, making placements is not easy. Being a recruiter is not easy. If it was, then everybody would be a recruiter. (Well, maybe not everybody . . . but more people, at the very least.) After all, there are a ton of steps in the recruitment process. There are people on both sides of the sale, and both of those people can say “No” to the sale!
However, since there are so many steps and there are so many distractions on your recruiting desk, this is exactly why you need a focused candidate placement strategy. A placement strategy that revolves around sendouts is effective because it focuses on what is called a key performance indicator or KPI. In other words, more of “this” leads to more of “this.” For our purposes, more sendouts leads to more placements.
Sendouts represents the key performance indicator for placements.
So if you want to make future career placements as a recruiter, then you must address the issue of sendouts each and every day that you’re in the office. In fact, as many industry trainers have advocated down through the years, there is one question you should ask yourself on a daily basis. That question is, “What’s the fastest way to my next sendout?”
Asking that question allows you to properly set your priorities for the day. It means that you’re working whatever is “closest to money.” And when you consistently work whatever is “closes to money,” you invariably make more money. (Funny how that works.)
How to make more placements
One of the best ways to prioritize your desk to make sure that you’re working on what matters the most is using a top-notch applicant tracking system. Top Echelon just released a new version of the Big Biller recruiting software, and it offers time-saving tools and features that streamlines the candidate placement process. As a result it creates more time for you to do those tasks that lead most directly to making placements.
Right now, you can try Big Biller for FREE.
In addition, Top Echelon offers a free monthly webinar as part of its Recruiter Coaching Series. After the webinars are over, we post the recorded version of the webinars on our website. These webinars touch upon a variety of recruiter-related topics. These topics deal with both candidates and clients. As always, our goal with these webinars (and corresponding videos) is to help recruiters make more placements.
Industry trainer Mike Gionta of RecruiterU has a webinar video on the Top Echelon website that can help with the dilemma posed in this blog post. The title of that video is “How to Double Your Placements AND Your Revenue in 121 Days or Less!”
For more information about Top Echelon and the products and services that it offers, visit the Top Echelon website by clicking here.