The mistake holding your recruitment agencies growth back

There is a trend in recruitment.

A trend that is damaging the future of the industry.

You could even say that it has made a negative impact already.

And a large chunk of the industry is blindly following it.

They promote the wrong people into leadership roles.

One of, if not the most important hires you can make is the team leader position. They are the boots on the ground that are directing your recruiters every day. They set the tone for the team, and play a huge part in the success of the agency.

So why are we all getting it wrong by doing what everyone has done and still is doing?

Let me set the scene, you have a recruiter join your agency. They work hard and start to bill good money and after a while they are one of your top billers. You want to reward them for their hard work and success, so what do you do?

You promote them and give them a team.

Your expectation is that they are billing well, so if they have a team then they will all bill well. You will then have a team of big billers and you will be laughing all the way to the bank.

That never actually plays out. What actually happens is that you have one big biller and then a team of people all helping them bill more. They become delivery consultants for the team leader. They only bring in a handful of their own clients, and they don’t get many jobs from those clients.

You are left scratching your head as to why the plan didn’t work, but now you are stuck as you don’t want to take the title away from them, and put someone else in charge as that might embarrass the big biller. What if they leave?

We have all seen this happen. You may even have a similar situation happening in your agency right now.

So how can we avoid this situation next time.

Simple, promote the big biller to a senior/ associate director level recruiter.

Give them a pay rise and a fancier title, and let them continue doing what they do best.

Don’t reward them with a team just because they are a great recruiter.

So what do you do about hiring a team leader?

When the need arises for a team leader, you should already know who you want to run the team.

The process for promoting a recruiter to a team leader shouldn’t be done over-night. You should be continually assessing the people in your team and looking at the potential role they could play in the future.

When you are assessing for a team leader there are 4 main things that you should be looking at.

1.        Billings

I know, I know, I have just told you not to promote a big biller.

When I said that, I was talking about not going on billings alone. You need to start sorting your recruiters into tiers: Top biller, Big billers, Profitable billers, Underperformers. When you are looking for a team leader, you want someone that has credibility as a recruiter. Underperformers are obviously out of the conversation. I have told you to avoid top billers, so we are left with big billers and profitable billers.

The profitable billers are the ones who are covering the cost of their desk and maybe making you a small amount of profit. These are people that we don’t want to have another distraction and give more money too as they are barely breaking even, so we are left with just one group.

The big billers.

2.        Core values

Once you have narrowed it down to the big billers, you need to look at core values.

Do you have core values? If not, then you should probably sort this out before you continue on he search for a team leader. You need someone who shows the agencies core values. I don’t mean someone who you have seen them demonstrate the value once. We want someone who lives and breathes them. Someone who personifies the values of the agency.

If your leaders don’t live by the core values, then how do you expect their teams to? You need someone that will lead the way with them and hold their team to the same standard. If they don’t then you will start to create and agency that just has a list of words rather than values. You will see you agency operate in a way that you had never intended.

So identify those who are your core values.

3.        Galvanising

As team leader should be exactly that, they should lead the team.

We have all had managers who dictate from the back of the pack. They bark orders and never get their hands dirty, help provide a solution or motivate. People who have a manager are far less productive and successful. Recruitment is hard, it has huge peaks and troughs. It’s easy to run a team when things are good, but what happens when they aren’t.

You want someone who has high emotional intelligence. Someone who can hack into the psyche of their team. When the going is tough, they need to be able to pull the team along with them and start the long ascent to the top of the peak. They need to be able to have difficult conversations and support the team.

This is a skill that some people cannot learn, so find those who already possess it.

4.        Time management

I have spoken to many billing managers about the difficulties of going from a pure biller, to a billing manager, and they all expressed the same challenge.

They got the team leader role as they were billing really well, but then they had a team to run and their target didn’t really change to accommodate this. So now they have to somehow bill he same as they did before while now attending more meetings and having every recruiters worst nightmare, more admin.

On top of that, they will have their team interrupt them constantly throughout the day for advice or firefighting. They will have a very small amount of time to actually focus on their own billings. Sure you can teach them some techniques to deal with it, but if they have poor time and task management to start with, they will be fighting a loosing battle.

So assess how productive they are and how they manage their time to ensure the work is done within the office hours.

So, now you should have drastically reduce the pool of people that you could put in a team leader position.

You are possibly looking at it worrying as they are not ready to run a team. That’s fine, because this is where the work starts. You now need to create a development plan to help the gain the skills and experience needed to be ready.

We don’t want to identify the right people and then just give them a team.

You need to ease them in slowly.

Start by making them a buddy or a mentor to one of the underperformers.

Progress them into taking some team training.

Get them more involved in meetings. They could take one of the daily stand ups, or all of them. Maybe they could take part of the Monday sales meeting.

You could even get them in the manager meetings and board meetings so that they can see how they fit in to the success of the agency. Get them involve in the commercial side of the business.

Once they are ready and they have a team, you need to continue with coaching and mentoring them as they will find themselves in situations that they may not know how to navigate.

By doing this, you will create great team leaders, and they will create great recruiters.