A recruiter once wrote The Fordyce Letter about a not-uncommon problem. While he owned the finest training products in our industry, they sat, as he said, “on the shelf,” while his group of experienced recruiters continued to repeat errors and limit their production, showing questionable improvement. He questioned why this was the case.
Unfortunately, the reality is that most people—in the absence of a truly life-changing event—are not self-motivated beyond a certain point. To let excellent training products “sit on the shelf” and expect the non-self-motivated to improve is about as likely to yield results as purchasing exercise equipment for a non-motivated spouse.
Improvement by osmosis is highly unlikely. Does this mean there is no hope? Of course not. But it requires personal involvement and work from the manager.
The manager shapes the organization. They develop the corporate attitudes. They form the culture. If products simply sit, and it’s left to each recruiter to utilize them as he or she sees fit, this sends the clear message that continued learning is an individual responsibility and thus, an option.
That message is wrong. Professional growth is NOT an option in a well-run recruiting firm! But it is the manager’s responsibility to develop a plan—and enforce that plan—to bring it about.
The key to doing so is group meetings which cannot be interrupted. To allow calls to be taken during meetings addressing skill improvement is to send the message that these meetings are not of the highest priority, thus reducing the quality of the meeting. Eventually, everyone will be filtering in and out of skill improvement sessions, reducing the focus and concentration of the entire group.
These skill improvement sessions should be conducted twice a week, in the morning and not on Fridays. A rough estimate of length might be 30-45 minutes.
The difficulty many managers experience is arriving at topics and organizing the material. Without sufficient preparatory work, they simply pick a subject and blindly stumble into it on the morning of the meeting, relying on their recruiters to bail them out of their lack of structure by making contributions. This is rarely productive—and totally unnecessary.
There are plenty of resources available for recruiting firm owners, starting with Search and Placement by Larry Nobles. This book, plus selected chapters from the best generic books on selling, is repeatable, reviewable, and relevant—and should be the foundation of solid sales meetings to improve skills and production.
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Steve Finkel, a guest writer for the Top Echelon Recruiter Training Blog and founder of Professional Search Seminars, is one of the recruiting industry’s leading speakers and trainers. For more information about Finkel’s training products and services, including his selection of books for recruiters, visit www.stevefinkel.com or call 314.991.3177.
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