Planning
As recruiters, those in our industry who perform at the highest levels have a formalized strategic plan in place and have implemented it well. Those recruiters who flounder often seem to struggle in their attempts to be successful. In order for a recruiter to be successful, there needs to be a roadmap for success – specific results that are to be achieved and establishing a course of action for achieving them. Creating an annual plan, daily plan, and then executing that daily plan are not difficult, but it requires careful thought and a little time. Once developed, the key to making your plan work is a commitment to seeing it through and sound implementation. Many recruiters develop strategic plans only to put them on a shelf to gather dust.
A succinct quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland that states, “if you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” The purpose of planning is to first figure out what you want to achieve, and then meticulously think through the who, when, why, and how you’ll achieve those results in the most effective way possible.
Annual Plan – Learn more
Before jumping in and dialing the phone, think first about what you are looking to accomplish with those dials. As recruiters, if there is not a clear direction and path for the placement process, it is possible to end up mistaking activity for productivity.
A strategic plan for your practice serves the same purpose for diagnosing your business, as a dashboard on your car does for diagnosing the status of your vehicle’s well-being. You must be able to look at a variety of ratios and be able to track important numbers that create the well-being of your business. If you don’t know, or if you don’t take the time to track, your numbers and ratios, it’s like having no gauges in your car – and in that case, when your car stops working, you don’t even know where to start in order to diagnose what’s wrong. If your car won’t start one afternoon and you don’t have a dashboard to give you some indications of what might be broken, you’ll just have to start guessing. You’ll waste valuable time fixing the wrong problem – is it the engine? The brakes? Are you out of gas? Did the vehicle overheat? Think about how much time you’d waste finding someone with jumper cables to jump start your car if the real problem is that you are out of gas. If you don’t know your needed numbers and your ratios, it’s the equivalent of driving a vehicle with no dashboard and no desired destination.
Daily Plan – Learn more
The purpose behind creating a daily plan is that it will allow you to maximize your opportunity to reach as many candidates and clients as possible while business is open. Imagine you owned a restaurant and your objective was to serve as many patrons as possible during the prime lunchtime hour. The more quality lunches you serve, the more money you will make; the more satisfied patrons you have, the more they are going to tell their friends about your amazing restaurant. A smart restaurant owner would take time the night before to wash all the lettuce for the salads, and maybe even put them in pre-measured containers. A smart restaurant owner would slice all the tomatoes and onions that you need for your sandwiches, saran-wrap all the cookies and roll all the silverware. Why? Because you don’t want to be slowed down between customers. You don’t want one customer to order a chicken salad sandwich and a cookie, and you’ve got to go back in the kitchen, broil some chicken, wait for it to cool, mix it with the mayo, chop up some pecans and celery, mix it all together, bake a cookie, wait for it to cool, wrap it up, and 30 minutes later hand over the order to your customer. The net result is that during your prime time restaurant hours, you will serve about four people and your restaurant will go out of business.
Unfortunately, this is very similar to what happens to recruiters who don’t take the time to plan well each evening. They spend little to no time in the evening prepping for prime time tomorrow, and assume that they’ll just figure it out as they go. This results in a huge lag time from one call to the next, because they are spending time from dial to dial trying to figure out what the next call will be. The amount of time that you spend prepping the night before will have a direct and incredibly profitable impact on the kind of day you will have tomorrow. It might take you some time, and you might be tired and ready to go home, but recognize that when your market is open, you need to be on the phone with as many “customers” as possible. Planning for each day, methodically and meticulously, will make one of the biggest impacts on how fast you get to know your market, how fast you start to get candidates and clients together, and ultimately how quickly you start running at a consistent billing pace.
Executing a Daily Plan – Learn more
Unfortunately, we live in an ADD world. It has been said that the amount of information in a Sunday New York Times today is more than what the average person learned in an entire lifetime in 19th century. Today, we are constantly being inundated by messages – from radio and TV to internet, newspaper, bill boards, product placements in movies, elevators, sporting events, airplanes, trains, and even bathrooms. We have instant messages, text messages, call forwarding, email on our phones and have become so overly accessible that we’ve created a culture with incredibly low attention spans and incredibly high stress levels. Unfortunately, with all of these phenomenal technical advances, there are always unintended consequences, and the key in becoming a great recruiter lies in learning how to harness all of these distractions that will bombard you throughout the day. Learning how to harness information to increase effectiveness and efficiency is critical and is like any other skill that needs to be developed which requires study and practice!
The biggest and most consistent billers are ones who know their ratios and work them steadily and without fail. If they fall short one day, they make up for it the next. If it’s Friday afternoon and they only have one interview for the week and needed two, they are coming in on Saturday and Sunday to continue to get there. It is a given that if they DO fall short, they are going to fall reaching.
