As we prepare for a new year, and as I look forward to preparing for a metrics panel at the Spring 2012 Expo, I have been pairing a series of thoughts on metrics and measures that are important to talent acquisition.

For the past several months, my team has reviewed dozens of articles, blogs, and white papers that outline foundational and basic aspects of “How to do Metrics.” There is a tremendous resource available by simply using search engines to find information on metrics.

I am encouraged by the amount of content that is dedicated to subjects such as what metrics can be tracked, the quality of hire conversation, the candidate experience, and how metrics can serve as a stepping stone to a real relationship with business leaders. I will also admit that the meat behind many of these blogs, articles, or white papers is pretty lean, but there are exceptions. Shout out to Chris Brabic at Smashfly for his tutorials that break into some of the detail.

As I prepare for the metrics panel for the spring ERE conference, it occurred to me how statistics and analysis tends to not be standard training for recruiters. There are some recruiters who were engineers, programmers, or MBAs, and as such they would have some basic to intermediate statistics training. But it is likely that statistical analysis or training is likely reinforced by using Excel with tables, pie charts and graphs — not using the actual definitions, architecture, and structure of true statistical analysis.

Which brings me to this post, and the danger of correlation and causation. It is not new to hear that metrics, when pulled together and compared to each other, tell a story. Much of that story has to do with correlation. As an example, if you spend more money (increase cost per hire), you may reduce your time to fill. Well, sometimes that is true. Sometimes.

That relationship may not be a causal relationship: One does not necessarily cause the other. The dependence that we wish was there is actually not there in the strength that we need it to be, or even at all. There is a common scientific and statistical concept that states “correlation does not imply causation.” I find that to be very true in recruiting and talent acquisition metrics.

We try so hard to find how one metric impacts the other. Technologies, branding companies, consultants, and so on use metrics to drive home value — and they should. We all try hard because we just really want to sort out why things are happening and what can we do to change what is happening, and that is a worthy endeavor.

However, I caution trying to correlate metrics together in order to force causation. It is more likely that two or more metrics correlate and have less of a causal relationship then having a causal relationship.

As you review your metrics and measures for 2012, I encourage you to:

1. State which metrics you are correlating together, and challenge yourself to see if you are hoping for a causal relationship, or if a causal relationship actually exists.
2. Prove that the causal relationship has validity and can be repeated time and time again.
3. Go back to your executive presentations and record where you did indicate that correlations and causal relationships exist. Remember that those statements are now out there, and it is possibly expected that the causal relationship will sustain.
4. As you create or refine goals for your recruiting teams or the hiring managers, be aware of these causal and non-causal correlations, as it will help you declare and meet expectations in the marketplace.

Happy metric-ing, and see you at the Spring ERE!

What’s surprising about a new analyst report from Aberdeen is that in 2012 HR professionals still need to be reminded that talent management is as much a strategy as a tactic they should be captaining.

“HR still struggles to become a ‘strategic partner’ with the business, engaging employees and aligning integrated talent management initiatives with overall organizational goals,” write the authors of an Aberdeen Analyst Insight about developing a “Talent First” culture.

Drawing  from an upcoming Aberdeen report, analysts Madeline Laurano and Mollie Lombardi say HR’s day-to-day work and the lack of support and buy-in from other business leaders and senior management stand in the way of developing the strategic approach that HR leaders say must be a part of their skill set.

Yet there’s some sort of disconnect here. The analysts note that in Aberdeen’s Quarterly Business Review, the 1,300+ business leaders in the survey named workforce and talent concerns in half of their top 10 business challenges. However, 35 percent of the HR leaders participating in the forthcoming HR Executives Agenda 2012 complained of a lack of buy-in from their senior management.

Integrated talent management will help with this, say Laurano and Lombardi. “An integrated approach to talent management can help organizations carry out key talent initiatives that will benefit the business,” they write, citing evidence from “Best-In-Class” companies. These are the top 20 percent of scorers on three Aberdeen metrics: Employee engagement, bench strength, and hiring manage satisfaction.

This Best-in-Class group reported improved retention, high employee engagement, and achievement of key performance indicators. Overall, 70 percent of the group credited their integrated approach to talent management with achieving organizational goals.

As the authors note, “integrated talent management is not a new phenomenon.” Fine-tuning recruiting methods to the performance of workers three months, six months, even a year after hire has been going on for years. Projecting worker and skill needs into the future, based on company growth, workforce demographics, competition, and so on, and then using that intelligence to plan recruiting, is much more recent, yet hardly brand new.

These examples are part of the drive toward developing a unified approach to talent within a company. Many, note the authors, have “succeeded in breaking down traditional HR silos.”

“Without integration,” they add, “HR operates in one department, rather than spanning the entire organization.”

In many ways technology can hasten the integration. Besides shifting paperwork to managers or to the employee themselves, and thus freeing HR for more strategic work, it brings to line managers information once available only in HR.

Integrated talent management technology isn’t the determinant of a “Talent First” culture, but it does make big-picture viewing easier, and sometimes even possible. “Analytics matter,” say Laurano and Lombardi. Technology makes it simpler to access the data that leads to business insights.

“Organizations that integrate talent data with business data are three-and-a-half times as likely to achieve Best-in-Class as those that do not integrate data,” they write.

How should HR move forward in its quest for integration putting talent first? By first eliminating the silos and integrating management processes, while focusing on improving employee engagement. As the company becomes more sophisticated about talent management as a critical business strategy, the authors say talent management must be tied to business goals, progress has to be measured and success defined.

To reach Best-in-Class status, analytics have to be a priority. “An HR professional today must keep analytics as the backbone of any talent management strategy,” conclude Laurano and Lombardi. “Analytics will help HR gain support for integrated talent management, and improve the reputation of HR throughout the organization.”

Note: I’m writing this “think piece” as part of a series of articles designed to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

HR and talent management leaders are constantly striving to become more strategic. But more often than not it seems that when they are presented with a strategic alternative that really breaks new ground, they retreat and stick with the status quo. However, if you are serious about making a strategic impact and you take a minute to reflect, it’s hard to think of many things that could have more of a strategic impact than increasing corporate revenues.

This is because increasing revenue or “topline growth” is on every CEO’s agenda and it is also almost always a top corporate goal and an executive success measure.

Other business functions like marketing, sales, supply chain, and product development have become corporate heroes (and are richly budgeted as a result) because they have demonstrated that they have a direct and measurable impact on this critical strategic goal.

