”All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.” — Earl Nightingale, American motivational speaker and author

What are your business objectives for 2012? I know we have personal resolutions that we announce to the world and then try to keep but what are your New Year resolutions for work? Most sales organizations begin the year with a plan to fail because they did not have a strategic plan to win. The most successful plans require the following:

1. Plans must be specific, detailed and realistic
2. Plans must be written down and accountable
3. Plans must be associated with deadlines or deliverables
4. Plans must be measurable for success or failure
5. Plans must have the ability to change or adjust based on success of goals

I encourage you to sit down this year to come up with a detailed business plan that is worthy of the industry and the company you represent. In the spirit of Work, Compete, or Dominate, you should be focused on nothing less than Competing or Dominating. Start thinking about the following…

“Like Industries and Like Skill Sets”

Your plan should include a complete understanding of the industries and skill sets that you and your team can consistently provide with exceptional service. Each market is defined differently. Anyone can provide staffing services, but only ONE staffing firm can be the best in their market and it is critical that you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your recruiting team — and exploit the strengths.

Target Account List

Once “Like Industries and Like Skill Sets” are defined, your goal is to add hundreds of prospective clients that meet that profile. If they are “Like Industries and Like Skill Sets,” add them to your list! Earn the right to meet with them by doing your homework. Understand how flexible staffing or solutions are incorporated into their business model and find ways to improve that process. Every client prospect has an “approved bench” of vendors that have earned the right to support their business needs. To earn the right to meet with them, your engagement approach should lead them to believe that you can actually raise the level of service. In other words, you are a firm that could compete or raise the level of service they are currently experiencing from their primary vendor.

Too often we settle for the “I would love to be a backup vendor” mentality, when you can strategically place yourself as their primary vendor for all solutions. As you begin the discovery process, focus on the challenges, not the services. If you can fix the challenges, you’ll earn the right to provide solutions.

Questions to consider when placing prospect clients on your Targeted Account List:

• Does the prospective client match your office’s business plans?
• Can you “Compete” or “Dominate” in provided services or solutions?
• Why do they need YOU? For what type(s) of services?
• Who are your competitors? What is your relationship with client vs. your competitors?
• Who are the decision makers or buying influencers? Can you get access to them?
• What is their current Staff Augmentation or Solutions spend?
• What challenges do they have with regard to finding talent or services?

• Do you have solutions to solve the problems?
• Do you know the Features & Benefits of those solutions?

Why is the Job Order King? Candidates are KING!

Continued face to face “candidate traffic” will be the lifeblood for your office. Too often the focus has been on “client development” or bringing in logos. However, if your office does not have the talent to submit to the orders, you’ll lose the client. Proactive pipelining of candidates that match your office’s recruiting plan is paramount.

What came first: the Chicken or the Egg? What should come first: the order or the candidate? The answer is the candidate. Here’s the rationale: You cannot win a “client” if you can’t fill the order. Companies will always be a “prospect” until you actually fill an order and then they become a “client.” You can bring in all the orders you want however if your team can’t fill them with qualified candidates it’s just a costly exercise. Another famous quote from this industry is as follows: “If you can own the talent, you’ll own the market.”

Recruiter Lead Sheets

Your recruiters should be presenting their top Most Market-able Candidates to you every day with a clear understanding of what differentiates that candidate from all the other candidates. Set standards for them to interview beyond skill sets. They should be interviewing for accomplishments and reference quotes.

Encourage face-to-face interviews with all “Like Industries and Like Skill Sets” candidates in their market. 10 candidates per week face to face interview is a good benchmark standard. Each candidate interview has the opportunity to drive 10-15 leads per interview with the following questions.

• What have you done to date in your search?

• This provides companies with active searches, so don’t start selling services — start selling MPC Candidates!

What companies would you love to work for?

• This provides additional companies in your market that should be on your Target Account List.

360 degree referencing

• 9 Passive candidates in your market. (3 Supervisors / 3 Peers / 3 Subordinates)

Who do you know in your industry that I need to be connected to?

• 5+ candidates over the life of a candidate

Social Media / Networking

Become a Center of Influence in your virtual and physical communities. We are in the people business and I’m amazed how little our salespeople are involved in their local community. Surveys have shown that less than 50% of our Business Development Managers are actively involved in local professional organizations that are closely tied to their business / recruiting plans. Of that 50% that are engaged in local networking, less that 25% participate consistently in those organizations. Most of the time they show up sporadically and hand out business cards but leave shortly afterwards! Lastly, less than 5% of salespeople have consistently supported their local professional organizations to where they have earned a spot on the board.

Get out of the offices and off the phones and meet people personally. If you talk to the top producers in our industry, they will tell you that active involvement in their local community is critical to their success. Find two to three local professional organizations that are closely tied to your office’s business model and get involved.

Grow your virtual network on LinkedIn, BranchOut, and Facebook with the following values as defined in Bob Littell’s book, The Heart and Art of Netweaving, which gives us clear direction:

• Be a connector of other people with their Needs, Problems, and Opportunities in mind — not yours.
• Position yourself as the “no strings attached” resource for others and establish yourself as the “go-to” person.
• Constantly be on the lookout for persons who are “best of breed” at what they do and when you identify one, stay in touch and add to your trusted network.

Advanced Google Search Tools

Today’s Web 3.0 world provides us with the opportunity to automate alerts and organize tons of Internet data like never before. There’s no reason for you not to be completely informed with “behind the scenes” information prior to making your first call.

You’ve heard that “people like to buy, they don’t like to be sold” and that rings true in our business as well. As a business development manager your success will be directly related to your ability to understand and identify the challenges that your prospective clients have with regard to staff augmentation and more specifically how staff augmentation plays a role in their company’s mission statement. Their challenges are normally centered on the following:

• Quality of Consultants
• Quantity of Consultants
• Availability of Consultants
• Time to Fill
• Productivity of Consultants
• Communications or Follow Up

90% of the time your competition struggles in those areas and it will be your job to identify them through various resources including your Recruiting Team, Internet Research, or Internal Coaches. You’ll need to know the challenges so you can position specific questions to bring these challenges to the surface. Once surfaced, it will be your job to walk clients through the process they have in place and to help them realize that if that process is left unchanged it may have negative bottom line impact.

