Almost every recruitment business in existence has coaching to some degree.

If the mainstay of your hiring is Grads, you’ll almost certainly have a training programme where your new hires learn the basics of the job.

They’ll have scripts to follow and recruiters to shadow. The good ones will get it, and those who don’t will have their card marked.

But there are severe limitations to this blanket approach.

The benefits of blanket coaching

You might be reading this thinking “our training programme’s produced multiple top billers” and that’s a fair response. However you’ll also know there comes a point when your people need more.

Basic training works well at a junior level because entry-level recruiters typically share both common foundations and gaps in their knowledge.

You’ll teach them about sourcing, pipeline management, effective communication, and sales techniques.

And perhaps most importantly for you, they’ll learn how you do things. Your particular style of recruiting which has made you a trusted name in your industry.

Group coaching at this level will always give you a structured way to instill the fundamentals of the job.

It’ll also give your fledgling recruiters a chance to learn from their more experienced colleagues and build a shared language and camaraderie.

For learning the universal principles of recruitment, blanket training schemes work incredibly well. Especially where there’s an element of competition and new hires are mirroring the conditions of the job and competing with each other.

With effective and up-to-date training, you’ll give your new charges all the support they need while they navigate the learning curves the job has to offer.

You’ve probably found your training more than sufficient in setting and raising performance levels while limiting the cost associated with more tailored guidance.

However when it comes to nuanced personal challenges, individual technique or going beyond the basics, blanket training leaves a lot to be desired.

As seniority rises, impact diminishes

Your “one-size-fits-all” model will hit limitations as recruiters earn their stripes and rise through the ranks.

And for many, this is where training stops.

You might give your people a personal training budget, which is a safe offer in most recruitment businesses as there aren’t many senior recruiters who believe they aren’t the finished article after billing £300k.

But as recruiters gain experience and move into senior roles, their strengths and weaknesses become more nuanced and harder to spot.

One of your senior recruiters might struggle with new business generation.

Another might be the best generator of business you’ve ever seen but struggle with negotiation or candidate engagement.

You might employ someone who’s excellent at candidate engagement but poor in prioritisation, which is holding them back from pushing on.

All of these recruiters probably excelled in the basic training you offered them when they started. And simply suggesting they revisit one of your modules can leave them feeling like they’re going backwards or not up to scratch.

They’ve read that module. They completed it. If they haven’t retained the guidance you gave them, is that their fault? Yours? Or the efficacy of the training?

These small things make a bigger impact on your business at the later stage of someone’s recruitment career.

Recent research from a 2024 study shows coaching effectiveness varies substantially depending on individual characteristics.

The individuals in your team will have ingrained behaviours, motivations, and personal goals that limits the impact of group coaching. They also might be working in different sectors, sub-sectors or locations where the ‘science’ of their job will differ.

Take Financial Services recruitment in the UK. The approach and basics of the job will differ for a recruiter working the London market, to one working with clients in New York.

So what can be done to make sure your senior recruiters are still learning, developing and evolving?

Should you hire a training consultant?

This is another path well-travelled for recruitment businesses.

Most recruitment leaders are self-aware enough to know their team can’t be trained by themselves beyond a certain point.

And so off they go to the market to bring in a specialist.

You’ll find unique individual profiles who’ve trained senior recruiters in countless companies just like yours. Their website will have a collage of happy customers, all now top billers, who have them to thank for their meteoric rise.

If you’re lucky, this is the end of your story.

You’ll have found someone with the nuance, versatility and candour to train a variety of individuals, all with different needs, backgrounds and minds.

From my thousands of conversations with agency leaders, this seems like a one-in-a-hundred shot, and is far from common. A lot of the time, you’ll land on someone who talks a great game but falls back on the upside down recruitment funnel, which your recruiters learnt in their first week.

It’s also likely the consultant you choose hasn’t been ‘on the tools’ for years, if not decades.

And just as senior recruiters are individual and complex, so must their training be.

