In my previous blog post, I described “3 Reasons Why Your Recruiting Firm May Be Underperforming.”
In this post, I’m going to address specific ways to define recruiting success and set your goals.
Before you can succeed, you need to define exactly what that means to you. At the beginning of each year, my entire team and I write our personal scorecards. We reassess all areas of our lives, including personal, financial, career, material possessions, spirituality, and giving. We set or adjust goals based on what we hope to make happen in the New Year. Being a great leader isn’t about what I want my employees to achieve; what matters is how I help them achieve their own goals.
Remember, recruiting success cannot be defined by a manager, your wife, or your buddies. That is up to you and you alone. Start putting your personal scorecard together today to help define what you want to accomplish. Below are four steps to help you get started.
1. Identify your weaknesses.
You know the adage “Nobody’s perfect.” Take a look at yourself in an objective way. Make a list. Identify your weaknesses and develop an action plan detailing how you will attain the skills and information you need to improve and get to the top of your game. How is your planning? Are you meeting your goals for calls per day and phone time? Do you have an in-depth knowledge of your niche? How are your selling and closing skills? Are you managing your employees well? Never let yourself get too satisfied. Be a seeker: keep abreast of the latest professional trends and pertinent information to make sure you are constantly getting better at what you do.
2. Measure your progress.
It’s essential to evaluate your performance every day, week, month, and quarter. Measuring your activity and results allows you to determine whether you are on track to hit your goals. If your stated objective is to deliver four hours of daily phone time, don’t leave the office until you achieve that. Often you can get that extra job order or send-out just by making a few more calls. Recruiting success does NOT fall into the laps of clock-watchers. It is earned by people who know they need to work until they meet their goals, not walk out the door because it’s 5 o’clock. I believe it’s a good habit to stay in the office until 5:30 or 6 p.m. every night. That extra time could be the difference between achieving and missing your goals.
Once you’ve achieved your goals one day, focus on hitting them for two days in a row. Then three days. Pretty soon you will be conditioned to do what you need to do to achieve your activity numbers on a daily and weekly basis.
3. Learn from your mistakes.
Sometimes the worst times are the best times to ask yourself the hard questions. If you’ve gone the entire day, week, or even month without achieving a specific goal, ask yourself why. What was I doing between calls? Why didn’t I get that send-out? Why didn’t the candidate accept the offer? How could I have avoided that? How can I make sure it never happens again? Be willing to evaluate your performance and make changes. It is the fastest way to achieve your goals.
4. Re-define your comfort zone.
People tend to hang out in their comfort zone. If a recruiter is uncomfortable marketing and not seeing a lot of recruiting success, it is natural to begin to do less marketing, with the result being little to no improvement. Recruiters who are uncomfortable qualifying and pre-closing candidates need to force themselves to go through these steps repeatedly to improve their skills. Every one of us needs to push ourselves to reach new professional comfort levels so that we see measurable improvement in our performance. When we get comfortable with that which once made us uncomfortable, we get stronger.
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Jon Bartos, a guest writer for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog, is a premier writer, speaker, and consultant on all aspects of personal performance, human capital, and the analytics behind them. In 2010, Bartos founded Revenue Performance Management, LLC. The RPM Dashboard System is a business intelligence tool used worldwide for metrics management for individual and team performance improvement. In 2012, Bartos achieved national certification in Hypnotherapy, furthering his interest in learning the dynamics behind what motivates others to achieve higher levels of success. Click here to visit Bartos’s website.
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