HR has historically focused exclusively on cost cutting, but realize that increasing revenue is a far superior goal. That is because almost anyone can cut costs using an arbitrary number. However, in order to generate more revenue in the marketplace from your customers, you must meet a much higher standard, which requires that you be competitive in every aspect of the business.

Now if you are an HR traditionalist or someone who is happy to maintain HR’s status as a service/overhead function, you are probably already thinking that a strategic goal to impact revenue is a ridiculous idea. However, you would be wrong. We know that HR can directly increase revenues because several firms have already succeeded in demonstrating to their CFOs that they could directly increase revenue. At least take a minute and look at a quick example where HR has increased revenue.

Think it’s not possible? Here is a quick example to demonstrate the possibilities.

It’s obvious that average salespeople produce revenue and good salespeople produce more. So in an attempt to hire better salespeople, this technology firm analyzed its current sales hiring process and reengineered it, so that it measurably identified and hired better salespeople.

If the new process hired salespeople that sold on average 10% more (than those hired under the previous recruiting process), you could (with the CFO’s blessing), publicly state that this HR action had improved sales revenue by X dollars (i.e. the actual amount would be the 10% improvement in the average salesperson’s yearly sales revenue, multiplied by the number of new salespeople who were hired under the improved process).

Still skeptical? Here is another quick example of how HR can increase revenue.

The recruiting function at this Midwest bank realized it was losing significant revenue every day that a loan officer position was vacant. Obviously, with no one in the position, you can’t make or close any revenue-generating loans. In order to reduce the number of days that loan officer positions were vacant, it called on recruiting to apply its speed-hiring techniques on these positions.

By speeding up the requisition process, placing the best recruiters on these positions and identifying and eliminating “deadtime” throughout the hiring process, it cut the number of vacancy days nearly in half. At $5,000 per eliminated vacancy day, over dozens of requisitions, it increased the bank’s revenue by millions. Everyone from the CFO on down agreed that HR had substantially increased revenue. If these two brief examples are not enough for you, the next section contains the top 15 HR actions that can lead to increased corporate revenue.

The Top 15 Talent Management Actions With the Highest Impact on Revenue

Even if you’re not ready to implement an HR-wide coordinated “revenue impact strategy,” realize that there are many independent actions that the functions within talent management can take in order to increase organizational revenue. If you’re looking for some “low-hanging fruit” actions to take, here are some to consider (those with the potential for producing the most revenue impact listed first).

1. Prioritize revenue-generating business units, jobs, and employees — the highest impact and the lowest cost action is prioritization. HR needs to work with executives, the CFO, and risk management to identify and then prioritize the specific business units that generate the most revenue. You should also identify the highest revenue-generating jobs and employees. Next, you must also identify revenue “impact” jobs, which are jobs that don’t directly generate revenue but the actions of the employees in the jobs directly “influence” the likelihood of subsequent revenue generation. You should also identify revenue “impact” functions (note that product development and customer service are often the highest revenue-impact functions). Finally, you should identify and prioritize jobs where a major error would significantly decrease revenues or increase costs. Obviously after setting your priorities, you need to develop processes that ensure that the most HR resources and the best HR personnel are allocated to those priorities.
2. Targeted recruiting from competitors — recruiting talent away from your direct competitors has a high ROI, because if you are successful, your revenues will go up and theirs will go down. Start by “mapping” the revenue-generating talent at your competitors. Next, recruit away the top sales manager or exceptional salespeople from your competitors. Once you land a “magnet” individual, others are likely to follow. Other high-impact targets for your recruiting from competitors might include innovators, game-changers, pioneers, and individuals with expertise in monetizing products and services.
3. Retain revenue producers — retention has a high ROI because most of the factors that cause top revenue generators to leave are not related to their pay. Interview the most successful revenue producers and those who significantly impact revenue. During the interview, identify the factors that currently frustrate them, as well at the factors that would make their job a dream job. Put together a personalized retention plan to minimize the negatives and to increase the positives.
4. Hire revenue producers — external hiring brings in individuals with a proven track record for generating revenue. External hires also bring with them revenue-generating ideas. Focus your employer branding and recruiting processes on revenue-generating jobs. Reengineer the process so that it leads the industry in its ability to identify, attract, and hire individuals with a superior revenue-generating track record. For example, a major mobile phone network provider found that by adding an online testing component to its hiring process , the resulting call center rep that were hired produced over 10% more revenue than the untested hires.
5. Training on how to increase revenue — revenue generation and the related skills that support it must become a key corporate competency. The T&D function must target its offerings so that they cover all aspects of revenue generation. The quality of the offerings must also be improved, so that individuals show at least a 10% improvement in revenue generation after returning to their jobs after completing the T&D programs. In addition to targeting revenue-generating employees, revenue impact learning modules need to be developed so that every employee (regardless of their position) can understand the concept and subsequently improve their support of revenue-generating employees and business units. In this light, Wal-Mart routinely makes it a part of pre-shift store meetings to make all employees aware of which specific products produce the highest margins and revenue. This awareness allows employees to focus their sales and customer service efforts.
6. Identify barriers — HR must proactively use surveys, interviews, and metrics to forecast upcoming revenue-generating problems and opportunities. HR must also have a process for rapidly identifying current problems and the barriers that restrict revenue generation.
7. Create a fast-reaction team — HR must put together a team of specialists that can respond rapidly to the identified revenue problems that occur anywhere in your organization. Team members should excel at discovering HR related “root causes” and have the skills and experience necessary to solve sudden revenue generation problems.
8. Leadership development and succession must focus on revenue-related competencies – revenue generators also need to be effectively led and managed. So as a result, the leadership function needs to make revenue generation a key competency and development area for leaders. The ability to increase the revenue impact of their team should also be added as a key criterion for promoting managers and leaders.
9. Proactive internal movement — employees and contingent workers need to be proactively placed into the “right jobs” where they can have the highest possible revenue impact. The initial placement of top revenue producers needs to be regularly re-assessed so that key individuals (and even teams) are redeployed to the needed business areas. Seasonal and business cycle rotations may also be required to ensure that there is no excessive idleness among revenue generators.
10. Identify those who support revenue producers — once a year, survey your top revenue producers and ask them which individuals or support positions have directly helped/contributed to their revenue production. Make sure that these impactful support personnel are rewarded and recognized.
11. Release poor performers quickly – the performance management process must be redesigned so that it focuses on rapidly identifying, fixing, and releasing employees who fail to meet their revenue or revenue impact goals. The recruiting function should also continuously be on the lookout for top-performing talent that can be “swapped” with these lower-performing current employees.
12. Implement revenue-impact metrics and rewards – work with the COO, the CFO, and performance management to develop a process and a set of metrics that accurately assess an individual’s revenue generation and revenue impact. Rewards and recognition programs must also be focused and reengineered to better encourage revenue generation.
13. Onboarding — even the onboarding process can impact revenue generation if a weak process means that new-hires get up to speed slowly. As a result, the onboarding process must be reengineered so that new-hires on the first day clearly understand the importance of revenue generation, no matter what job they have. They also need to be informed about how their revenue generation/impact will be measured and rewarded. And finally they need to be educated as to where they can go to get help in this area.
14. Contingent workers and vendors must be included — because a significant percentage of the “workforce” are not technically employees, HR must also work to ensure that contingent workers are hired and evaluated based on their ability to impact revenue. HR should work with purchasing to ensure that vendors, contractors, and consultants are also all capable of increasing revenues.
15. Generate a direct profit — the least ambiguous of any HR action is directly generating revenue from external activities. Firms like Disney, HealthEast, Southwest, and Wachovia have generated revenue as a result of offering their HR services externally in areas including training, temp services, building a culture, and executive recruiting.

