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Recruiter Requisition OVERLOAD - Tips to improve recruiter performance? Read this tip if you are a recruiter or staffing leader in a large company trying to understand what an optimum requisition load is to ensure peak recruiter performance.
A common assumption by many of my clients who have never sat in the shoes of a corporate or external search recruiter is that recruiting is transactional, easy and can be done by anyone -- so why cant they fill more jobs when they are managing 75 - 100 open jobs a month? The answer is not that simple as it is a function of many variables that directly impact recruiter performance. Unfortunately, often recruiter requisition load is assigned without taking into consideration the impact that the NUMBER of jobs , TYPE and Skill Level, and LOCATION of jobs assigned will have on the recruiters ability to perform.
The first factor in optimizing recruiter performance is to hire professional, career recruiters who are passionate about what they do. Many companies view recruiting as a low level skill or a stepping stone into an HR Generalist role so they hire people with skills and competencies designed for success in an HR profession --- but recruiting is sales and project / process management --- so often employers hire the wrong competency to do a very critical job.
The second factor is to assess the TYPE of jobs being recruited, HOW MANY are needed and WHERE they are located. Recruiting 100 $8 / hr call center reps with limited technical skill requirement is quite different from recruiting a CFO of a multi-national organization for the corporate office in Chicago AND a biomedical engineer with 10 years experience for NY, Rural IOWA and Canada locations.
To recruit 100 call center reps with basically the same skill set for the same location, a good recruiter could probably manage 50-75 open jobs at a time because the process is weighted more heavily on screening job posting applicants in one market and less on finding the people since job postings probably generate an ample supply. In a sense -- this situation would be like an automotive assembly line where the recruiters are mainly highly skilled at putting the car together after another group puts boxes of parts in front of them. If multiple locations are added, the same team can most likely still be effective provided the job postings in the markets draw a sufficient amount of qualified applicants for them to screen.
On the flip side, the recruiters given responsibility to recruit the biomedical engineers and the CFO need to be specialists and know the target market talent competitors pretty well. In this case, the CFO search may go out to a third party search firm to cap recruiting costs internally -- why waste valuable recruiter time building a talent pool for one position that may open up once every few years?? This will free up more of the recruiter's time to focus on the biomedical engineers where one or more people could potentially be hired from the talent pool of qualified people they identify. In this situation, if all of the engineers are in a single location -- then the recruiter could probably manage 15-30 open jobs at a time successfully provided they are all of similar job profile and the only variable is the skill level ( years of experience). If however, they have 15-30 uniquely different types of biomedical engineers --then each recruiter should have anywhere from 5-15 on their plate as each unique profile requires a seperate talent pipeline/pool to be created. Similarly -- for multiple market searches, regardless of if the profile is the same or different, the number of reqs per recruiter in in the 10-20 range depending upon whether the target market is a major metro market ( 20 ) or a rural or undesirable market (10). For perspective -- companies spend a LOT of money with third party search firms because they have established relationships with specialized talent in multiple markets -- This does not happen overnight so the job becomes much harder for the recruiter than simply posting a job and screening applicants. The best people need to be found, approached about your opportunity and pulled forward into your recruiting process on their timeline -- which may not always synch up with yours. What this means is that your corporate recruiter is starting from scratch in the passive talent relationship building process and therefore, they have to work 10X as hard as the search recruiter to find more people to talk to in order to get a few who are ready to consider your job. The harder the job to fill, the harder the task will be for the recruiter and therefore, they need to manage fewer reqs if you want to impove their success rate in filling critical jobs internally.
The third factor to consider is how your organization is structured to deliver recruiting services to the business. Typically, there are three delivery models commonly used: 1) Full life cycle 2) Dedicated Sourcing/Recruiting teams 3) Hybrid. The most common model is full life cycle which works best in small and mid sized firms in which the recruiter handles all aspects of the recruiting process themselves. Larger firms flip flop between centralized sourcing/recrutiing and hybrid models depending upon the philosophy embraced by it's corporate leadership team at the time.
As a rule of thumb, fewer reqs per recruiter should be assigned for the more complex and difficult to recruit the jobs so that the recruiters can effectively dedicate time working various sources to find and qualify the best talent. In this case, if you have a volume hiring need of this type of talent, then you may want to consider separating the sourcing activities and hiring dedicated sourcing researchers to focus on continuously searching for potential candidates so that your experienced recruiters can focus their time on approaching, selling and qualifying those that are interested in the opportunity. For low volume hiring needs , the full life cycle model is typically sufficient.
A Hybrid model is effective in a decentralized culture with high volume , difficult to fill ongoing hiring needs in multiple markets. This would have a centralized sourcing team supporting decentralized full life cycle recruiters in the business units or in market who own recruiting responsibility for the market or business unit they support. The sourcers focus on uncovering passive talent while the recruiters work the active resumes posted online and ad posting responses that are less time consuming to source/qualify. In this case , the recruiter in the field can probably handle 25-40 reqs each.
In all cases, low level , high volume hiring like call centers etc. should be done by a seperate team and not combined with more specialized recruiting needs handled by the same recruiter. This type of high volume hiring is a great training ground for junior / entry level recruiters.
Created by Carl Kutsmode
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