While all professions have their sources of frustration, the recruiting profession is in a unique position because we can be frustrated by either side of the sale. Clients and/or candidates can change their mind or go back on their word. If we were financial advisors and we consulted with a client who chose to invest in 100 shares of IBM, those shares couldn’t say “I don’t want to be in your client’s portfolio!”

Let’s face it: making a placement is an emotional nightmare and is a culmination of a number of activities. Frankly, making a placement is truly the one thing we can’t control in the placement process. Think about it: we cannot control the decision on either side. Can we influence it? Absolutely. Control it? Absolutely not!

If this is true, then why is the main focal point of most owners and managers the ONE thing they can’t control? This is a recipe for perpetual frustration and makes running a search firm educated guess work. Stop focusing on placements. Today! You heard me, stop focusing on placements and focus on what counts … ACTIVITY.

I am going to talk about the taking and tracking of numbers. For those of you reading beyond the last sentence, congratulations! Many have disengaged. We all learned this, yet my experience with my client search firm owners is that few actually do it. My experience is also that those who take, track, and execute to specific targets rarely fail. Actually, they are usually among the highest-producing offices out there.

As we know, placements are a function of interviews and job orders. Interviews and job orders are a function of live presentations, which are a function of attempts. While we don’t control placements, we do control the number of attempts. Attempts and good presentations lead to good job orders and candidates. These can be measured daily and weekly, and tracked over time are predictable.

Again, we all know this, yet most don’t do it. Why? It is Boring with a capital “B”! I don’t take our numbers; I have a service called the lock-on report that emails each AE every Friday morning as a reminder to send their data in. The data is compiled and sent to me in a very easy-to-use format. It is by far the best tool for tracking numbers and seeing their relationship on the market. I don’t recommend the owner or manager take numbers from AE’s with more than six months’ experience, because it won’t happen! Have your administrator do it and put it on a spreadsheet if you don’t want to pay a service to do it.

Now that I have set the table, here are the steps to reducing AE frustration and increasing revenues by putting them in control of their income and their desk.

Follow this simple formula and hold people accountable to execution:

1) Discover what a placement is. By that I mean, how many first-time interviews does it take to make a placement? How many job orders does it take to make a placement? How many candidates do you have to speak with to get one on an interview? How many prospects to take a job order? What is your average fee? Key: if you don’t know, make an educated guess and adjust as you go on … you will develop solid numbers and ratios after three to six months. You can also use the benchmarks in the examples below if you haven’t tracked number as they are close to industry averages.

2) Take their annual production goal and break it down into activity (i.e., AE’s goal is $240k gross production, your average fee is $20,000, and thus you need 12 placements). Each placement is nine first-time interviews and six job orders. Each first-time interview is 20 candidate connects and each job order is 15 prospect connects.

3) Take these numbers and break down to weekly activity. On the above example, $240k = 12 placements = 108 1st time interviews (9 1st interviews x 12 placements), 72 job orders (6 JO’s x 12 plmts). So this recruiter needs to take 1.38 job orders a week or rounded up, three every two weeks and arrange 2.07 interviews per week to be on target.

4) Take these numbers and break them down daily. Each first-time interview is 20 candidate connects or 40 per week, eight per day to get two first-time interviews per week. Each job order is 15 live prospect connects or 23 per week, five per day to get 1.5 job orders per week. This means an account executive in your office with a goal of $240k in gross production needs to make 13 live new presentations or connects per day (eight recruiting and five marketing).

When you do this as an owner or manager you have defined success daily. Again, placements are fairly random events outside of your control. Good recruiters in the professional placement area make only one placement per month on average, meaning they go home 21 out of 22 working days per month without closing a deal. How do they know if they had a good or bad day those other 21 days? Using this methodology, the answer is simple … they spoke with 13 people.

In the near 19-year history of my office, only one person who hit their daily numeric targets failed …ONE! That’s it! The ones who either fail in the business or fail to hit their goals have one thing in common: they fail to hit their daily numbers on a consistent basis.

We, as owners and managers, can give this gift of “certainty” to our people by tracking their activity. You are in a position to coach them daily or weekly to make adjustments vs. waiting months for the placements that do not materialize to define a “slump.”