The Benchmark Firm to Copy

In addition to the 15 examples that were provided above, you should also know that the HR function at Google is the world’s leader in operationalizing a business-impact strategic approach. HR leaders at Google consistently use metrics and mathematical algorithms to scientifically improve business performance from programs like hiring, retention, and leadership. HR leaders can tell you the revenue impact of people management offerings like 20% time, free food, workspace design, and collaboration practices. They can also easily show you which business units (i.e. Adwords) have the most impact on revenue.

Understanding the five key components of a “revenue focused” HR strategy.

If you decide to implement this revenue-focus strategy, be aware that there are five key components that make a “revenue-focused” HR strategy successful.

Collaboration with the CFO — the first component is collaboration with the CFO. HR leadership must work directly with the CFO’s office (who is the undisputed “king” of measuring revenue). Together they must develop a credible process for proving when an action has a revenue impact and what the value of that impact actually is. Next, HR can provide the CFO’s office with a list of its intended actions and then finance can help to sort out any on the list that simply wouldn’t be credible no matter what the data said (i.e. an example of an action that might be sorting out as not credible could be the premise that hiring and retaining better janitors would increase revenues).

Make it an HR goal — the second component of the strategy is goal setting by making “impacting revenue” a major HR and talent management goal. As a major HR goal, it would need to be part of every HR function’s execution plan. The importance of the goal would be reinforced by adding revenue impact to the HR reward and metric structure. Together these actions would help to get everyone in HR to focus on this goal.

Prioritization — the third component is prioritization. If you start with the assumption that there will be no additional budget at least initially for this strategy,focus and concentrate your current HR budget and your best HR people on the business units, the jobs, and the employees that have the most impact on increasing revenue. Instead of equal treatment or first-come first-serve, high-priority jobs and employees would be serviced first. Resources would also be channeled toward the HR programs and processes which proved to have the most success on increasing revenue (i.e. usually they are hiring, retention, training, metrics, and rewards).

A process for identifying problems and barriers — the fourth component of the strategy involves identifying barriers to prohibit revenue from increasing. By applying benchmarking, research, and analyzing metrics, HR can determine which “people management problems” or barriers are having the most impact on reducing revenues. (Examples of problems include extended position vacancies in revenue-generating jobs, high turnover among top salespeople, salespeople unwilling to attend sales training etc.). The same effort should be put into identifying “positive people management opportunities” that when taken advantage of, directly increase revenues.

Best-practice sharing – the final strategy component is best-practice identification and sharing. Under this component, HR uses research, benchmarking, and metrics to proactively identify and then rapidly spread the implementation of the most effective revenue improving “people management practices” to all managers throughout the organization.

Final Thoughts

If you are still skeptical about this strategy and approach, ask your CEO whether they would prefer that you hire great clerks versus great salespeople. Also ask them if they would prefer that HR excel at low hiring costs, hiring without fewer legal issues, or would they instead prefer you to hire innovators and individuals who can increase revenues by 10 to 20%?

Although the initial concept might seem daunting, a number of advanced HR departments have been using a piecemeal approach to increasing corporate revenue for years. If you’re HR department were to adopt “revenue impact” as a primary HR strategy, the net impact for even a medium-sized firm would literally be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. If you implemented the strategy, not only would you “have a seat at the table” but you would be listened to and respected because you successfully made the transformation from “overhead function” to a strategic contributor. Your work would be noted in the annual report, so even the shareholders would become aware of the major contribution that HR made.

And incidentally, if you like this strategy, you should also consider related HR strategies. Where instead of focusing on revenue, the strategy would focus on increasing quality, speed/agility, customer service or innovation throughout the organization as a result of HR actions.

And one final question … Did this article succeed in expanding your thinking?

Two recruiters meet at a conference:

• Laura gets 30% of her hires from referrals, has used only one headhunter in the past six months, and has a 42-day average time to fill. She filled 11 jobs last month.
• Jerry gets 20% of his hires from referrals, uses headhunters regularly, and has a 65-day average time to fill. He filled eight jobs last month.

Is Laura better than Jerry? Does Jerry suck? 

Wait.

What if I told you Jerry has 300 more Twitter followers than Laura? Ha. Now who sucks, Laura!?

I love – love — to hear provocateurs speak at conferences. I love to hear opinionated people make a case for doing stuff better, pushing us to hire better, faster. But I get tired of the measuring sticks we use to decide if we’re nailing it.

I spent most of my career in corporate recruiting, as a recruiting director with Amazon and Expedia. And now as a consultant, I get to work with some great companies. As we work to help them with sourcing strategies, recruiting process and systems improvement, or even recruiter and hiring manager training, we learn a lot about how they do what they do. And what we find is that there are a bunch of recruiters out there that don’t suck, but who think they do suck. That’s a problem. People who think they suck don’t usually do great things. And we need as much “great” as we can get.

Our team gets asked, “How does our [time to fill, source of hires, recruiter productivity, employer brand, candidate experience] compare to other clients you work with?” And we can share averages and help them to see what they do better and not-as-well as others. I completely get why we all want to know this stuff. But can we really compare one company to another? One team of recruiters to another? Along some dimensions and some standards, sure, probably.

But as many before me have pointed out, comparing cost per hire, time to fill, recruiter productivity … it’s not silly to benchmark, but I’m not sure the results are really that helpful. Why?