If you fail to show them how you can raise the level of service, resolve problems, fix pain, or that you can challenge their “bench” of approved vendors, then the only means of winning that prospect will be through lowering your price. Anyone can gain clients by lowering pricing but to build “sustainable business relations” you will have to outperform the competition. Your competitive advantage is your strategic approach to resolving problems and improving proficiencies with regard to how companies utilize temporary staffing consultants to meet company objectives. Without that, you are only as good as the next salesperson that should happen to call. Know their PAIN, Know your SOLUTIONS.

Activity-Based Metrics

Too often, we tend to focus on the end result by concentrating on the number of submits per week or the number of appointments you had this week. Don’t get me wrong — those are important KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to follow; however, you could make your weekly quota of meetings and submits week after week and still not be close to driving revenue at the end of the month.

Activity without “quality” is just a wasted exercise of time, resources, and company money. – Daniel Guelzo

If you really want to measure recruiter activity then measure:

• The number of recruiting calls you make to get a passive candidate.
• The number of submittals you make to get an interview.
• The number of interviews or “send outs” you schedule to get a hire.
• The number of passive referrals you receive each week from the active candidate you interview.
• The number of relationships you make each week with place-able, source-able, and Centers of Influence (COI’s) professionals that match your “recruiting and business” plan.

If you really want to measure Account Executives’ activity then measure:

• The number of Appointment Action Calls you make to get a face-to-face meeting.
• The number challenges you discover each time you meet with a decision maker.
• The number of times you are invited back to continue the discovery process.
• The number of meetings it takes before you are able to provide valuable solutions.
• The number of unsolicited “referrals” you get from your existing clients.

Job Order / Submittal Standards

Our industry has two gigantic time wasters, 1) taking and investing valuable man hours on unqualified job orders with little or no Return-on -Investment (ROI) and 2) recruiting, interviewing, and submitting lack-luster candidates. Unfortunately this has become 70-80% of our activity. Let me try to set clear standards here:

Job Order Standards (See attached)

1. A “priority order” is one that your recruiting team can submit three qualified candidates to immediately.
2. It matches your “Like Industry / Like Skill Set” objectives.
3. It has as a minimum all of the following attributes:
• A well-defined description of key elements and requirements to include functional title, vertical, applications or degrees, size of project or people, and experience
• Short Term / Long Term Objectives of the role
•  Selling Points of Interest
• Desirable company that will work with you to fill the opening

Submittal Standards

1. A “qualified candidate” is one that matches your “Like Industry / Like Skill Set” objectives
2. Is activity seeking opportunities to upgrade their career
3. Willing to work with you honestly in representing them with the minimum attributes:
• Matches the key elements and requirements to include functional title, vertical, applications or degrees, size of project or people, and experience
• Has justifiable accomplishments that relate to Short Term / Long Term Objectives
• Verifiable references from influential supervisors that are willing to speak to our clients

Going back to the quote at the beginning of this article, Mr. Nightingale is correct in saying that we need a plan, a road map, and the courage to chase our dreams. Too often we start the year with a just a goal of doing better or closing more business or making more money. That’s not enough. A well-defined plan includes specific, actionable activities, which can be measured to see if desired results have been accomplished. Dreams are measured by win or fail, but individual action items needed to accomplish a dream can be measured and each successful completion gives us the courage to continue.

Good hunting this year!

Four years (give or take) into recruiting’s embrace of social media, it turns out that job boards are the most productive source of new hires.

Where social media sources register a barely discernible 1 percent of all hires, job boards produced 19 percent. That was matched only by internal transfers; even referrals came in lower — 16 percent.

These are among the surprising, and not so surprising, bits of data developed from a survey of 414 employers conducted by HR consultants Bersin & Associates. Compiled into the Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011, and authored by principal analyst Karen O’Leonard, the 100 page volume offers details on the recruiting metrics from employers as small as 100  workers to those with more than 10,000.

Josh Bersin, founder of the eponymous firm, said the genesis of the factbook came from the company’s clients and conversations with many others since Bersin launched his talent acquisition practice a few years ago.

Employers, he said, “are anxious for a lot of information.” But there wasn’t much detailed bench-marking generally available. It wasn’t easy for employers to get answers to questions like: Are my recruiting costs in line with other companies? Am I spending my money effectively Am I getting the kind of results others are?

Now they can.

Some of the data — such as cost per hire, source of hire, time to fill — is widely available and in more detail.  The Society for Human Resource Management has data on a number of important recruiting metrics, including cost per hire and time to fill, the traditional recruiting effectiveness measures. The Prinzo Group offers a series of reports on talent acquisition metrics. Annually, CareerXroads publishes a source of hire survey, based on responses from the firm’s roster of mostly Fortune 500 companies.

Bersin’s factbook includes those types of metrics, but breaks down the responses by company size, and industry. In other areas, such as the report’s section on quality of hire metrics being used by employers, offers insights not readily available.

The report also draws conclusions and makes recommendations based on the data. Regarding job boards, for instance, authoir O’Leonard writes:

While the landscape is changing, job boards certainly are not dead. To the contrary, 81 percent of organizations say they will spend on job boards this year. However, we expect that organizations will use job boards more selectively, for certain types of positions and in certain geographies…

(Incidentally, CareerXroads found job boards accounted for 24.95 percent of new hires in 2010. Referrals represented 27.5 percent in the CareerXroads report. The data, however, is not directly comparable since the report separated new hires from internal transfers, while Bersin’s survey asked about how all open positions were filled.)

Some of the more telling points in the factbook deal with the use of social media. Despite all the chatter about social recruiting, most companies spend next to nothing on that strategy and, not surprisingly, make few hires from all their friends and fans and followers. “General social media,” as the factbook describes sites not principally intended for professional networking, produced 1 percent of hires. Only the largest employers hired more — 2 percent.

O’Leonard notes that the reason for the low spend — 1 percent of the recruiting budget — is that social media’s costs “are negligible”, and that when money is spent there it typically comes out of a centralized marketing budget. “Converting candidates reached on social media to hires,” O’Leonard writes, “can be a time consuming-process.”

On the other hand professional networking sites like LinkedIn account for 10 percent of the hires, but companies only spend 3 percent of their external recruiting budgets there.

With all the energy being put into social media, the results reported by the surveyed companies seems meager at best. “A lot more hype than reality,” is   Bersin’s assessment. However, when companies use sites like Facebook and Twitter as a marketing and brand building tool, they get results, he said. Social media, he says, “is being used effectively to build pipelines.” But when candidates decide to apply, they go to the company career site, he said.

One important, and oft-ignored area that the Bersin factbook to its credit takes a stab at addressing is quality of hire. More than a few companies attempt to close the loop and track the performance of new hires back to the source of their application, as well as the recruiter who presented them.

