While benchmark numbers and calculators are useful starting points for determining workload, the optimal allocation will ultimately be based on your specific company culture and on the challenges faced by individual recruiters. Two companies in the same industry may have very different hiring philosophies, which result in very different benchmarks, both completely defensible. But you can also have individual recruiters working side by side in the same company, yet under very different constraints.
Here is a checklist of 15 questions from the 2010 Corporate Recruiting Report that you need to ask when setting individual performance standards for your staff. They are not meant to lower anyone’s performance bar, merely to adjust it fairly. Each item will affect either the recruiter’s requisition workload, hiring quotas or efficiency rating.
When measuring recruiter performance, we consider requisition load to be less meaningful than hires completed. This is because the latter contains no future or low priority hires, only jobs to be filled now.
- Quality – Is the recruiter’s hiring manager asking for exceptionally high quality hires?
- Passive vs. Active Candidates – Is the recruiter’s candidate pool largely active or passive? (Passive candidates are 2-3 times harder to recruit.)
- Sources – Are all recruiters working with similar resources? For example, does the company’s referral program favor one person over another?
- Administrative support – Do recruiters have the same access to administrative support?
- Technology – Are they using the same technology?
- Hiring managers – Does the recruiter’s hiring manager turn paperwork around and schedule interviews quickly? Does he insist on interviewing ten candidates instead of three?
- Skill and experience – Is the quota appropriate to the recruiter’s training and experience?
- Teamwork – Does the recruiter have the support of a successful, well-managed team.
- Structure – Are they primarily a sourcer, a selector/interviewer, or an end-to-end recruiter?
- Competition – Is the industry or job specialty unusually competitive?
- Geography – Are they hiring for a difficult geography?
- Scarcity – What is the supply/demand equation for the recruiter’s requisitions?
- Employment brand – Has the recruiter’s employment brand suffered unexpectedly, for example, from an oil spill, a management scandal, or a product recall? (Appropriate for staffing departments whose recruiters service multiple operating companies.)
- Unemployment rate and state of the economy – Are they unduly advantaged or disadvantaged by these factors?
- Industry – How are the recruiter’s assignments affected by security clearances and other strict candidate vetting requirements?
Excerpted from the 2010 Corporate Recruiting Report, Ch. 9, “Recruiting Workload.” This new edition of our recruiting report is 59% longer than the 2009 edition and contains nearly 100 pages of new material. For more details or to order the report, click here.
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