Geez, just start to make a list of all the things that may be different between two companies or two recruiting teams. Here are several:

The type of people hired

• Entry level customer service vs. software engineers vs. outside sales people

The number of recruiters

• This usually drives req loads/recruiter, which can almost dictate what a recruiter can/can’t realistically do

Access to scheduling and sourcing support

• Some of you have teams supporting you, and some of you are one-person, ass-kickers with a phone, Outlook, Google, a free LinkedIn license, and Excel for your ATS

The role of the HR generalist

• Friend or foe? Manager (or maybe they think they’re your manager ☺) or peer partner?

The engagement level of the hiring managers

• Are they sourcing? Do they drive quick, quality hiring decisions? Do they help close?

Your brand

• Do you have a strong consumer brand? A strong employer brand? Or, do you have to spend 10 minutes of your sourcing calls just to explain what your company does?

Your location

• Do people want to work where you have jobs? (In the late 1990s, before everyone knew who Amazon was, 50% of our sales pitch to software engineers was focused on Seattle, since we ended up needing to relocate the majority of our hires — much harder for my recruiters to source people from sunny California than companies who hired locally.)
• Are you in Europe, with practices and laws that slow down your process, even though you’re ready to move fast?

Your compensation packages

• Do you pay 50% of market? Or, 70% percent of market? Do you offer equity?

Tools!

• Do you have — and use — Linkedin Recruiter, Avature CRM, Job posting distributors … even an ATS?

Even the basics of how things are measured vary wildly. Take time to fill …

• Does your clock start when the position was budgeted, when the incumbent quit, when the req was approved, when the req was posted, or when you led the strategy kickoff meeting? I’ve seen it so many ways.

It’s almost never apples to apples. Req loads in retail and healthcare are typically much higher than in tech and corporate functions, so comparing results across industries is hard. And even within the same industry — take retail — you may have a model with a lot of centralized sourcing support, or one with field HR generalists who own recruitment, or one with only foundational field support (where hiring managers are largely on their own, with support from their district managers and a three-ring binder from HR).

And I find the same to be true when I’ve interviewed recruiters, trying to compare them to each other. I’ve probably interviewed 50 recruiters from Microsoft in the past 15 years, for example, and it’s even hard to compare Microsoft recruiters to each other!

My point is that very few of us will get a lot of value from comparing our performance to other companies. We’d likely get more from comparing ourselves to our internal targets, to goals that make sense in our resource model, and to goals that come from our unique business and talent needs.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t benchmark externally. That can be key to making business cases, key to executive influence, and key to getting your raise. And don’t get me wrong — I want more from the folks at the Corporate Executive Board, Staffing.org, CareerXroads (great, transparent Source of Hire reports), not less. It’s very helpful. You just need to … Put. It. All. In. Context.

I want you to hear it from me first. You don’t suck.

• I’d love comments from those of you who have worked in multiple environments, to share with everyone what kind of differences really help — or hurt — you.
• I’d love to hear people share how they gather external benchmark data that really helps them.
• And I’d love to get a halleluiah from people who are kickin’ ass despite the fact that they have little budget, little support, unrealistic req loads, and systems that make their job harder, not easier.

 ”All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.” — Earl Nightingale, American motivational speaker and author

What are your business objectives for 2012? I know we have personal resolutions that we announce to the world and then try to keep but what are your New Year resolutions for work? Most sales organizations begin the year with a plan to fail because they did not have a strategic plan to win. The most successful plans require the following:

1. Plans must be specific, detailed and realistic
2. Plans must be written down and accountable
3. Plans must be associated with deadlines or deliverables
4. Plans must be measurable for success or failure
5. Plans must have the ability to change or adjust based on success of goals

I encourage you to sit down this year to come up with a detailed business plan that is worthy of the industry and the company you represent. In the spirit of Work, Compete, or Dominate, you should be focused on nothing less than Competing or Dominating. Start thinking about the following…

“Like Industries and Like Skill Sets”

Your plan should include a complete understanding of the industries and skill sets that you and your team can consistently provide with exceptional service. Each market is defined differently. Anyone can provide staffing services, but only ONE staffing firm can be the best in their market and it is critical that you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your recruiting team — and exploit the strengths.

Target Account List

Once “Like Industries and Like Skill Sets” are defined, your goal is to add hundreds of prospective clients that meet that profile. If they are “Like Industries and Like Skill Sets,” add them to your list! Earn the right to meet with them by doing your homework. Understand how flexible staffing or solutions are incorporated into their business model and find ways to improve that process. Every client prospect has an “approved bench” of vendors that have earned the right to support their business needs. To earn the right to meet with them, your engagement approach should lead them to believe that you can actually raise the level of service. In other words, you are a firm that could compete or raise the level of service they are currently experiencing from their primary vendor.

Too often we settle for the “I would love to be a backup vendor” mentality, when you can strategically place yourself as their primary vendor for all solutions. As you begin the discovery process, focus on the challenges, not the services. If you can fix the challenges, you’ll earn the right to provide solutions.

Questions to consider when placing prospect clients on your Targeted Account List:

• Does the prospective client match your office’s business plans?
• Can you “Compete” or “Dominate” in provided services or solutions?
• Why do they need YOU? For what type(s) of services?
• Who are your competitors? What is your relationship with client vs. your competitors?
• Who are the decision makers or buying influencers? Can you get access to them?
• What is their current Staff Augmentation or Solutions spend?
• What challenges do they have with regard to finding talent or services?

• Do you have solutions to solve the problems?
• Do you know the Features & Benefits of those solutions?

Why is the Job Order King? Candidates are KING!

Continued face to face “candidate traffic” will be the lifeblood for your office. Too often the focus has been on “client development” or bringing in logos. However, if your office does not have the talent to submit to the orders, you’ll lose the client. Proactive pipelining of candidates that match your office’s recruiting plan is paramount.

What came first: the Chicken or the Egg? What should come first: the order or the candidate? The answer is the candidate. Here’s the rationale: You cannot win a “client” if you can’t fill the order. Companies will always be a “prospect” until you actually fill an order and then they become a “client.” You can bring in all the orders you want however if your team can’t fill them with qualified candidates it’s just a costly exercise. Another famous quote from this industry is as follows: “If you can own the talent, you’ll own the market.”

Recruiter Lead Sheets

Your recruiters should be presenting their top Most Market-able Candidates to you every day with a clear understanding of what differentiates that candidate from all the other candidates. Set standards for them to interview beyond skill sets. They should be interviewing for accomplishments and reference quotes.

Encourage face-to-face interviews with all “Like Industries and Like Skill Sets” candidates in their market. 10 candidates per week face to face interview is a good benchmark standard. Each candidate interview has the opportunity to drive 10-15 leads per interview with the following questions.

