Crap KPI’s. Dumb managers. Unhappy recruiters: Or the smart way.

Recruiters love to be busy.

Or to be more accurate, they love to feel busy.

Same goes for many recruiting managers.

If everyone is busy, busy, busy, they are happy.

Happy, but dumb.

Because yes, activity is key in recruitment. But smart activity is what we want.

So many recruiters are currently getting better and better at doing things they should not be doing at all.

And it’s made worse by draconian, antiquated and overly onerous KPIs being forced on recruiters, who don’t understand why.

The key to working on the right activity, and getting recruiter buy-in to that activity, is ‘backwards planning’.

Simply telling your recruiters to, “Make more placements!” is not really very helpful. We all know that is the goal.

Don’t focus the recruiter on the outcome. Focus the recruiter on the activities that are proven to lead to success.

Goal setting (and KPIs) is a science, not a whim.

Here is my ‘classic backwards plan’. The basic starting point for making sure you are working on the right stuff. This one is designed for permanent, contingent recruiters.

If this blog gets a good response, I will follow up with more backwards plans, including one for temp/contract recruiters.

So, bring it in tight, switch on the brain, and backwards plan with me.

Firstly, the “classic backwards plan”. CCI goal per week (CCI = Candidate/Client Interview)

For a perm recruiter, CCIs is the only metric that matters, so let’s put some science behind our daily goal.

The chart explains itself, if you follow carefully, but essentially you start with your GP $ goal and divide by average placement value. That gives you the goal of 20 placements per quarter. Most recruiters don’t even know that. Then you know you need 2 placements a week to hit your goal. Work out your average interview to placement ratio. ( CCI/Placement). Your ATS will tell you this (If you actually enter that data, of course). That tells you that you need to set up 10 CCIs per week. Or 2 a day.

Bang! A real, achievable, measurable daily goal, which is proven by science to lead to $120,000 in fees per quarter.

But, I am in generous mood, so here is your second backwards plan for a perm recruiter, the magic “job-order backwards” plan.

Again, it’s simple. You want to bill $120,000 in a quarter? And each placement is worth $6,000, on average? So you must make 20 placements in a quarter, right? But you only fill one job out of three that you take. Your ATS will tell you this. (Mind you it’s more likely to be one out of five, but let’s not go there).

So that tells us, if we fill one of out of three, and we need to fill 20, that we must take 60 jobs in a quarter.

That’s 5 new job-orders per week.

And it’s science. Not opinion.

So don’t set crazy KPI targets that were made up in a dark room decades ago. Don’t accept mindless GP targets that someone plucked out of his bum.

Backwards plan. Add science to your daily work effort. Set goals that are achievable, digestible, understandable and effective in driving results.

Then hit these daily goals and watch the money roll in.

(PS: I have a pretty nifty backwards plan for temp/contract recruitment. But writing that blog is tedious for me. If you want to see it, let me know in the comments below, and I will oblige. No feedback, and it stays with me 🙂  (Subsequently published here)

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Image courtesy of Glenn Carstens-Peters