Every staffing agencies’ goal is to increase recruiter closes or the percentage of placements from your firms monthly average number of open jobs received from your customers. Increasing monthly placements is not always as simple as it seems. There are several recruiting factors that, if not performed with rigor every minute of every day, can have a negative impact on candidate submittal to offer ratios.
Often as a staffing firm owner, your first inclination may be to add more recruiters. This is not always the first solution that needs to be considered. Assuming that the recruiting leader is a player-coach and knows their job better than their recruiters do, he or she should start by identifying bottlenecks. These are layers and manually intensive tasks that can be streamlined in order to optimize performance and increase monthly placements.
Where to start:
1. Job Order Management Prioritization (JOMP), and immediate assignment of a job requirement to a recruiter is the first step for increasing recruiting outcomes.
2. Assigning open job orders based on each recruiters experience level.
3. Ensure that recruiters have access to talent communities and networks that afford them an advantage over their competition.
4. Ensure that your ATS is the first place that your recruiters go when they are assigned to an open job and not have their first instinct be to jump on a job board.
5. Removal of any layers that prevent the assignment of newly released open jobs from being assigned to the recruiting team within 15 minutes from when it is received from the customer.
6. Remove all administrative and manual processes that could or should be automated or reassigned to someone that is not intended to be part of the revenue & profit making formula.
7. Clarity in job order specifications need to be obtained immediately when unclear. This should not preclude the job order being assigned to recruiting until the information needed is received.
8. When assigning a job order to a recruiter they should be able to start recruiting on it within 5 minutes. If they do not have bandwidth or are leaving for lunch it should be reassigned to another recruiter.
All job orders are not created equally, neither are customers. That said, not all recruiters are equally experienced. The more seasoned, experienced and qualified recruiters should be assigned open jobs that have the highest dollar value to the staffing firm. After all, you are expecting their performance to be much more of an impact to your firms profitability, right? Higher level skilled professionals, expect their recruiters to have the right knowledge in order to actually feel as though the recruiter can help them with career alternatives.
If these eight important job order management steps are not enough, then the next step in increasing productivity and profitability is recruiter training. If this fails, it is then time to look closely at your recruiting organization and determine if you have the right mix of recruiters to meet your organizations recruiting performance goals.