• What have you done to date in your search?

• This provides companies with active searches, so don’t start selling services — start selling MPC Candidates!

What companies would you love to work for?

• This provides additional companies in your market that should be on your Target Account List.

360 degree referencing

• 9 Passive candidates in your market. (3 Supervisors / 3 Peers / 3 Subordinates)

Who do you know in your industry that I need to be connected to?

• 5+ candidates over the life of a candidate

Social Media / Networking

Become a Center of Influence in your virtual and physical communities. We are in the people business and I’m amazed how little our salespeople are involved in their local community. Surveys have shown that less than 50% of our Business Development Managers are actively involved in local professional organizations that are closely tied to their business / recruiting plans. Of that 50% that are engaged in local networking, less that 25% participate consistently in those organizations. Most of the time they show up sporadically and hand out business cards but leave shortly afterwards! Lastly, less than 5% of salespeople have consistently supported their local professional organizations to where they have earned a spot on the board.

Get out of the offices and off the phones and meet people personally. If you talk to the top producers in our industry, they will tell you that active involvement in their local community is critical to their success. Find two to three local professional organizations that are closely tied to your office’s business model and get involved.

Grow your virtual network on LinkedIn, BranchOut, and Facebook with the following values as defined in Bob Littell’s book, The Heart and Art of Netweaving, which gives us clear direction:

• Be a connector of other people with their Needs, Problems, and Opportunities in mind — not yours.
• Position yourself as the “no strings attached” resource for others and establish yourself as the “go-to” person.
• Constantly be on the lookout for persons who are “best of breed” at what they do and when you identify one, stay in touch and add to your trusted network.

Advanced Google Search Tools

Today’s Web 3.0 world provides us with the opportunity to automate alerts and organize tons of Internet data like never before. There’s no reason for you not to be completely informed with “behind the scenes” information prior to making your first call.

You’ve heard that “people like to buy, they don’t like to be sold” and that rings true in our business as well. As a business development manager your success will be directly related to your ability to understand and identify the challenges that your prospective clients have with regard to staff augmentation and more specifically how staff augmentation plays a role in their company’s mission statement. Their challenges are normally centered on the following:

• Quality of Consultants
• Quantity of Consultants
• Availability of Consultants
• Time to Fill
• Productivity of Consultants
• Communications or Follow Up

90% of the time your competition struggles in those areas and it will be your job to identify them through various resources including your Recruiting Team, Internet Research, or Internal Coaches. You’ll need to know the challenges so you can position specific questions to bring these challenges to the surface. Once surfaced, it will be your job to walk clients through the process they have in place and to help them realize that if that process is left unchanged it may have negative bottom line impact.

If you fail to show them how you can raise the level of service, resolve problems, fix pain, or that you can challenge their “bench” of approved vendors, then the only means of winning that prospect will be through lowering your price. Anyone can gain clients by lowering pricing but to build “sustainable business relations” you will have to outperform the competition. Your competitive advantage is your strategic approach to resolving problems and improving proficiencies with regard to how companies utilize temporary staffing consultants to meet company objectives. Without that, you are only as good as the next salesperson that should happen to call. Know their PAIN, Know your SOLUTIONS.

Activity-Based Metrics

Too often, we tend to focus on the end result by concentrating on the number of submits per week or the number of appointments you had this week. Don’t get me wrong — those are important KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to follow; however, you could make your weekly quota of meetings and submits week after week and still not be close to driving revenue at the end of the month.

Activity without “quality” is just a wasted exercise of time, resources, and company money. – Daniel Guelzo

If you really want to measure recruiter activity then measure:

• The number of recruiting calls you make to get a passive candidate.
• The number of submittals you make to get an interview.
• The number of interviews or “send outs” you schedule to get a hire.
• The number of passive referrals you receive each week from the active candidate you interview.
• The number of relationships you make each week with place-able, source-able, and Centers of Influence (COI’s) professionals that match your “recruiting and business” plan.

If you really want to measure Account Executives’ activity then measure:

• The number of Appointment Action Calls you make to get a face-to-face meeting.
• The number challenges you discover each time you meet with a decision maker.
• The number of times you are invited back to continue the discovery process.
• The number of meetings it takes before you are able to provide valuable solutions.
• The number of unsolicited “referrals” you get from your existing clients.

Job Order / Submittal Standards

Our industry has two gigantic time wasters, 1) taking and investing valuable man hours on unqualified job orders with little or no Return-on -Investment (ROI) and 2) recruiting, interviewing, and submitting lack-luster candidates. Unfortunately this has become 70-80% of our activity. Let me try to set clear standards here:

Job Order Standards (See attached)

1. A “priority order” is one that your recruiting team can submit three qualified candidates to immediately.
2. It matches your “Like Industry / Like Skill Set” objectives.
3. It has as a minimum all of the following attributes:
• A well-defined description of key elements and requirements to include functional title, vertical, applications or degrees, size of project or people, and experience
• Short Term / Long Term Objectives of the role
•  Selling Points of Interest
• Desirable company that will work with you to fill the opening

Submittal Standards

1. A “qualified candidate” is one that matches your “Like Industry / Like Skill Set” objectives
2. Is activity seeking opportunities to upgrade their career
3. Willing to work with you honestly in representing them with the minimum attributes:
• Matches the key elements and requirements to include functional title, vertical, applications or degrees, size of project or people, and experience
• Has justifiable accomplishments that relate to Short Term / Long Term Objectives
• Verifiable references from influential supervisors that are willing to speak to our clients

Going back to the quote at the beginning of this article, Mr. Nightingale is correct in saying that we need a plan, a road map, and the courage to chase our dreams. Too often we start the year with a just a goal of doing better or closing more business or making more money. That’s not enough. A well-defined plan includes specific, actionable activities, which can be measured to see if desired results have been accomplished. Dreams are measured by win or fail, but individual action items needed to accomplish a dream can be measured and each successful completion gives us the courage to continue.

Good hunting this year!

Four years (give or take) into recruiting’s embrace of social media, it turns out that job boards are the most productive source of new hires.

Where social media sources register a barely discernible 1 percent of all hires, job boards produced 19 percent. That was matched only by internal transfers; even referrals came in lower — 16 percent.

These are among the surprising, and not so surprising, bits of data developed from a survey of 414 employers conducted by HR consultants Bersin & Associates. Compiled into the Talent Acquisition Factbook 2011, and authored by principal analyst Karen O’Leonard, the 100 page volume offers details on the recruiting metrics from employers as small as 100  workers to those with more than 10,000.