“Recruiting teams can look at a number of measurements to determine new-hire quality, including new-hire performance assessments, hiring manager satisfaction, candidate satisfaction and new-hire retention,” O’Leonard writes. However, more than 25 percent of companies do nothing, she adds.

This section of the report details the kind of measurements companies do use, though the data here is limited to just a few charts specifically regarding use of performance reviews and turnover data.  Still, it offers guidance to companies who want to become more data-driven, but aren’t sure what to measure or where they stand.

That’s exactly how Bersin hopes employers make use of the factbook. “First,” he says, “Are they in the right ballpark?” The data can be used to analyze their own spending, source of hire, and basic productivity measures.

Second, he says, the factbook can help recruiting leaders determine how to allocate their sourcing dollars.

“Really, Bersin, says, “what this is about is where do they fit. It gives them something to compare (to).”

Taking a broader look at the survey results, Bersin said, “It tells me that (recruiting) is expensive. It is not cheap to do it well.

“It tells me that companies are spending more right now… It may be even harder because there are so many candidates.

“It shows that there is a pretty substantial change in using social networks.

“It tells me that the recruiting industry is very complicated.”

The New Year is an opportune time to “raise the bar” by doing something strategic in talent management. In many corporations, new plans and budgets take effect at the first of the year, so the holiday period preceding the New Year is an ideal time to review the potential strategic actions to put in front of your team. Unfortunately, many talent management leaders are risk adverse, and although they constantly talk about the need to “be more strategic” they all-too-frequently find excuses that indefinitely postpone those dramatic and strategic actions.

The leadership set aside at least half the day for the team to identify upcoming problems and opportunities and the resulting strategic moves that need to be made. This article is merely a checklist of the strategic talent management actions that I have found that the very best corporations should have on their potential to-do list.

The Top 15 Potential Strategic Actions to Consider in Talent Management

If you’ve decided to stop fighting fires and to do something major with a strategic impact, here is a list of possible programs and actions that you should consider.

1. Increase the productivity of your workforce – workforce productivity is merely comparing the output of your entire workforce (the total value of the products and services they produce) with the cost of your workforce (total labor and talent management costs). Many talent management departments measure engagement (a precursor to productivity) but they don’t measure workforce productivity. Even fewer take proactive actions to directly increase it. Increasing productivity requires talent management to identify the barriers that restrict productivity and then to proactively provide the consulting advice, best practices, and tools that have been proven to increase a team’s productivity.
2. Increase employee innovation – fierce marketplace competition requires firms to accelerate innovation in product and service areas, despite having fewer resources. Rather than targeting a few departments, talent management must increase innovation in all areas of the business. Typically, innovation can be increased tough the targeted hiring of innovators, retaining innovators, and minimizing the barriers that innovators face within the corporation. Talent management must help shape the culture so that the expectation of continuous innovation permeates every business area.
3. Reward great people management – Most managers simply don’t spend enough time on talent management activities. The primary reason is that managers are not directly measured or rewarded based on how well they manage their talent. This is true even though talent management “owns” all of the key components related to measuring and rewarding (performance management, performance appraisal, competencies, and reward systems). The key action step is to develop a “people management scorecard” for each individual manager and reward them based on their performance against those standards.
4. Identify and fix bad managers – research by Google has shown that in most cases, an employee’s or a team’s manager is the single-highest impact factor on the hiring, retention, innovation, productivity, and the development of employees. Yet most organizations have no formal program for identifying weak managers. Strategic actions would include implementing surveys and metrics to identify with managers and to provide general lists with proven tools and approaches to improve a manager’s people management performance.
5. Convert talent management metrics into their dollar impact – unfortunately, most traditional talent management metrics fail to impress executives because they are not expressed in “the language of business,” which is dollars. Saying we have a 12% turnover rate, a 54% engagement rate, or an 87-day time to fill generally won’t impress senior managers because the metrics are not expressed in their dollar impact on corporate revenue. In contrast, stating that every percentage point increase in regrettable employee turnover costs us $7.2 million gets an immediate reaction. Work with the CFO’s office to credibly calculate the impacts.
6. Calculate the risks of weak talent management — shifting from the positive business impact to the possible negative impacts requires a risk management manager. Risk management is an increasingly important function throughout the business, but unfortunately, few talent management functions have put anyone charge of risk management. Risk managers identify and quantify the risks associated with potential talent problems (its probability and likely costs). Underfunding important talent programs can create tremendous economic risks such as losing key innovators to competitors, failing to have enough developed leaders, and a weak employer brand that drives top candidates away.
7. You need to prepare for a leadership gap — the combination of increased growth and higher turnover rates will mean that most corporations will begin to suffer because of a lack of leadership bench strength. In addition, because the type of leaders who will be needed will also change, the entire leadership and succession program will have to be re-examined and new social media and project rotation tools will need to be developed and implemented.
8. Speed up internal movement through proactive internal placement – very few things increased productivity, retention, and employee development faster than periodic internal movement. Unfortunately, most corporate programs require the employee to initiate the movement and to find the “correct” placement area. A more strategic approach is a proactive one where recruiters periodically identify employees and then help to correctly place these individuals who should be moved both for their own and for the corporate good.
9. Improve internal best-practice sharing – most talent management leaders spend most of their time and resources on developing new programs and approaches. Surprisingly, the data indicates that you can have a higher impact faster and at lower cost by simply identifying and sharing “hidden” existing best practices. Rather than relying on this best-practice sharing occurring organically, a superior approach is a proactive one that seeks out these affected practices wherever they might be in the organization. And once identified, they are shared in such a manner that managers easily understand their value and implement them.
10. Update your retention approach – just like employer branding, retention programs have been allowed to atrophy because the economy has reduced most turnover to a trickle. Unfortunately, turnover is about to dramatically increase, so processes to prioritize key individuals, processes for identifying who is at risk, and retention toolkits need to be reinvigorated before it is too late.
11. Employee referral programs need to be reinvigorated — as the rate of hiring and competition for talent increases throughout the year, stagnant employee referral programs need to be re-examined. Because they produce the highest quality and volume of hires, referrals as the percentage of all hires should begin to reach over 40%. Employee referral programs must be closely integrated with the developing social media approaches.
12. Assess your external employer brand – during the economic downturn, the area of employer branding has been frequently ignored because very little hiring was going on. Unfortunately, during the same time, the reputation of many corporations has been tarnished as a result of layoffs, salary/promotion freezes and a reduction and development resources. In addition, corporate images in general and in some specific industries like banking, oil etc., have been damaged by recent events and “occupy” type movements. The growth of glassdoor.com, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook now make it much easier for negative messages to be spread. At the very least, the positive/negative aspects of your employer brand should be measured and monitored before an upturn in hiring begins.
13. Re-examine your social media approach – although many talent managers have “done something” in the area of social media recruiting, realize that the potential for social media in talent management is much greater than almost everyone anticipated. Plans should be developed to determine how social media can positively impact training, employee development, learning, retention, collaboration, problem identification, crowdsourcing of answers, and best-practice sharing. The mobile platform should be examined in a similar manner because it is rapidly becoming the dominant communications platform for employees.
14. College recruiting needs to be reengineered — communications and job seeking approaches have changed dramatically on college campuses but college recruiting programs have unfortunately been stagnant for years. Program features that need to be examined include remote college recruiting, social media approaches aimed at college students, mobile platform approaches and marketing research to better understand the needs and the actions of top grads.
15. Improve non-monetary motivation – when compensation and reward resources are limited, nonmonetary motivators need to be emphasized. Unfortunately, the compensation function focuses almost exclusively on “expensive” salary, benefits, and bonuses … even though a significant percentage of employee motivation comes from … recognition, praise, and feedback. Talent management should develop non-monetary motivation tools for managers that are easy to use and that produce measurable results. They should also target key employees and server them in order to identify “how to best manage and motivate me” plans.

