Understanding Recruitment Businesses
Looking back on my time working in a number of highly successful, high performing recruitment firms, I have great memories. At that time the ‘Work Hard’ then ‘Play Hard’ mantra was alive and kicking… so we did our average of 50 hours work Monday-Thursday and then celebrated success to the absolute max!
Targets were hit, many holidays and night’s out were enjoyed and promotions and bonuses were achieved. For me personally, achieving success has always motivated me and the sense of achievement of working towards a goal and achieving it felt great and has provided me with some of the many ‘highs’ when I look back on my professional life.
I recall working for a team who took this to another level, as collectively and consistently we ALWAYS celebrated someone’s success or record achievement. This created a positive culture and mindset for all, on a daily basis – it really was infectious. 9 times out of 10 when we set our mind on achieving the quarterly target or holiday incentive, we’d smash it and REALLY enjoy the celebrations in the Sunshine!
As I sit here, many years on in my present life, my team (The Rencai Family) work with companies to help them improve their collective performance, by supporting the development of Positive Authentic Cultures Driven by Engaged Employees. With this daily reminder, I can reflect on how rare the instance is where you have whole teams working together and pushing to improve on a daily basis.
Common Business Challenges
Common Business Challenges from Low Employee Engagement within Businesses
The demands of modern personal and work life are real, without even taking into consideration the inevitable curve balls that get thrown your way on a regular basis! It doesn’t take much to move individuals and teams from really pushing to be their ‘best version of themselves’ daily, to simply getting their head down, keeping under the radar and heading for the door at the earliest opportunity….
As we partner with more businesses who are looking to achieve positive culture change, we can see first hand the importance of a successful employee engagement programme (that does not have an end point!). Engagement does not only impact business performance and increase the revenue of recruitment businesses but also the work environment…making it a nicer place to work and develop your career.
Challenges For Recruitment Leadeers
Taking a step back for a minute and reflecting on my experience of developing within and then managing successful recruitment teams the model was:
- 90% employees are fee earners – meaning they either make money for OR cost the business money based upon their performance against their targets…
- Many of the managers/team leaders are in that role because they have been successful independently (with the skills and attributes that come with that) not because they are competent ‘people-mangers’ or have any aspirations to be that…
- Speaking from experience being a Team Leader was the hardest job in my career as it felt pretty much impossible to get everybody in my team performing at target hitting level and achieve that high performance consistency and satisfaction that I’d experienced working in that highly engaged, high performing team
The Common Challenges For A Recruitment Manager
Things are always changing so the ‘model’ may have moved on in many businesses. Our general feedback from recruitment leaders however, is that these considerations remain.
The Benefits of Employee Engagment Strategies for Businesses
So how can an engagement programme help? As a universally recognised priority area for companies to improve globally, endorsed by thought leaders, you can review various papers here which reflect on the benefits of an Engaged Business with ranging numbers on the percentage (%) impact. There is common agreement on the areas that it positively impacts within the business:
-
Happier more valued employees
-
Improved Employee Retention/Loyalty
-
Improved internal communication which builds trust and eases tensions
-
Reduced absenteeism
-
Increased productivity
-
Improved culture
-
Increased customer loyalty
-
Reduced stress
-
Reduced Costs due to less dependence on Reward
-
Engaged Companies are more attractive to new hires
Linking this back to the recruitment environment where literally EVERY day counts to impact the bottom line, Retention, Absenteeism, and Consistent Productivity were top line management challenges. High stress levels, and employee wellbeing were the ever-present elephant in the room, and improving customer retention was present in every new strategy rolled out from the top down.
With the acknowledgment that considering all of the above, you would like to focus on improving employee engagement and ultimately your company culture and profits the ongoing barrier for recruitment management teams will always be time. I’ve been there, we all worked too many hours striving to hit targets so new ‘solutions’ must consider this.
Our Employee Engagement Programme
Our Engagement programme, tailored for recruitment firms gives you an Employee Engagement solution that is:
- Quick to implement – Two weeks
- Low investment – Annually less than one deal!!!
- Low time investment – 10 minutes per employee per quarter
- Easy to use – Efficiency and automation provided via Digital Solution (Mobile/Tablet/PC)
- Analytics and insight available on your dashboard within 15 minutes
- Provides focused analysis – Can review by the team, by vertical, by location, time in business
- Supports your team leaders in more effective team management
If you’d like to learn more about the benefits recruitment leaders are getting through running their engagement programmes internally or have any questions I’d be very happy to chat.
+44 (0) 161 660 9610