Josh Bersin, founder of the eponymous firm, said the genesis of the factbook came from the company’s clients and conversations with many others since Bersin launched his talent acquisition practice a few years ago.

Employers, he said, “are anxious for a lot of information.” But there wasn’t much detailed bench-marking generally available. It wasn’t easy for employers to get answers to questions like: Are my recruiting costs in line with other companies? Am I spending my money effectively Am I getting the kind of results others are?

Now they can.

Some of the data — such as cost per hire, source of hire, time to fill — is widely available and in more detail.  The Society for Human Resource Management has data on a number of important recruiting metrics, including cost per hire and time to fill, the traditional recruiting effectiveness measures. The Prinzo Group offers a series of reports on talent acquisition metrics. Annually, CareerXroads publishes a source of hire survey, based on responses from the firm’s roster of mostly Fortune 500 companies.

Bersin’s factbook includes those types of metrics, but breaks down the responses by company size, and industry. In other areas, such as the report’s section on quality of hire metrics being used by employers, offers insights not readily available.

The report also draws conclusions and makes recommendations based on the data. Regarding job boards, for instance, authoir O’Leonard writes:

While the landscape is changing, job boards certainly are not dead. To the contrary, 81 percent of organizations say they will spend on job boards this year. However, we expect that organizations will use job boards more selectively, for certain types of positions and in certain geographies…

(Incidentally, CareerXroads found job boards accounted for 24.95 percent of new hires in 2010. Referrals represented 27.5 percent in the CareerXroads report. The data, however, is not directly comparable since the report separated new hires from internal transfers, while Bersin’s survey asked about how all open positions were filled.)

Some of the more telling points in the factbook deal with the use of social media. Despite all the chatter about social recruiting, most companies spend next to nothing on that strategy and, not surprisingly, make few hires from all their friends and fans and followers. “General social media,” as the factbook describes sites not principally intended for professional networking, produced 1 percent of hires. Only the largest employers hired more — 2 percent.

O’Leonard notes that the reason for the low spend — 1 percent of the recruiting budget — is that social media’s costs “are negligible”, and that when money is spent there it typically comes out of a centralized marketing budget. “Converting candidates reached on social media to hires,” O’Leonard writes, “can be a time consuming-process.”

On the other hand professional networking sites like LinkedIn account for 10 percent of the hires, but companies only spend 3 percent of their external recruiting budgets there.

With all the energy being put into social media, the results reported by the surveyed companies seems meager at best. “A lot more hype than reality,” is   Bersin’s assessment. However, when companies use sites like Facebook and Twitter as a marketing and brand building tool, they get results, he said. Social media, he says, “is being used effectively to build pipelines.” But when candidates decide to apply, they go to the company career site, he said.

One important, and oft-ignored area that the Bersin factbook to its credit takes a stab at addressing is quality of hire. More than a few companies attempt to close the loop and track the performance of new hires back to the source of their application, as well as the recruiter who presented them.

“Recruiting teams can look at a number of measurements to determine new-hire quality, including new-hire performance assessments, hiring manager satisfaction, candidate satisfaction and new-hire retention,” O’Leonard writes. However, more than 25 percent of companies do nothing, she adds.

This section of the report details the kind of measurements companies do use, though the data here is limited to just a few charts specifically regarding use of performance reviews and turnover data.  Still, it offers guidance to companies who want to become more data-driven, but aren’t sure what to measure or where they stand.

That’s exactly how Bersin hopes employers make use of the factbook. “First,” he says, “Are they in the right ballpark?” The data can be used to analyze their own spending, source of hire, and basic productivity measures.

Second, he says, the factbook can help recruiting leaders determine how to allocate their sourcing dollars.

“Really, Bersin, says, “what this is about is where do they fit. It gives them something to compare (to).”

Taking a broader look at the survey results, Bersin said, “It tells me that (recruiting) is expensive. It is not cheap to do it well.

“It tells me that companies are spending more right now… It may be even harder because there are so many candidates.

“It shows that there is a pretty substantial change in using social networks.

“It tells me that the recruiting industry is very complicated.”

The New Year is an opportune time to “raise the bar” by doing something strategic in talent management. In many corporations, new plans and budgets take effect at the first of the year, so the holiday period preceding the New Year is an ideal time to review the potential strategic actions to put in front of your team. Unfortunately, many talent management leaders are risk adverse, and although they constantly talk about the need to “be more strategic” they all-too-frequently find excuses that indefinitely postpone those dramatic and strategic actions.

The leadership set aside at least half the day for the team to identify upcoming problems and opportunities and the resulting strategic moves that need to be made. This article is merely a checklist of the strategic talent management actions that I have found that the very best corporations should have on their potential to-do list.

The Top 15 Potential Strategic Actions to Consider in Talent Management

If you’ve decided to stop fighting fires and to do something major with a strategic impact, here is a list of possible programs and actions that you should consider.

