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Article: Developing Experienced Recruiters, Part 1 by Steve Finkel

What strategy should a manager employ in today’s improving-but-still-not-good market?

Clearly, there can be significant positives to adding to staff. Nevertheless, there are risks as well, and most firms would probably be better off simply improving their existing staff. Yet how is this to be done in the face of resistance to change from experienced recruiters?

Several months ago, a reader contacted this author with 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 search consultants continued to repeat errors and limit their production, showing questionable improvement. He questioned why this was the case.

Reality

This a not uncommon problem. There are a number of excellent motivational products available, from the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill to Larry Nobles’ 3-tape audio series “Success Behavior”. Everyone should be exposed to these outstanding works or their imitators.

Nevertheless, the reality is that most people – in the absence of a truly life-changing event – are not self-motivating beyond a certain point. The fault in this instance lies solely with the manager. To let excellent training products “sit on the shelf”, as he says, 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.

A Culture of Learning 

The manager shapes the organization. He develops the corporate attitudes. He forms the culture. If products simply sit and it is left to each recruiter to utilize 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, and not individual. It is a permanent on-going responsibility of the entire firm. But it is the manager’s responsibility to develop a plan – and to enforce that plan – to bring it about.

The Key 

The plan itself embodies four elements, and they will be discussed in this article and Part 2 in the next issue. But the key to these elements is group meetings which cannot be interrupted. To allow calls to be taken during meetings addressing skill improvement is to send a message that these meetings are not of the highest priority, and to reduce 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.

Topics

The difficulty many managers have is arriving at topics and organizing the material. Without sufficient preparatory work, they simply pick a subject and blindly stumble into it 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.

In point of fact, there is no need for a manager to flail about wildly seeking subjects or specifics, as the outline of our industry has long been established and codified, and since broadened and refined.

The superb foundational training book by Larry Nobles, Search and Placement! (www.larrynobles.com or on Amazon US) contains 28 chapters. This author’s own hardbound book Breakthrough! contains 30 chapters. 

Each of these high-content sections plus selected chapters from the best generic books on selling is repeatable, reviewable, relevant – and should be the foundation of solid sales meetings to improve skills and production.

For those recruiters who claim to be too advanced to learn, a quotation from an early manager of this writer should draw quick acknowledgement. “No one is smart enough to remember all he knows!”

Role-Playing 

The reality, of course, is that people in our business do not get paid for what they know; they get paid for what they do. Improvement is only useful if it translates to increased production. There is only one way to go from knowing to doing – and that is role-playing.

New people should have this as an integral part of all training. But for experienced ones, an analogy will be persuasive. Regardless of how many millions of dollars a baseball or cricket player earns, every day – regardless of income – he does batting practice.

Role-playing is our batting practice, and we do it for the same reasons – to polish skills and correct weak points leading to improved performance.

An extensive article on this subject entitled “From Knowing to Doing! How to Implement” may be found at the author’s website www.stevefinkel.com. It should itself be the subject to an entire meeting to clarify and explain why this is mandatory and how to do it. 

The most frequent error made, however, is attempting to role-play face-to-face. Role-playing to be effective must be real. That means on the telephone, not face-to-face.

You can’t consistently hit for a high average if you skip batting practice!

Management Evaluation of Calls

What does this mean?

It means that the manager must find out what the recruiter is really doing on the phone. How? By listening in to his calls at his desk. 

A simple analogy will show the worth of this. In outside sales, it is part of a sales manager’s job to travel the territory with the people he supervises. While on some calls he will participate by adding clout on “key account calls”, on others his job is to listen, evaluate and then to conduct “curbside coaching” with the aim of improving performance.

The technology to do this is readily available from electronics store or with headsets designed with an extra jack for taping. The easiest way is simply to tape the call with the manager listening in via an earplug.

Speakerphones are not recommended, as they will alter the quality of the recruiter’s voice (reverberations are common), thus reducing the worth of the call.

Poor performers will resist this idea, as it will show them up. Good performers will like being listened to, as they believe it shows them off.

Signs on the Phone 

Habit patterns can be broken and poor habits improved only by practice (role-playing) and repeat reminders. The manager should insist that the recruitment consultant put signs on the phone as a reminder of habit patterns that must be broken. Examples of this may be “slow your pace” for a person who speaks too rapidly or “who else?” for a recruiter that stops at one referral, i.e. lead to new recruits.

Conducting Sales Meetings 

Aristotle wrote that “the truest knowledge of an art is achieved only by teaching that art”. As the manager conducts substantive, structured, formal skill improvement sessions, this will be found to be true. However, this benefit should not be limited only to the manager. The experienced recruiters too will gain markedly by preparing for and conducting such meetings. 

In a firm with five or more experienced recruiters, the manager should eventually be conducting no more than 50% of the twice-a-week meetings. Every experienced recruiter has a skill in one or more of the facets of our complex business. Even if it is only playing a tape of a call and critiquing his own performance, he should be in charge of occasional skill improvement sessions.

The entire firm but especially the meeting conductor will be the beneficiary.

In our next article (in the newsletter next week), we’ll complete this dissertation on how to improve the skill level – and production – of your existing staff.

A 30-year veteran of our industry, Steve Finkel has consulted with hundreds of firms on four continents. He has been described by the US National Association of Personnel Services as possessing “the most in-depth knowledge of search and placement in industry history”. The producer of many excellent training products (www.stevefinkel.com), he is also the author of “Breakthrough! Exploding the Production of Experienced Recruiters”, considered to be the definitive work for recruiters on this subject and also available through Amazon US. He may be contacted at (US) + 314-991-3177.

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