If this makes sense and you are going to implement it, expect severe resistance. As much as you may dislike taking numbers, AE’s hate tracking them more. For new hires, this will be easy, as it is part of the job. For tenured AE’s, show them the formula first, tie it in with THEIR goals, and ask them if they are deadly committed to hitting their goals. Then ask them if they want you to coach them to that production number and hold them accountable. If they do, and my experience shows they will, you are now managing them to their own self-defined expectation, not your “random” goal.

Following this methodology of focusing on daily and weekly production vs. “making placements” hands more control of success to the account executive. There is tremendous power in telling an AE “hit these activity numbers and the placements WILL happen.” As said earlier, they have little control over a placement. When we focus on what we CAN control, and take the focus off what we can’t “frustration with the business” plummets. While this strategy will not eliminate frustration, the producer will experience less of it as they can see visually where they are in the process. Acknowledge and celebrate the hitting of weekly targets to show your focus is off of placements and my experience shows production will increase dramatically!

Michael Gionta’s seven-part audio series on The 7 Deadly Sins of Search Firm Owners and How to Avoid Them is available at www.theRecruiterU.com. Learn the most common mistakes owners make and some practical tips you can implement immediately to grow your business. Michael is an emerging coach and trainer to owners who are frustrated and want to grow their business. Michael has over 18 years as an owner and billing manager. He has ranked in the top 2% to 3% of Management Recruiters offices for several years. As a billing manager, he ranked as high as 2nd with over $2,200,000 in annual personal production. He can be reached at mike@myrecruitercoach.net.

When I opened my firm in 1990, I was trained that you would need to hire seven people to keep one more than six months. Naively, I thought I was better than that. I discovered I was not. One of the biggest frustrations I hear about from my coaching clients and peer owners is their challenge of training, onboarding, and retaining new hires.

While this is still a challenge at our firm, there are several changes we made to this process that cut our rate from the old model of hire seven to keep one down to hire two to keep one six months or longer.

What is this lesson? Set expectations throughout the hiring process and follow through for at least 120 days! Now, most of you are probably rolling your eyes at this Management 101 technique. You may know it, but the experience with my client search firm owners is that it is rarely implemented.

My experience with most recruiting firm owners is that they sell “money” throughout the interview process. Money, money, money! That is it! They point to successful people in their office and say, “Look at Bob. He made over $200,000 last year. See Sue, $125,000!” If they are not selling money, many other owners are 180 degrees different, screening the heck out of candidates with multiple personality tests, Rorschach tests, eye retinal scans, etc. Both techniques appear to have equally weak results.

This lesson on setting expectations and holding people accountable is by far the greatest and most profitable lesson I have learned. This process begins in our first interview. We first paint the vision of a successful recruiter – a six-figure-plus income, relative freedom to manage their day, week, working with C and V level executives, etc. Then we discuss the “but.” We explain that this business is an acquired taste, like the first beer consumed as a teenager; most people do not find the ramp-up enjoyable. We explain all of the frustrations of the ramp-up: the seeming mindless nature of 80 to 100 calls a day, the unreturned calls, uncooperative candidates and clients, the occasional fall-offs and counteroffers. We tell them there are going to be days when they wish their parents had never met! But if, if, they can persevere through this relatively short period, the rewards are great!

In each stage of the interview, one needs to balance the opportunity with “the price to be paid.” A mistake I see many of my clients make is not properly explaining the ramp-up process. Sure, we tell them they have to be able to cover themselves financially for the first few months, but we don’t explain a “day in the life” of those first few months. We explain a day in the life of a successful recruiter, and when they start and measure themselves against that level of performance, their frustration and self-doubt begin to breed quickly. The new recruiters listen to successful people and remember “a day in the life” and wonder if they are cut out for this career. They wonder if they can ever sound like that recruiter!

Also, during the interview process we tell the candidate: “A new hire starts out with great enthusiasm and a clear picture of where he or she wants to go, like an explorer standing on one mountain peak looking in the distance at another they will climb. The new hire must then descend into an Amazonian-type valley with thick brush and obscured vision (tons of calls, rejection), that second mountain peak not often visible (why am I doing this?). There is a clearly marked path, however, that is always visible. Stay on this path, avoid the temptation to discover a shorter route, be persistent and more importantly resilient, and success is inevitable. If we continue to move forward in this process, I will ask you if you are ready for this journey.”