1. Increase the productivity of your workforce – workforce productivity is merely comparing the output of your entire workforce (the total value of the products and services they produce) with the cost of your workforce (total labor and talent management costs). Many talent management departments measure engagement (a precursor to productivity) but they don’t measure workforce productivity. Even fewer take proactive actions to directly increase it. Increasing productivity requires talent management to identify the barriers that restrict productivity and then to proactively provide the consulting advice, best practices, and tools that have been proven to increase a team’s productivity.
2. Increase employee innovation – fierce marketplace competition requires firms to accelerate innovation in product and service areas, despite having fewer resources. Rather than targeting a few departments, talent management must increase innovation in all areas of the business. Typically, innovation can be increased tough the targeted hiring of innovators, retaining innovators, and minimizing the barriers that innovators face within the corporation. Talent management must help shape the culture so that the expectation of continuous innovation permeates every business area.
3. Reward great people management – Most managers simply don’t spend enough time on talent management activities. The primary reason is that managers are not directly measured or rewarded based on how well they manage their talent. This is true even though talent management “owns” all of the key components related to measuring and rewarding (performance management, performance appraisal, competencies, and reward systems). The key action step is to develop a “people management scorecard” for each individual manager and reward them based on their performance against those standards.
4. Identify and fix bad managers – research by Google has shown that in most cases, an employee’s or a team’s manager is the single-highest impact factor on the hiring, retention, innovation, productivity, and the development of employees. Yet most organizations have no formal program for identifying weak managers. Strategic actions would include implementing surveys and metrics to identify with managers and to provide general lists with proven tools and approaches to improve a manager’s people management performance.
5. Convert talent management metrics into their dollar impact – unfortunately, most traditional talent management metrics fail to impress executives because they are not expressed in “the language of business,” which is dollars. Saying we have a 12% turnover rate, a 54% engagement rate, or an 87-day time to fill generally won’t impress senior managers because the metrics are not expressed in their dollar impact on corporate revenue. In contrast, stating that every percentage point increase in regrettable employee turnover costs us $7.2 million gets an immediate reaction. Work with the CFO’s office to credibly calculate the impacts.
6. Calculate the risks of weak talent management — shifting from the positive business impact to the possible negative impacts requires a risk management manager. Risk management is an increasingly important function throughout the business, but unfortunately, few talent management functions have put anyone charge of risk management. Risk managers identify and quantify the risks associated with potential talent problems (its probability and likely costs). Underfunding important talent programs can create tremendous economic risks such as losing key innovators to competitors, failing to have enough developed leaders, and a weak employer brand that drives top candidates away.
7. You need to prepare for a leadership gap — the combination of increased growth and higher turnover rates will mean that most corporations will begin to suffer because of a lack of leadership bench strength. In addition, because the type of leaders who will be needed will also change, the entire leadership and succession program will have to be re-examined and new social media and project rotation tools will need to be developed and implemented.
8. Speed up internal movement through proactive internal placement – very few things increased productivity, retention, and employee development faster than periodic internal movement. Unfortunately, most corporate programs require the employee to initiate the movement and to find the “correct” placement area. A more strategic approach is a proactive one where recruiters periodically identify employees and then help to correctly place these individuals who should be moved both for their own and for the corporate good.
9. Improve internal best-practice sharing – most talent management leaders spend most of their time and resources on developing new programs and approaches. Surprisingly, the data indicates that you can have a higher impact faster and at lower cost by simply identifying and sharing “hidden” existing best practices. Rather than relying on this best-practice sharing occurring organically, a superior approach is a proactive one that seeks out these affected practices wherever they might be in the organization. And once identified, they are shared in such a manner that managers easily understand their value and implement them.
10. Update your retention approach – just like employer branding, retention programs have been allowed to atrophy because the economy has reduced most turnover to a trickle. Unfortunately, turnover is about to dramatically increase, so processes to prioritize key individuals, processes for identifying who is at risk, and retention toolkits need to be reinvigorated before it is too late.
11. Employee referral programs need to be reinvigorated — as the rate of hiring and competition for talent increases throughout the year, stagnant employee referral programs need to be re-examined. Because they produce the highest quality and volume of hires, referrals as the percentage of all hires should begin to reach over 40%. Employee referral programs must be closely integrated with the developing social media approaches.
12. Assess your external employer brand – during the economic downturn, the area of employer branding has been frequently ignored because very little hiring was going on. Unfortunately, during the same time, the reputation of many corporations has been tarnished as a result of layoffs, salary/promotion freezes and a reduction and development resources. In addition, corporate images in general and in some specific industries like banking, oil etc., have been damaged by recent events and “occupy” type movements. The growth of glassdoor.com, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook now make it much easier for negative messages to be spread. At the very least, the positive/negative aspects of your employer brand should be measured and monitored before an upturn in hiring begins.
13. Re-examine your social media approach – although many talent managers have “done something” in the area of social media recruiting, realize that the potential for social media in talent management is much greater than almost everyone anticipated. Plans should be developed to determine how social media can positively impact training, employee development, learning, retention, collaboration, problem identification, crowdsourcing of answers, and best-practice sharing. The mobile platform should be examined in a similar manner because it is rapidly becoming the dominant communications platform for employees.
14. College recruiting needs to be reengineered — communications and job seeking approaches have changed dramatically on college campuses but college recruiting programs have unfortunately been stagnant for years. Program features that need to be examined include remote college recruiting, social media approaches aimed at college students, mobile platform approaches and marketing research to better understand the needs and the actions of top grads.
15. Improve non-monetary motivation – when compensation and reward resources are limited, nonmonetary motivators need to be emphasized. Unfortunately, the compensation function focuses almost exclusively on “expensive” salary, benefits, and bonuses … even though a significant percentage of employee motivation comes from … recognition, praise, and feedback. Talent management should develop non-monetary motivation tools for managers that are easy to use and that produce measurable results. They should also target key employees and server them in order to identify “how to best manage and motivate me” plans.

Benchmark Firms to Learn From

A key competency for any talent management leader is rapid self-directed learning, so it only makes sense to benchmark the firms that are aggressively making tremendous strides in talent management. My extensive research has identified some of the best firms to learn from. Many are from the Silicon Valley, which has already returned to a “war for talent” (Google, Facebook, Zynga all approach talent management using a more scientific approach).

Firms outside of technology have also taken some amazing steps so they should not be ignored (Zappos, Sodexo, CACI, DaVita, Deloitte, KPMG, PepsiCo, and the U.S. Army have all taken bold steps).

Additional Strategic Talent Management Actions to Consider

In addition to the top 15 major actions recommended above, some other strategic actions to consider include:

• Prepare for VUCA, the new normal — talent management plans, approaches, and processes need to be improved so that they can handle the new business environment that we face (VUCA = Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)
• Increasing revenues — examining how talent management actions can directly increase individual employee revenue generation
• Integration of talent management functions – an almost-universal weakness is a lack of integration. Talent management functions must more closely cooperate, coordinate, and integrate so that they work seamlessly.
• Hire right before they do — if your firm doesn’t have the strongest employer brand, location or glamorous product, you must develop a plan to quickly initiate hiring immediately before your talent competitors. A rapid “explode out-of-the-box” plan is also required.
• Corporate headcount “fat” – setting up a process that ensures that the return to hiring doesn’t result in a surplus of employees (i.e. headcount fat).
• Competitive analysis — identifying the competitive advantage that your talent management practices provide compared to your talent competitors.
• Prioritizing — prioritizing jobs, managers, and talent management programs so that your limited resources provide the highest possible impact.
• SWAT team — creating a rapid response team that can respond to sudden talent management opportunities and problems.
• Alerts — providing a process that alerts managers about upcoming problems before they get out of hand.
• Lean or agile talent management – adapting lean, CRM, and agile business approaches and tools to the area of talent management.
• Remote work opportunities — as technology, communications, and social media tools improve, talent management must develop ways that allows top talent to work from anywhere.
• Forward-looking metrics — unfortunately, almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Instead, forward-looking and predictive-metrics that allow for improved decision-making need to replace them.
• Reengineer performance appraisals – this is an almost universally disliked process that requires tremendous amount of time but produces no measurable results. A completely new approach is required.
• Transparency – throughout the business world there is an increasing emphasis on transparency and openness. The time has come for talent management leaders to reassess their entire approach to secrecy, privacy, and the degree of openness with employees and applicants.
• Cloud talent management – HR and talent management cannot be exempt from the powerful trend to move everything to the cloud.

