Recruitment: It’s all about the numbers

There isn’t one trait that we look for in a hiring a recruitment consultant but a number of behaviours and technical skills that make a great recruitment consultant.

In order to fast-track your career into becoming a top biller or the best recruitment consultant in your agency, you need to pay attention to your numbers. This will help you grow your desk and you will then see why we do what we do in order to achieve the desired results.

Greg Savage wrote a great blog about this which I have expanded upon.

Now, some people may call them KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators), ratios, targets, benchmarks, and metrics but at the end of the day, to be a great recruiter, you need to think about how you are going to make money. After all, it’s a tough job. You need to manage your time and make sure to stay focussed. Knowing what activity you need to do to keep on track to achieving your financial incentive is essential.

Let’s break it down:

Think about how much money you need to make in order to be eligible for commission and what your average fee is. Figure how many placements you need to make to get to the target.
For every placement you make, think about how many first round interviews with a client you need to arrange.
For every candidate that you send to a client (and you only want to be sending quality candidates to your clients!), how many candidate profiles do you need to send before you get that first round interview. Bare in mind, some clients may have a limit on how many profiles you can submit – your top three, or profiles that are on budget, over budget and under budget depending on the specific skills that the client is looking for, so that they can see a range of profiles that are available in the market.
For every candidate that you send to a client, think how many candidates you will need to screen and meet in person before you are happy to represent them and send them to a client. It’s unlikely that you would send every candidate that you ever screen and meet to a client. Some just might not be right for the job right now. Maybe the candidate needs to figure out what they are really looking for in a role before saying yes to having their details submitted. Remember, the client will remember you for the quality (or not so great quality) of candidates that you submit to them.
The next thing you need to think about is how many jobs do you need to be working at any one time in order to make those placements. Not all jobs are immediate placements. If you are a permanent recruitment consultant, you may need to work with the client for three or six months to find the right person for the job. But also think about the quality of that job. Is it in your area of specialisation? Are you confident that your candidate pool fits what the client is looking for? Don’t say yes to working on a job that you don’t have any candidates for.
How do you get working on the job? That’s where the sales, business development or client account management part comes in. Where will you find the job leads to figure out which clients to contact? It might be from searching job boards to see who is advertising, it might be from referrals from clients who have worked with you before, or it might be from you reading about market trends in your area of recruitment and putting a list together of clients who you think will have a need to hire due to restructuring, mergers or being a start up. Think about how many client calls or client business development calls you need to make in order to meet with the client to get the job on in the first place.
Think about how many client visits or face to face meetings you need to have before you have built the relationship with the client to a point where they feel comfortable to release the job to you.
Now it might be that you have more jobs on but no candidates so that week you need to place more emphasis on screening and meeting candidates. Other times, you may have loads of great candidates but not enough jobs on so you need to place more emphasis on business development calls and client meetings. Your activity report won’t be the same every week and that’s okay. As long as you are moving forward and you are getting more candidates getting first round and second round interviews, it will lead to placements.