I want you to take a moment. Look around your office and find the best performer. If it’s you, either look at the second best, or feel uncomfortable as your colleagues stare at you right now. Now ask yourself: does the office’s highest biller recruit exactly like you do? Actually, think of it another way: if they are the best performer, do you recruit exactly like them? Next, do the same but with the worst performer. Are they the worse because they do stuff that it 100%, unequivocally totally different from the high performers in the team? I’m going to guess that you don’t do things exactly the same as the best performer in the office. You’ve probably tried but soon realised that it doesn’t work in the same way. I’m also going to guess that the worst performer doesn’t necessarily do things a whole lot different from those performing much better. And these two things make managing recruiters a very difficult job.
Manging people is famously difficult of course. All managers deal with the employee who’s always “sick”. The employee that tries to finger colleagues whilst drunk. The one who smokes meth. The one who does a good job but annoys everyone in the process. This is typical in all jobs. The difference is in the job itself. Jobs that are about process typically have a long established best way of doing things. Running payroll takes no flair, panache, or creativity. Screwing lids onto Marmite jars was perfected 50 years ago. Even making a cocktail can be accurately replicated by machine. Although not unique in this fact, Recruitment is not like this. We talk about best practice, and running a process, however if you master both of these, you won’t necessarily be a good recruiter. In fact, if judged purely on billings, you could be the worst performer in the office. So instead we have to accept that it’s not just about teaching and then monitoring a solid process. This will only get you so far. There is also an intangible x-factor in this game.
Obviously, like all of us, a large part of the matchmaking process we do is figuring out if a Consultant can work with a Manager. Managers who manage recruiters on their output are actually quite easy to recruit for. Managers who want things done a certain way “under their watch” are, quite frankly, a nightmare. And this all comes down to one simple fact that will always exist in recruitment: What works for some doesn’t work for others.
If you have ever managed a recruiter, you have sat there often (maybe daily, maybe every hour), with your internal monologue screaming “F*CKING NOT LIKE THAT!!!”. Bad recruitment managers swap this internal monologue for a Sir Alex Ferguson style tirade, complete with boot kicked at Beckham’s face (as if he’s not going through enough!). Good recruitment managers await the outcome, and then offer some alternative solutions should the desired outcome not be achieved. We were chatting about this in the office yesterday, and agreed that it’s like watching someone making a Bolognese. It’s easy to scream “you’re burning the garlic!” and “those tomatoes aren’t cooked! It’ll be watery AF!”, but we have to remember something. We all make it differently, and we owe it to the chef to judge it once completed and not a moment before. If recruitment were any different, we’d all just copy the best performer and get the same results. Alas, what might be irreverent and cheeky coming from one Consultant, will sound like the thinly-veiled threat of sexual violence from another.
This is one of the reasons I’ve come to question highly specific KPIs. Very rarely are the best performers the best at hitting standard recruitment KPIs. If you were to base KPIs on the actions of your top biller, you might be measuring client lunches, lack of data entry, and obnoxious behaviour towards colleagues. Encourage others to behave like this and you probably wouldn’t have a business. There is no perfect solution to this, but the best I’ve landed on is what all high-performers have in common: activity. Some of us need a sh*t-load of meetings to be successful. Some of us need to make a sh*t-load of calls. Let’s just log any revenue generating activity as a “1” and then tell everyone that they need to do 30-50 (depending on industry) of these “1’s” a week.
Anyway, that’s my opinion on managing recruiters, even if you didn’t ask for it. Have a good’un.
^SW