Benchmark Firms to Learn From

A key competency for any talent management leader is rapid self-directed learning, so it only makes sense to benchmark the firms that are aggressively making tremendous strides in talent management. My extensive research has identified some of the best firms to learn from. Many are from the Silicon Valley, which has already returned to a “war for talent” (Google, Facebook, Zynga all approach talent management using a more scientific approach).

Firms outside of technology have also taken some amazing steps so they should not be ignored (Zappos, Sodexo, CACI, DaVita, Deloitte, KPMG, PepsiCo, and the U.S. Army have all taken bold steps).

Additional Strategic Talent Management Actions to Consider

In addition to the top 15 major actions recommended above, some other strategic actions to consider include:

• Prepare for VUCA, the new normal — talent management plans, approaches, and processes need to be improved so that they can handle the new business environment that we face (VUCA = Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)
• Increasing revenues — examining how talent management actions can directly increase individual employee revenue generation
• Integration of talent management functions – an almost-universal weakness is a lack of integration. Talent management functions must more closely cooperate, coordinate, and integrate so that they work seamlessly.
• Hire right before they do — if your firm doesn’t have the strongest employer brand, location or glamorous product, you must develop a plan to quickly initiate hiring immediately before your talent competitors. A rapid “explode out-of-the-box” plan is also required.
• Corporate headcount “fat” – setting up a process that ensures that the return to hiring doesn’t result in a surplus of employees (i.e. headcount fat).
• Competitive analysis — identifying the competitive advantage that your talent management practices provide compared to your talent competitors.
• Prioritizing — prioritizing jobs, managers, and talent management programs so that your limited resources provide the highest possible impact.
• SWAT team — creating a rapid response team that can respond to sudden talent management opportunities and problems.
• Alerts — providing a process that alerts managers about upcoming problems before they get out of hand.
• Lean or agile talent management – adapting lean, CRM, and agile business approaches and tools to the area of talent management.
• Remote work opportunities — as technology, communications, and social media tools improve, talent management must develop ways that allows top talent to work from anywhere.
• Forward-looking metrics — unfortunately, almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Instead, forward-looking and predictive-metrics that allow for improved decision-making need to replace them.
• Reengineer performance appraisals – this is an almost universally disliked process that requires tremendous amount of time but produces no measurable results. A completely new approach is required.
• Transparency – throughout the business world there is an increasing emphasis on transparency and openness. The time has come for talent management leaders to reassess their entire approach to secrecy, privacy, and the degree of openness with employees and applicants.
• Cloud talent management – HR and talent management cannot be exempt from the powerful trend to move everything to the cloud.

Final Thoughts

The period immediately before the beginning of the New Year is a great time to sit back and think of your accomplishments and your legacy. Unfortunately, rather than being strategic, too many talent leaders have been simply happy to survive the last few years with their sanity intact.

Now is the time to shake loose any lethargy, to take some risks, and do something bold before you retire or move on. You may have “earned a seat at the table” but you can’t be truly respected and admired unless you produce a measurable strategic business impact.

Moneyball teaches us that when there is too much information (no sport has more data than baseball), it is time to rethink what and how we measure success. Success in baseball is winning; success in sourcing and recruiting is hiring. And like the journey to winning in baseball, the path to hiring as viewed through the eyes of data will help us determine what activities lead to success.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Dear Barb:

Many greetings from South Africa!  Barb, the reason for my email today is that I’m stuck with a problem and I thought – who is the best person in the industry and always at the forefront of recruitment trends and your name came up.  I was hoping that I could pick your brain.  Here are my questions:

1. What stats / ratios do you track for your consultants?
2. Why do you track those specific stats / ratios?

Barb, I hope I’m not being to forward in asking these questions but am really hoping I can tap into your wealth of knowledge and expertise on this. Thank you very much in advance.

Theresa N., Johannesburg, South Africa

Dear Theresa:

It’s always nice to hear from you. These are the stats we monitor on a daily basis.  We track the stats so we can provide each individual recruiter with their ratios, most importantly:

• Job order to Fill
• Send-out to Placement

Once we know the ratios of our recruiters, together we discuss their income goals and then determine the results they need each day to hit their goals.  We don’t care about the actual number of calls they make as long as they hit their daily results.

For example:  If someone has a minimum daily standard to interview three new candidates and they only interview two on Tuesday, they have to make sure they interview four on Wednesday or Thursday.  Everyone in our office has different minimum daily results standards because they all have different individual ratios based on their abilities and experience.

This is from our prosperity planner:

We also think it is good to determine goals in these areas for the month and for the recruiter to see their MTD (Month to Date Numbers).  It’s a daily reminder of where they are and where they need to be.

The most important number in my mind is the Send-out number.

They are all focused on booking send-outs which in our world is a candidate being interviewed by a decision maker.

Hope this information helps you.

Barbara J. Bruno, CPC, CTS

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Would you like to Ask Barb a question? Email her at support@staffingandrecruiting.com. Each month in The Fordyce Letter print edition, Barbara Bruno answers questions from individuals in the Recruiting Profession. We will bring you some of these Q&A responses from Barb each week on FordyceLetter.com.

