Are you working close to the money?

Hit the target

“Are you working close to the money today? ”

This was the question my first manager asked me every morning for my first 18 months in recruitment.

What is “working close to the money?”

It is the philosophy that your days’ activity should be focused on doing things that give you the best chance of converting your effort into fees.

This is the most important question

20 years on, I still ask myself the question “are you working close to the money today?”

Asking this question has never been more important for contingent recruiters.

For open market recruiters, It is easy to be sucked into working for clients, where they are looking for a purple squirrel and also using their internal recruiting team or other agencies at the same time.

In your heart, you know this is not close to the money, yet often you will still work these roles.

The trap that many recruiters fall in to is that they forget that they are not paid to search for CVs for clients, or paid to arrange interviews.

They are only paid when they make placements.

Yet every day I meet recruiters who are super excited to get a new vacancy from a client,  but often forget to ask themselves, “how likely am I to get paid for the time I am going to spend sourcing for this role?

I totally get that most of the recruitment industry works on the basis of “NO WIN NO FEE”.  However the unwritten premise is that a recruiter needs to give them the best chance of winning.

Clients are not there to help recruiters get paid

Whilst many recruiters have great relationships with recruiters, their interests lie not in helping the recruiter get paid, but finding the right candidate for their business.

I have been a line manager and even though I though I would not want my team working on vacancies when they have little or no commitment from a client, I am happy to let other recruiters who do not work for me work very hard with little prospect of being paid.

This is because for all line managers the idea of individuals working hard to help you solve a problem, but have not commitment to pay unless they give you exactly what you want.  Is not only alluring but ADDICTIVE

This means that line managers are unlikely to say  ” you are unlikely to get paid for your time, I am probably going to waste your time, so do not put much effort in?”

In many cases multiple recruiters are being given a single vacancy to source, from internal recruiter.  Who is still actively working to make sure they do not pay a fee (in fact they are bonused on this). Yet recruiters stop what they are doing and spend precious time and effort on sourcing candidates that are unlikely to be placed or result in a fee.

But……

I hear you say “Alex, I love the concept of working close to the money.  But, how do you not negatively affect your client relationship when you say “no thank you”  Also, you might need to find the hard to source candidates, which then leads to more of the easier stuff by building trust and a relationship based on your capability.

In this you are right,  whether you work a vacancy is not black and white.

It requires judgement on the part of the recruiter to determine how likely the effort they will invest will result in a fee.

There are situations where you may work a “long shot”

• You may have an existing client base that is providing a consistent flow of fees.
• If you sense a larger opportunity then you can work niche roles to prove your capability (and that you are a decent person). I worked plenty of internal audit roles in my early days to get access to the management accountant vacancies. BUT, if after a few months all I was getting was the super-niche roles I was encouraged to jog on to find another company that would give me roles that I could fill.

The key is for the a recruiting team to have a clear definition of what criteria need to be in place to unlock a 100% of a recruiters efforts,  and a criteria that limits the amount of effort that is invested.

At Nurtureit, We think that the two key drivers for assessing the quality of a vacancy are client commitment and sourcing effort.

High commitment and low sourcing effort = A grade opportunity

Low Commitment and High sourcing effort – C grade opportunity

What is your criteria for unlocking 100% of your sourcing effort?

You can also try being upfront with your client.

It is possible to tell a client that you are not going to work hard on their opportunity and increase the quality of your client relationship.

Why?  Because Recruiters over promise to clients every day.

If you can find a way to say something like “Look this is a role outside my specialism or looks like you have lots of other options for this role at the moment so I cannot put 100% into helping you on this at the moment, but what I can do is x,y or z to help you. If you can give me more commitment, more flexibility (insert other requirements) I can put more effort in to help you find someone.”

Although I appreciate this type statement needs to be tailored to the individual situation and applied with care.

But ultimately…

– if all you have is tough roles where you have little or no commitment from the client, then you will struggle to succeed,

– if all you get from certain clients is the super-niche roles and never get a shot at the easier roles, you may struggle too

– if managers let their newer consultants work too many long shots, then you will end up firing them for not billing enough, or just as likely they will fire themselves because they lose belief they are going to make enough placements to achieve the level of performance they were promised in their interview.

Judgement is key. It needs to be used at every stage of the process to determine how much effort a recruiter should continue to put in to a role.

But it all stems from one question:

How likely am I to be paid for the effort I am expending? (now or in the future)

And what if a recruiter cannot express the right judgement?

Then it is the responsibility of the managers and directors of the organisation to continually help thier recruiters make better judgements.

Happy hunting and good luck converting effort into fees…..

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