Question:  I totally agree with monitoring the actual presentation conversations. How do you monitor presentations per day of your recruiting team? Trust them to provide the accurate account or use the call accounting software to count all calls that last over 8 or 9 minutes? Mark, Hilton Head, SC

Coach Mike:  Great question, Mark. Both. In my office, I was very “Ronald Reagan-ish”. I trusted them BUT verified them too! The best way I found to do it was a simple Post It pad with hash marks “RP” and “MP”—recruit presentation and marketing presentation. When they had one, they put a hash mark. Over 20 years with dozens of recruiters, I had 2 or 3 that lied but here is the beauty when they lie. You cannot fake placements, right? In a really good economy my whole office, in a variety of sectors, was averaging anywhere between 10 and 15 marketing presentations to a job order. Within tens of hundredths of a point—just in that range. Everyone in the same desk specialty was within 1 of each other.

Then we had one tenured recruiter as an “outlier” who was coming in at 100:1 MP’s to a JO. I am thinking, “He is making it up.” There are some things you can do. I actually brought him in and I said, “100:1? You are seven or eight times worse than everyone else in the office and you have been here for quite a while. So, what is missing?” “Oh, I don’t know. I really do not know.” And, I said, “Okay. What I want you to do is record every call.” If you have that ability, it is very easy now, and forward the recordings to the conference room. I am only going to count the ones that you forward. I am going to assume that a call is going to take place and it is going to get forwarded.” Only the calls that got forwarded counted.

His presentations on the marketing side plummeted and his marketing in the job ratio fell to what everyone else’s was in the office. When that occurred and I had the two things and then he slipped back up. Without going into too much detail, we fired him. I do not tolerate fraud. I will forgive you on technique. I will forgive you on mistakes. I do not forgive lying. Once you forgive one liar in your company, the next person who is tempted to lie goes, “Well, at least if I lie, Mike will give me a second chance.” No.

I have told that to my office over and over again. I will tolerate a lot of things and I will be patient with you. I will work with you. I do not tolerate lying. So, out of dozens of recruiters I hired over many years, making recruiting data up occurred just a few times. I got bad presentations. I tell them when they make this stuff up is, if they say they talked to 15 people and they only talked to 10, then their ratio is spike and this reveals ignorance of their role.

Then I say, “Instead of talking to fifteen, you are going to need to talk to twenty.” Because I know my recruiting metrics like the back of my hand, I say, “If you tempted to even lie, and I do not catch it, I am just going to up your presentation counts because everything boils down to what is it going to take for you to arrange “X” number of interviews per week and if you are a full desk recruiter, what are you going to need to do to get “X” job orders per week or per month?”