“Great acts are made up of small deeds.” — Lao Tzu (ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism)

How true this is in our own business. Too often, we tend to focus on the end result by concentrating on the number of submits per week or the number of appointments you had this week. Don’t get me wrong — those are important KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to follow; however, you could make your weekly quota of meetings and submits week after week and still not be close to driving revenue at the end of the month.

Activity without “quality” is just a wasted exercise of time, resources, and company money. – Daniel Guelzo 

Recruiter Measurement

Recruiters, If you really want to measure something, measure:

• The number of recruiting calls you make to get a passive candidate.
• The number of submittals you make to get an interview.
• The number of interviews or “send outs” you schedule to get a hire.
• The number of passive referrals you receive each week from the active candidate you interview.
• The number of relationships you make each week with place-able, source-able and Centers of Influence (COI’s) professionals that match your “recruiting and business” plan.

When you are evaluating rookie recruiters, first measure their success by evaluating how many candidates they recruit and meet face-to-face (that matched their recruiting plan) on a weekly basis. For us, the face-to-face benchmark for full desk recruiters was set at twelve to fifteen per week. If they couldn’t meet the face-to-face activity level, then I knew we had training opportunities with them on communicating their value proposition for candidates. If the recruiter could not drive face-to-face candidate traffic after remediation then the recruiter could not be successful in this industry.

If they met the 12–15 candidate face-to-face interviews per week objective, then I focused on the number of passive referrals, job leads, and references the recruiter obtained during each candidate interview. A typical 20-minute interview with a passive or active candidate should provide 8-12 leads. If the number of leads and referrals were low, then we had training opportunities specifically on creating value during the interview process for the candidate. The quicker they got to passive candidates the higher their submit-to-interview ratio climbed. The better they got at finding and presenting passive candidate the higher their interview to hire ratio climbed.

There’s a thousand ways we can measure activity metrics for recruiters however, weekly candidate traffic and leads per interview are two that I recommend that measure “quality” in the activity process.

Account Executive Measurement

Account Executives, if you really want to measure something, measure:

• The number of Appointment Action Calls you make to get a face-to-face meeting.
• The number challenges you discover each time you meet with a decision maker.
• The number of times you are invited back to continue the discovery process.
• The number of meetings it takes before you are able to provide valuable solutions.
• The number of unsolicited “referrals” you get from your existing clients.

Understanding where you can work, compete or dominate in your market is priority one, and as a manager, I made sure that new business development managers had a clear understanding of the capabilities and limitations of their recruiting teams. Working was not an option and once we defined areas in which we could compete or dominate the first priority was to see how successful they were at scheduling face-to-face appointments with prospect clients that match their recruiting / business plans. I set that benchmark at fifteen per week (three per day).

Definition of an Appointment: An agreed-upon meeting with a decision maker to discuss how flexible staffing or solutions is used to help meet company objectives.

If a new sales person could not schedule face-to-face meetings, then I knew we had training opportunities on differentiating our solutions, approach, and business processes. If they could not consistently schedule appointments then I knew this was an Account Executive that would not be successful.

If they were able to schedule appointments, I then focused on the salesperson’s ability to continue the sales process. In other words, are they invited back? Too often, sales people are not invited back because they did not differentiate themselves or their product. They did not uncover challenges or present valuable solutions to help the company grow or meet business objectives. If sales people struggled with scheduling additional meetings then I knew we had training opportunities on consultative selling specifically on challenges and solutions clients have with regard to securing and retaining talent. In other words, NO PAIN / NO SALE!

Every client has difficulty with Quality, Quantity, Productivity ,and Availability of talent. Understanding where clients (and other staffing firms) fall short in these areas is critical. Lastly, having a well-rehearsed and compelling story on how our Features and Benefits will resolve those challenges is paramount.

If you want to measure something, measure Quality of Activity.

Good hunting!

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention.

But you should certainly do your own thinking. I recommend that you start by examining this past year…

2011 Was The Year of Social Media

2011 was a tough year for many in talent management, but despite compressed budgets, organizations continued to hire and develop talent. One factor that seemed to invade nearly every high-level functional discussion was social media. It’s clear that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter will play a dominate role in recruiting and development best practices in years to come.

Not surprisingly, 2011 saw no fewer than 40 new vendors emerge to help organizations use social media to attract referrals. We also started to see early stage tools to use social media in talent assessment (pre/post hire) as well as applicant/candidate/employee experience management. New tools brought much enhanced visibility into talent issues, but most talent-management metrics continue not to resonate with key leaders outside of the HR function.

2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”

By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place.

Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.

The Additional Top Nine!

Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years.

In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.

Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management.

Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.

Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.

Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier.

Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.

The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach.

In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.

Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employee referral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees.

With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.

Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.

The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach.

At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.

Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.

Other Things to Keep Your Eye On…

In addition to the major trends highlighted above, there are 12 additional “hot” topics to keep your eye on:

• Risk identification — almost every other business function has already adopted a risk management strategy. So the time is coming when talent management will be forced to adopt a similar strategy and set of metrics. This program will not only cover HR legal issues but also the economic “risk” associated with weak hiring, the absence of developed leaders, and the cost of turnover of key talent.
• Prioritization — continued budget and resource pressure will force talent management leaders to prioritize their services, business units, key jobs, and high-value managers/employees.
• Integration — there will be increasing pressure for talent management functions to more closely integrate and work seamlessly.
• Expedited leadership development — as more baby-boom leaders and managers actually begin to retire, there will be increased pressure for expedited leadership development — specifically solutions that develop talent remotely using social media tools and within months rather than years.
• Competitive analysis — the increasingly competitive business world has forced almost every function to be more externally focused. Although HR has a long history of being internally focused and not being “highly competitive,” there is increasing pressure to become more business-like and to adopt an “us-versus-them” perspective. That means conducting competitive analysis and making sure that every key talent management function produces superior results to those at competitors.
• Contingent workers — as continuous business volatility becomes the “new normal,” the increased use and the improved management of contingent workers will become essential for agility and flexibility.
• Unionization — there is a reasonable chance that actions by the NLRB will increase union power and make it easier for unions to gain acceptance at private employers.
• Recruiting at industry events — as industry events return to popularity, recruiting at them will again become an effective tool for recruiting top and diverse talent.
• Location software — talent managers will begin to realize that software that allows you to check-in and see who is within close geographic proximity has great value and many still unidentified uses.
• Hire before they do — most firms will restrict their hiring until the turnaround actually begins. However, your firm must have a talent pool or pipeline developed, so that you can hire immediately and capture the top talent right before your competitors realize the downturn is over.
• Assessment continues to improve — vendors, software, and tools continue to improve in this area that will become increasingly important.
• Increase your revenue impact — increased economic pressures will continue the trend of forcing all functions (including talent management) to convert their functional results into business impacts in dollars. Talent management will face increasing pressure to directly demonstrate how their hiring, retention, development, etc. is focused, so that it directly increases and maximizes corporate revenues.