Final Thoughts

The period immediately before the beginning of the New Year is a great time to sit back and think of your accomplishments and your legacy. Unfortunately, rather than being strategic, too many talent leaders have been simply happy to survive the last few years with their sanity intact.

Now is the time to shake loose any lethargy, to take some risks, and do something bold before you retire or move on. You may have “earned a seat at the table” but you can’t be truly respected and admired unless you produce a measurable strategic business impact.

Moneyball teaches us that when there is too much information (no sport has more data than baseball), it is time to rethink what and how we measure success. Success in baseball is winning; success in sourcing and recruiting is hiring. And like the journey to winning in baseball, the path to hiring as viewed through the eyes of data will help us determine what activities lead to success.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

Dear Barb:

Many greetings from South Africa!  Barb, the reason for my email today is that I’m stuck with a problem and I thought – who is the best person in the industry and always at the forefront of recruitment trends and your name came up.  I was hoping that I could pick your brain.  Here are my questions:

1. What stats / ratios do you track for your consultants?
2. Why do you track those specific stats / ratios?

Barb, I hope I’m not being to forward in asking these questions but am really hoping I can tap into your wealth of knowledge and expertise on this. Thank you very much in advance.

Theresa N., Johannesburg, South Africa

Dear Theresa:

It’s always nice to hear from you. These are the stats we monitor on a daily basis.  We track the stats so we can provide each individual recruiter with their ratios, most importantly:

• Job order to Fill
• Send-out to Placement

Once we know the ratios of our recruiters, together we discuss their income goals and then determine the results they need each day to hit their goals.  We don’t care about the actual number of calls they make as long as they hit their daily results.

For example:  If someone has a minimum daily standard to interview three new candidates and they only interview two on Tuesday, they have to make sure they interview four on Wednesday or Thursday.  Everyone in our office has different minimum daily results standards because they all have different individual ratios based on their abilities and experience.

This is from our prosperity planner:

We also think it is good to determine goals in these areas for the month and for the recruiter to see their MTD (Month to Date Numbers).  It’s a daily reminder of where they are and where they need to be.

The most important number in my mind is the Send-out number.

They are all focused on booking send-outs which in our world is a candidate being interviewed by a decision maker.

Hope this information helps you.

Barbara J. Bruno, CPC, CTS

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Would you like to Ask Barb a question? Email her at support@staffingandrecruiting.com. Each month in The Fordyce Letter print edition, Barbara Bruno answers questions from individuals in the Recruiting Profession. We will bring you some of these Q&A responses from Barb each week on FordyceLetter.com.

“Great acts are made up of small deeds.” — Lao Tzu (ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism)

How true this is in our own business. Too often, we tend to focus on the end result by concentrating on the number of submits per week or the number of appointments you had this week. Don’t get me wrong — those are important KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to follow; however, you could make your weekly quota of meetings and submits week after week and still not be close to driving revenue at the end of the month.

Activity without “quality” is just a wasted exercise of time, resources, and company money. – Daniel Guelzo 

Recruiter Measurement

Recruiters, If you really want to measure something, measure:

• The number of recruiting calls you make to get a passive candidate.
• The number of submittals you make to get an interview.
• The number of interviews or “send outs” you schedule to get a hire.
• The number of passive referrals you receive each week from the active candidate you interview.
• The number of relationships you make each week with place-able, source-able and Centers of Influence (COI’s) professionals that match your “recruiting and business” plan.

When you are evaluating rookie recruiters, first measure their success by evaluating how many candidates they recruit and meet face-to-face (that matched their recruiting plan) on a weekly basis. For us, the face-to-face benchmark for full desk recruiters was set at twelve to fifteen per week. If they couldn’t meet the face-to-face activity level, then I knew we had training opportunities with them on communicating their value proposition for candidates. If the recruiter could not drive face-to-face candidate traffic after remediation then the recruiter could not be successful in this industry.

If they met the 12–15 candidate face-to-face interviews per week objective, then I focused on the number of passive referrals, job leads, and references the recruiter obtained during each candidate interview. A typical 20-minute interview with a passive or active candidate should provide 8-12 leads. If the number of leads and referrals were low, then we had training opportunities specifically on creating value during the interview process for the candidate. The quicker they got to passive candidates the higher their submit-to-interview ratio climbed. The better they got at finding and presenting passive candidate the higher their interview to hire ratio climbed.

There’s a thousand ways we can measure activity metrics for recruiters however, weekly candidate traffic and leads per interview are two that I recommend that measure “quality” in the activity process.

Account Executive Measurement

Account Executives, if you really want to measure something, measure:

• The number of Appointment Action Calls you make to get a face-to-face meeting.
• The number challenges you discover each time you meet with a decision maker.
• The number of times you are invited back to continue the discovery process.
• The number of meetings it takes before you are able to provide valuable solutions.
• The number of unsolicited “referrals” you get from your existing clients.

Understanding where you can work, compete or dominate in your market is priority one, and as a manager, I made sure that new business development managers had a clear understanding of the capabilities and limitations of their recruiting teams. Working was not an option and once we defined areas in which we could compete or dominate the first priority was to see how successful they were at scheduling face-to-face appointments with prospect clients that match their recruiting / business plans. I set that benchmark at fifteen per week (three per day).

Definition of an Appointment: An agreed-upon meeting with a decision maker to discuss how flexible staffing or solutions is used to help meet company objectives.

If a new sales person could not schedule face-to-face meetings, then I knew we had training opportunities on differentiating our solutions, approach, and business processes. If they could not consistently schedule appointments then I knew this was an Account Executive that would not be successful.

If they were able to schedule appointments, I then focused on the salesperson’s ability to continue the sales process. In other words, are they invited back? Too often, sales people are not invited back because they did not differentiate themselves or their product. They did not uncover challenges or present valuable solutions to help the company grow or meet business objectives. If sales people struggled with scheduling additional meetings then I knew we had training opportunities on consultative selling specifically on challenges and solutions clients have with regard to securing and retaining talent. In other words, NO PAIN / NO SALE!

Every client has difficulty with Quality, Quantity, Productivity ,and Availability of talent. Understanding where clients (and other staffing firms) fall short in these areas is critical. Lastly, having a well-rehearsed and compelling story on how our Features and Benefits will resolve those challenges is paramount.

If you want to measure something, measure Quality of Activity.

Good hunting!