Yet, even if you have found a winner amongst the pile there are other drawbacks to individual coaches.

There can be inconsistency in both quality and relevance.

And their ability to scale and personalise their methods is often one of their biggest limitations.

True one-to-one coaching is also an expensive outlay. Both in time and money. And you’ll already know how difficult it is to get a senior recruiter off the phone for personal development.

That said, the research shows it’s an outlay which pays off.

This report shows a likely return of £5–£7 for every £1 spent on training, on average. While this report gives the potential ROI at 800%.

The trouble is, you’re taking a risk in employing a coach and might not know the true ROI for months after your initial outlay.

And this is why you’ll default to workshop-style, generic training sessions that might fail to unlock performance improvements in your individual seniors, but are far better than offering nothing.

What options are available to you?

Communities and shared learning

RecWired: Recruitment Advisory Community – recruitment peer network

RecWired offers a community-based environment where founders and recruitment leaders share insights, templates, live coaching, and training.

This is a model that blends peer support with expert input and can be particularly useful for agencies that want a semi-tailored approach across multiple levels.

Specialist recruitment coaching providers

There’s a growing number of niche coaches that offer tailored programmes specifically for recruiters. These typically range from personal performance coaching to leadership development.

Of course, as an unregulated industry, you can limit your training strategy to the roll of a dice when hiring someone like this. It might be depended on whether you like the coach, their demonstrable history of success or the slickness of their marketing,

I’ve heard of recruitment businesses taking sessions from sporting heroes, ex-military leaders or inspirational figures not from the industry. And while these are impressive ‘outside the box’ personalities to hire, they can still be formulaic or ‘blanket’ in nature.

Of course, you might think “if it helps one person it’s worth it”, but that can be an expensive game to play, and doesn’t offer much strategy for the individual recruiters in your team.

Training platforms and courses

Training solutions such as Social Talent and other online recruitment training libraries offer structured learning paths that teams can use to up-skill together or independently.

These do however put the impetus on the individual, and might become another one of those tools that sound great on paper, but aren’t utilised as much as you’d hoped.

Can AI bridge the gap?

AI is becoming more and more potent as the days go by. And if not days, hours.

There are modern tools available today which can analyse recruiter conversations and activity data to identify patterns and coaching needs.

This takes a far more strategic approach to the individualistic nature of improvement.

You’ll find AI tools which suggest personalised improvements based on personal metrics and intelligence.

These can definitely accelerate learning without the cost of traditional coaching.

Whether that’s right for you and your team will depend largely on you and the effectiveness of the technology.

How you should approach the problem as a recruitment leader

There’s no one method for ensuring the success of training your team.

And that, at its heart, is the problem.

To ensure your senior recruiters are still evolving at your business you’ll likely have to adopt a number of different strategies.

1. Your baseline training will stay in place for juniors

2. You might look at assessment-led individual coaching, where you spot who needs tailored support and invest in those areas accordingly.

3. You might need to blend human and AI support. Using technology to provide the insights, while employing human coaches to improve skills.

4. You might even build an internal coaching capability, which many agencies have done. Training your leaders to coach their teams in a structured way can definitely pay dividends. But also hinges on the ability of the individual. You already know, a great recruiter doesn’t necessarily make a great manager.

The obligation on individuals

I think one of the biggest issues in this topic as a whole is that the impetus for improvement rests on the shoulders of the individual.

And in my experience, it’s not exactly common for a recruiter to think they need help. Much less seek it out and take time away from their desk.

Equally, those who do probably don’t need your support as much as those who don’t.

Recruiters do have a burden of responsibility to advance their own abilities. But how many of yours actively do this?

Not many recruiters are time rich. Much less senior recruiters managing their own desk and personally responsible for their own financial performance.

The recruitment market therefore needs a solution in my opinion.

What that looks like, we’ll have to wait and see.

But right now, there’s a problem with coaching in recruitment. And it’s a problem that needs solving.