Final Thoughts

A recent survey of CEOs rates talent management as the No. 1 area where CEOs expect dramatic change during the next year. Given this increased attention, it’s even more critical that talent management and recruiting leaders set aside time to conduct a SWOT assessment (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) to identify where they are and where they need to be.

The “new” talent management leader must be more strategic, more proactive, and more business-like, and that means getting your entire staff to begin thinking about and planning for the game-changing events, trends, and opportunities that will occur during the next year. It’s time to realize the “but-we-are-overwhelmed-and-too-busy” excuse for not forecasting and planning is wearing thin.

Great customer experiences depend heavily on companies creating a great experience for their employees. Executive VP Jim Bush acknowledged this relationship from the outset of his quest to ramp up customer satisfaction at American Express. The company polled existing customer care agents to find what would boost the quality of their service. Among their answers were improved incentives, more career mobility, more flexible hours, and streamlined processes.

In response, American Express increased job flexibility and created new job categories so agents could progress through four levels rather than remaining stuck in one. The company also changed its compensation plan, allowing agents to more easily earn bonuses based on customer service scores.

In addition, the company changed the job title from customer care representative to customer care professional. Agents got business cards for the first time.

These were more than symbolic gestures. Agents no longer merely recite company scripts, but use their discretion to figure out how American Express products can help customers solve problems. That’s made the job harder in a way. Agents like Teresa Tate, who works out of an American Express service center in Phoenix, now have to think on their feet. But Tate wouldn’t have it any other way. “We are getting more and more power to make the decisions at our level,” she says.

Tate, who used to run a restaurant, takes calls from AmEx cardholders who operate small businesses. She is now freer to share her wisdom and her concern for these customers. “I genuinely feel like I’m in this company’s finance department,” she says of her callers. “Having been in small business myself, you need that support.”

This sort of passion and compassion for customers translates into high levels of service, into reciprocal relationships.

American Express’s worthiness as an employer predates the Relationship Care program. The company has made Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For 11 of the past 12 years.30 Going even farther back, American Express offered employees one of the first private-sector pension plans in 1875.

These days, Amex combines kindness with cleverness in its people management. It offers a 401(k) plan that’s in the top 15 percent when it comes to company generosity. And Amex has worked harder in recent years to help struggling employees succeed at the firm, rather than usher them out the door. At the same time, it employs workforce metrics to fortify worthiness as a seller. Agents’ performance and pay are determined to a large extent by how well they fare on customer feedback surveys. The results are exposed directly to agents, who can view their recent customer satisfaction results, their aggregate results, and how they stack up against peers.

Relying too heavily on financial incentives can backfire. And workplace measurements can be misguided. Look no further than the way American Express used to track the robotic repetition of customer names. But Amex designed its compensation system based partly on employee feedback. And the strong results of the Relationship Care program suggest the pay approach isn’t distracting employees or hurting service. What’s more, the continual customer feedback measurements act as a self-correcting mechanism for agents – and therefore help keep service quality high.

By blending employee autonomy and a supportive culture with smart metrics, American Express shows that worthiness as an employer works to make companies worthy sellers.

From the book Good Company: Business Success in the Worthiness Era, copyright 2011 by Laurie Bassi. Reprinted with permission of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.

I am not sure about you, but I am reading more and more about the power of “big data.” Forrester, McKinsey, and IBM have all issued white papers or reports in the last month or two discussing the impact that the analysis of big data will have on business.

Big data refers to the totality of information available. This includes data in emails, instant messages, in video, and in audio files — all data that might help create a more complete understanding about an issue or person or provide an answer to some question. All the spreadsheets and databases we are currently using are made up of structured data, data that can be organized into columns or rows and then added or otherwise analyzed.

And, while this type of data is incredibly useful, access to unstructured data would add dimensions and depths that only the CIA can currently realize.

Historically, the volume and unstructured nature of so-called “big data” prevented much in way of analysis. An individual had to listen to the audio, watch the videos, read all the material, and integrate and analyze to form a conclusion. This is obviously very time-consuming, and requires training and the ability to assimilate many kinds of media. But we now have computers that are close to being able to look at large amounts of this kind of data and draw inferences, make suggestions, and provide summaries. The CIA and other government agencies undoubtedly already are using these tools to analyze email, voice mail, and phone calls in search of terrorists.

But these capabilities are about to be available to everyone. In the past few months Oracle announced it had acquired Endeca, a company that does dataanalysis and is building a Big Data Appliance — a computer specially designed to handle the volume of information found in unstructured data. IBM developed Watson, the computer that played against humans and won at Jeopardy, as a big data analysis machine.

HP announced a few days ago that it is integrating Autonomy, which it purchased earlier this year, into a new hardware platform for data analysis, SAS has developed a number of big-data applications, and EMC recently acquired Greenplum, another data analysis firm. Each of these firms is looking to mine the potential of the massive amounts of data that exist and that are being created.

Imagine the power these tools will potentially give to marketing and advertising folks. They may be able to specifically target individuals with messages that, based on the analysis of what they are writing or talking about, will entice them to buy a product or choose a suppler. On the more positive side, this level of understanding will make it possible for computers to take over call centers, much of customer support, and other jobs where knowing a lot about the caller as well as the products will be most useful.

What This Means for Recruiters

For recruiters, this may change everything about what we do and how we do it.

The capability this analytic software has is scary and threatening. To thrive in the coming world of big-data analysis, we will all have to learn to adapt and to develop very different skills from the ones we now have.

Here is just a cursory sampling of what may be in store.

Job Descriptions

By analyzing what a department produces, what data is gathered and used, who people talk to and interact with in meetings or in social networks, these programs will be able to identify key characteristics of successful people and from that develop a list of competencies, skills, and attitudes that are most likely to be successful. They can match this against current requirements and suggest changes or skills that might improve or complement whatever exists. But a job description or analysis will be much more complete and accurate than they are today.

This capability will be here in a year or two.