What is this “path?” The biggest gift we can give a new hire is a clearly defined road map to success vis-à-vis daily activity. Here is where I am going to lose some of you. I do not focus on connect time for new hires. I measure it; I just don’t make it our main focus. I focus on call and presentation count the first two weeks and add on job orders and/or send-outs in week three and beyond. Ask for connect time in the absence of other activity and you will probably get OK connect time. My experience shows a myopic attention to connect time alone leads to bloated calls with unqualified candidates and, often, more personal calls. Connect time is a function of quality, not quantity, and new hires don’t have much quality.

At the offer interview, I make candidates pledge – sometimes by raising their right hand – to commit to do exactly what I tell them to do for 120 days with no deviation. If they won’t make this commitment, and they all have, I would not offer the job.

The beginning of their path is the first day on the phone. When we began setting expectations for just that day, things began to change. Depending on your program, if the first day on the phone is a full day, we set a benchmark of 100 to 125 calls (including name gathering) and 15 to 17 live combined marketing and recruiting presentations. We ask the new hires to give us their understanding of these expectations verbally to ensure understanding. In what will be a “surprise” to many readers, we find that even after setting specific targets that were agreed to, committed to, as well as completely understood, 8 out of 10 will not hit the targets.

Here is where many of us as owners fall short. We fail to give aggressive, blunt feedback to these new hires that very first day on the phone. I sit down with new hires the next morning to review their first day and ask them for their results by category. If they are among the 20% who hit their target, I congratulate and reinforce their performance. If they are in the 80% who don’t hit any or all of the targets, I ask one simple question, “I wonder why you chose failure on your very first day?” I wait out the longest of silences. I watch them squirm until the confused person at the other side of the table stumbles out a barely discernable “I don’t know.” I again ask what the expectations for the day were and they again tell me. I also ask them what they committed to in the interview process and, again, they tell me. Then I proclaim that “I am confused. Based on these commitments and clearly defined expectations, why would someone so defiantly fail to execute?”

This approach may appear harsh to many. I disagree; it is harsher to allow them to believe that close is OK, that our expectations are merely suggestions. If you check your records for subsequent days of performance, without holding them accountable, I would bet, and my experience shows, that most drift lower. They generally drift lower to a point where the owner finally gets “ticked off” enough to confront the performance. The new hire has now successfully identified the owner’s “real number.” Let me assure you beyond a shred of a doubt that we are being tested. We as owners fail that test the first day we let performance below our stated minimums go by unchallenged.

If failure to hit the minimums persists for several days, we challenge the new hire’s commitment for the last time and ask, “Is this business really for you?” and most say no and actually, I have found, are put out of their misery.

For those who stay on course, be vigilant for at least the first 120 days. Have them email you their numbers every day. As a former VP of sales of mine said early in my career, “Managers get what they inspect, not what they expect!” By this 120-day point, good habits have combined with your coaching to get them into a groove of high activity that requires much less of your attention. Never stop taking numbers; simply let them become accountable to you weekly vs. daily.

My feeling is that not only new hires, but also many of us, as owners, do not see the connectedness of one simple day to a month’s or a year’s success. If we do not see it, how can we show it to them? Once we let them settle into their own self-defined comfort zone, we have often poured the foundation of failure. Later when we fire them or they quit, we shrug our shoulders and say, “They just didn’t get it!” And since history shows us that those who do get it are often the exception and not the rule, who really doesn’t get it?

Michael Gionta has over 18 years as an owner and billing manager. He has ranked in the top 2% to 3% of Management Recruiters offices for several years. As a billing manager, he has ranked as high as 2nd, with over $2.2 million in annual personal production. Michael is an emerging coach and trainer to owners who are frustrated and want to grow their business. His FREE seven-part audio series “The Deadly Sins of Search Firm Owners and How to Avoid Them” is available at www.theRecruiterU.com. He can be reached at mike@myrecruitercoach.net.