Our recent report - The Hiring Hustle: Recruitment Productivity Roundup, analysed two years' worth of data relating to productivity within the recruitment industry. Using this data, and the conversations we've had with people in the know, we're sharing the best ways to help motivate your own recruitment consultants and improve your own success and productivity levels.
Incentivise year-round
Don't just incentivise your team during specific months of the year when things are quieter - do it constantly throughout the year.
Incentivising your team all year round is vital if you wish to retain your best team members, encourage staff to really put the hard work in when it counts, and keep company morale consistently high. You must also find out which incentives will actually click with your specific team of people.
OneUp’s gamification provides a sure-fire way to motivate and engage your team through missions, fantasy-sport inspired leagues and much more. By creating competitions with tangible rewards, your team is going to be ready to work harder than ever and bring in the results you’re looking for. It taps into the inherent competitive nature of salespeople, and healthy competition is important. Book a demo with us to see exactly how it works.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can also create a system where the whole team gets rewarded. This way you can further encourage your team to really cooperate with each other where necessary. As the saying goes, ‘teamwork makes the dream work’ - it might be cheesy, but fostering a healthy environment where team members share knowledge and skills to get the job done is vital for increasing productivity levels.
Diversify your December
December is a fairly quiet month in recruitment - all of the data in our recent report shows that numbers tend to really dip at this time of year. Switch things up to prevent frustration and disappointment in a lack of results across the final month of the year.
Plan ahead and know that because you won’t necessarily be hitting your usual targets, you can instead spend the time on other tasks. These might include refreshing your email templates, reaching out to candidates you have already placed in roles to ask for referrals, or sending out Christmas cards to your clients to keep your name in the forefront of their mind.
TIP: Knowing that December is going to be much quieter, for some consultants it makes a lot of sense to push all Q4 targets into October and November. This means working harder across those two months to hit those all-important numbers, but it means your team won’t feel dejected if they don’t hit their December target - any results they *do* turn out will be a bonus.
You can also just switch up your methods of contacting candidates. Instead of making calls for the sake of making calls - huge red flag - why not opt for LinkedIn messages which candidates can come back to when they’re back in the job hunting mindset after the festivities end?
We know that January is a busy time for job hunters, with the ‘New Year, New Me’ mindset in full swing; the data in our report reflects that. Capitalising on this by preparing for it with messages or emails sent out at the end of Q4 is an ideal way to ensure success. This diversification is a great way to motivate your team, too, as it gives them a different avenue to focus on.
Keep on Top of Training
One of the ways to increase productivity is to stay consistent - especially in terms of how many CVs you’re sending per placement or how many calls it takes to generate an outcome. The data in our report showed that our clients saw a really steady rate of consistency throughout 2022 - a reflection of things settling down after the turmoil of the employment world throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.
If you’re looking at your own data and you’re not seeing consistency, then it’s really important to ensure that your recruitment consultants are on top of their training and know the best way to get those results. By honing in on sending the right CVs the first time round for example, your consultants buy themselves more time to achieve a higher number of placements made overall.
December, as mentioned earlier, is a great time to really focus on training. By setting your team up for the following year, they can go in with a renewed sense of productivity and a better idea of how to get the job done.
Investing in your teams’ professional development is also a great motivator; it allows people to feel like they - and their career - are really going somewhere. It helps team members feel capable and confident in their job role, boosts general morale, and of course allows them to better succeed at what they do. All of this leads to a very real boost in productivity.
Check in Regularly
In the fast-paced and ever-growing recruitment industry, it can be easy for your team of consultants to feel overwhelmed at times. Checking in regularly to make sure they feel confident in what they’re doing is so important.
Schedule a regular time to talk to your team members and see how they’re doing, what’s working for them, what they’re struggling with, and what you can do to make sure they get (and stay!) on the right track.
Having a support system in place to prevent your team members from feeling overwhelmed is a guaranteed way to keep them motivated - when people feel supported and appreciated, they are more likely to work hard to achieve their targets. Communication is key in so many aspects of life, and the recruitment industry is no exception.
These are just some of our ideas for motivating your recruitment consultants - it really is so important for increasing productivity and generating further success for your business. You can read our full report, The Hiring Hustle: Recruitment Productivity Roundup, here.
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