Sourcing

By tapping into a larger data-set than we can access or analyze today, we can find more people and learn more about them than ever. We can perhaps get referrals from whoever a person calls, what they talk about, and who they refer to in the conversations.

These tools will also completely eliminate the need for Boolean search or experts in using the various forms of search that are popular today. These will all be automated to a great extent. Imagine a computer akin to the Hal 9000 in 2001:Space Odyssey that can understand human languages (similar to Siri on the Apple iPhone 4S) and conduct a search independently of a recruiter. They will be able to dig much deeper and make inferences based on data that would be impossible for a human.

I look for some of this capability within two to three years at the most.

Assessment

We have an increasing ability to learn more and more about people by gleaning bits of information about someone from scraping or extracting data from websites/public information/social networks and from information about the products or services someone buys or uses, and from their interests extracted from comments, Tweets, locations, and so forth.

This, combined with better analysis of the job as described above, will let us choose people with a higher probability of success than we can do today with all of our tools.

This is just around the corner and could probably be put into practice at some level today if the machines were available for commercial use (some are) and the costs were reasonable.

Metrics and Performance Analysis

With the power that these tools are already capable of, everything we do will be tracked and can be correlated to our performance.

We will be able to measure and track which calls resulted in the most candidates, what methods yielded the greatest returns, and how well our candidates performed once hired. Some of this capability is available today with tools incorporated into HRIS systems like SAP and Oracle.

Legal and Privacy Concerns are huge and will require another article to discuss.

What are your thoughts about all of this? Is this all just a pipe-dream or do you agree that it will happen?

The phone rang. I answered. A new client started to unburden himself. His name was Benjamin. He was concerned about his somewhat anemic production in this sluggish economy. His was not an uncommon call these days. As the year begins to wind down, many of my clients are looking back over their production and, if substandard, are begging for help. Ben was one of these. He had heard me speak at a virtual summit and, since I was one of his favorites, was very excited about working with me. He had started his own firm eight years ago and had grown it at one point to ten recruiters. Now he had seven. His personal production had been as high as $550,000, but was now down in the $300,000 range. Technically, he knew how to do this business, but he had forgotten the ‘structure’ part of the equation. And so, Ben and I began by building the right foundation. We began with Goal Setting for the coming year. 

When you contemplate any new venture, you want to make sure that you are not bringing any old baggage with you. You want to approach new goal setting with a blank slate—a tabula rasa. Have you ever been in an upscale restaurant and the waiter brings you a sorbet between courses so that you can cleanse your palette of any previous taste before trying the next course? That’s the perspective we want to operate from as we set our new goals for next year. We don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past. We want to leave them in the past. How many times have we heard the famous quote that, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?” Let’s not be insane as we plan for the future.

Sometimes, in this cleansing phase, it is beneficial to revisit some literature that has moved you in the past. I like to re-read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. In his little book, which is chock full of great advice, Don Miguel covers the four agreements we need to make with ourselves. In abbreviated format, they are to speak with integrity; not to take anything personally; not to make assumptions; and to always do your best. I will let you discover the wisdom of this book yourself, but I believe that Don Miguel sets the stage so that we can be successful in any new endeavor.

The Four Central Principles of Goal Setting

1. The goal must be in writing. If it is not in writing it is a ‘wish,’ not a ‘goal.’
2. It must be vividly imagined. Pictures of your goals at your desk are good here.
3. It must be ardently desired. You must really, really want it.
4. You must be committed to it.

If these four principles are in play, then the goal exists and you will have a good shot of attaining it. At the end of the day, goal setting can be fun. Stay with me. It’s easier than you think!

Yearly Planning Worksheet*

Now let’s look at what Ben wants to personally produce, on his own desk, in the coming year. This does not include the production of his recruiters. Once we get his goal number, we can break it down and tell him what he needs to do on a daily basis to reach that number.

Basically, Ben wants to revisit his top production days of a couple of years ago and so we set a new goal for him of $500,000. I am going to modify this number a little and use $508,032 to make my math easier for you to follow. This is how it works…

Level One:

1. Take the $508,032 and add to it any fixed and variable expenses which will be incurred during the year, especially office expenses. In Ben’s case, his expenses are already taken care of from the income earned from his recruiters, so we don’t add anything to his initial number. This is Net Cash-In.
2. Now take the $508,032 and divide this by .90 for the fall-off factor. Big Billers feel that if they can keep their fall-off factor at less than 10%, that is acceptable, keeping in mind the fall-offs do occur, many times through no fault of our own. So we get a new number of $564,480. This is Net Billing
3. Now take the $564,480 and divide this by .98 for the bad debt factor. Big Billers feel that if they can keep their bad debt factor at less than 2%, then that is acceptable, especially in this economy. So we get a new number of $576,000. This is Gross Billing.
4. Now take the $576,000 and divide this by Ben’s average fee of $18,000. That will give us 32. So Ben needs to make 32 placements annually to achieve his goal of $500,000. This is Net Placements.

Now let’s proceed to Level Two:

1. Take those 32 placements and divide by 12 months. Ben needs to make 2.7 placements per month.
2. Now take those 32 placements and multiple them by Ben’s Send Out First (SO1) to Placement Ratio of 7:1. All Big Billers know their SO1-Placement ratio. That number is 224, on a yearly basis. Divide that number by 52 weeks and you get 4.3. Ben needs to arrange 4.3 SO1s per week.
3. Now take those 32 placements and multiple them by Ben’s Job Order (JO) to Placement Ratio of 4:1. All Big Billers know their JO-Placement ratio. That number is 128, on a yearly basis. Divide that number by 52 weeks and you get 2.5. Ben needs to write 2.5 JOs per week.
4. Now take the number of Send Outs arranged on a yearly basis (224) and multiply those by ten because it generally takes a Big Biller ten connect calls with the Hiring Manager (HM) to arrange one SO1. That number is 2240 (yearly). Divide 2240 by 260 (workdays in a year) and we get 8.6. Ben needs to make 8.6 marketing ‘connect’ calls per day.
5. Now take the number of placements (32) and multiple them by Ben’s Recruit Hit (Rec) to Placement Ratio of 8:1. All Big Billers know their Rec-Placement ratio. Now take that number and multiple it by 10 because it generally takes a Big Biller 10 connect calls with a potential Recruit before they recruit one. That number is 2560 (yearly). Divide 2560 by 260 (workdays in a year) and we get 9.8. Ben needs to make 9.8 recruiting ‘connect’ calls per day.

If Ben achieves all of those activity goals, he will reach his main goal of $500,000.

And there you have it. Pretty simple, no?

*(for more information on the planning worksheet see, TFL, January 2006, “TBMG Planning Worksheet For Recruiters 2006”, pp. 26-27).

Quarterly Goals

Do you remember when you were in school and were eagerly anticipating your two week Christmas break and your most demanding teacher gave you a book report to complete during the break when you had more fun activities planned? Well, what did you do? You did what most of the rest of us did. You waited until the night before you were to return to school to read the entire book and write the report. But not everyone did it that way. The honor students took that book, divided it into fourteen manageable daily segments, completed their assignments on time and still had time for all of their fun activities. You remember them don’t you? They’re the ones who got all of the “A’s” and screwed up the bell curve.

Well, we can take those honor student lessons and apply them to our recruiting profession.

The Quarterly Modularized Goal Sheet

Now let’s take a couple of numbers from Ben’s Yearly Planning Worksheet and use them to construct our Quarterly Goal Sheets.

Keeping in mind that there are thirteen weeks in a quarter, not twelve, let’s draw up two charts:

1. Production Chart

Let’s take Ben’s Gross Billing number of $576,000 and divide it by four (four quarters in a year). That gives us $144,000. Ben needs to bill $144,000 per quarter to attain his goal. Let’s divide $144,000 by thirteen weeks and we get $11,077. Ben needs to produce $11,077 (or more) per week. In week two he needs to have produced at least $22,154 (11,077 x 2). In week three he needs to have produced at least $33,231 ($11,077 x 3), etc.

Now get out some graph paper. Number from 1 to 13 (weeks in a quarter) on the horizontal axis and put in the $ numbers on the vertical axis ($11,077 on the first line, $22,154 on the second line, etc.). Fill in thirteen lines. Your last line should read $144,001. Now draw a gradual “tracking” line from the bottom left to the upper right of your graph. When you are finished you will have completed your first quarterly $ production chart.

At the end of each week, Ben will look at his production and, above the appropriate week, put a dot. Then, over the thirteen weeks, he will just connect the dots. As long as he stays on track he will produce $144,000 in this quarter.

Now for chart #2…

2. Placements Made Chart

Let’s take Ben’s Net Placement number of 32 and divide it by four (four quarters in a year). That gives us eight. Ben needs to make eight placements per quarter to attain his goal. Let’s divide eight by thirteen weeks and we get .62. Ben needs to make .62 of a placement (or more) per week. In week two he needs to have made at least 1.24 (.62 x 2). In week three he needs to have made at least 1.86 (.62 x 3), etc.

Now get out some more graph paper. Number from 1 to 13 (weeks in a quarter) on the horizontal axis and put in the placements made numbers on the vertical axis (.62 on the first line, 1.24 on the second line, etc.). Fill in thirteen lines. Your last line should read 8.06. Now draw a gradual “tracking” line from the bottom left to the upper right of your graph. When you are finished you will have completed your first quarterly placements made chart.

At the end of each week, Ben will look at his placements made and, above the appropriate week, put a dot. Then, over the thirteen weeks, he will just connect the dots. As long as he stays on, or above, the “tracking” line, he will make eight placements in this quarter.

Not bad, huh? Maybe those honor students were right after all!

Mike Crosswell

Here is some advice for those of you with larger operations—translated, that means for those of you who don’t work by yourself.

Mike Crosswell was a colleague of mine and a friend. I met Mike during the mid-1990s when I was frequently travelling to the UK to train and coach recruiters and recruiter managers. Mike was the owner of Blue Arrow, the largest privately-owned staffing organization in the UK.

One night, over dinner, Mike explained to me how they ‘goal set’ at Blue Arrow. Mike told me that he had too often seen recruitment firms let their coming year’s goals be set for them by their individual recruiters instead of by upper management.  In other words, the goal commitments were coming solely from the “bottom up” instead of from the “top down In business schools, they call this “undercut management.” Mike wanted to blend the top down and bottom up approaches to goal setting.

Mike explained that at Blue Arrow they collaborate with their managers to decide what their total revenue will be for the coming year.  Then, when the individual managers return to their offices with their assigned revenue goals, they divide and assign portions to each of their recruiters based on the recruiter’s past revenue flow histories and future projections. To allow each recruiter to take ownership of their goal, the manager asks each one, “Can you attain that number?” If they answer “yes,” then the goal is set in concrete. If they answer “no,” or say that they are not sure, this follow-up question is asked, “What can I do, as your manager, to ensure that you hit this number?”

At the end of this process, which is much like cutting up an apple pie, the manager has developed a consensus with his/her recruiters and knows what the recruiters expect from management to help guarantee the recruiter’s individual numbers.

By using Mike Crosswell’s format, Blue Arrow constantly hit their goals and eliminated year-end surprises. It’s as simple as that.

Modeling

It is clear that you teach best by what you actually do. If you are a good role model for your office, your recruiters will follow your lead. If you are not a good role model for your recruiters, they will still follow your lead. You lead best through positive modeling.

In one study, recruiters stressed that the help they viewed as the most valuable from their managers was practical, situation-specific advice offered in a positive manner.

The secondary motivators were:

1. Attention, approval and recognition from the manager and the other recruiters;
2. The satisfaction that comes from belonging to a cohesive work group;
3. The status and recognition that comes from being recognized as an “expert” in some aspect of the work;
4. The challenge and variety possible in the work.

Be Positive

I want to make one final point. Always remember that you need to be positive in the implementation of your goals. If you say that you can’t do something, your subconscious mind, which makes up 90% of your brain and controls your behavior, will agree with you and you will fail. Your subconscious mind is there to protect you and will help you to be successful if you give it the proper reinforcement. So make sure that you are always giving positive signals to your subconscious. If you are having trouble being positive, here’s a helpful hint. Try this quote, “People are amazed at how good I am at ________” (you fill in the blank). Since your subconscious doesn’t know negation, it will agree with you and your life will change! Activities that were your weakest will now become your strongest. I promise you that this works.

So now Ben’s goals are set for a highly productive year, and hopefully, by following Ben’s examples, yours will be as well. If any of this confuses you, be sure to contact me. Let’s make this our best year ever. We deserve it and it is there for the taking!

Next week, “The Phone Rang…” series will cover “The Classics of Planning & Organization.”

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“The Phone Rang…” by Bob Marshall is a series that defines what we, as recruiters, do for a living. This article series ran in The Fordyce Letter over the past year and we are proud to bring you the series online. To subscribe to the print edition of The Fordyce Letter, click here.