QUESTION: Mike, you are big on metrics and hitting a certain amount of first-time interviews and presentations every week. How do you adjust when there is a three-day weekend or when you go away on vacation?
Understanding Placements and Revenue Goals
Great question. This came up in one of our group calls today. What we teach, if you have not worked with us or have not been in this group for a while, is that you have a placement goal and revenue goal. Then, you reverse engineer down to what has to occur every single day for you to know you are on target to hit those goals. Let’s use $300,000 for example. Say an average fee of $25,000, equals one placement a month. That is $300,000 divided by $25,000 equals 12.
Calculating Required Interviews and Presentations
Our clients’ metrics are around 6.5 first-time interviews to a placement. I always tell people to benchmark at 8, just to be conservative. If you need one placement a month, that means you need eight interviews a month because we are using a metric of 8 first-time interviews for a placement. That is 2 a week.
To get two interviews a week to get a candidate to go on an interview, you might have to talk to 15 candidates. It might be 12. It might be 25. Every niche and every person is different, and 15 is the sweet spot. It is a realistic number. We see it with a lot of people, meaning you have to talk to 30 candidates in a week. Then maybe they are all contingency, and you have a 4:1 job order to placement ratio; for every four job orders you take, you fill 1, so you need a job order a week, and maybe you have to talk to about 15 clients, which is about average. That’s 3 a day.
So, 3 a day on the marketing side gives me 1 job order and keeps me on track, and 6 a day on the recruiting side gives me 2 candidates a week to interview, so 6+3 is 9 presentations. I am breaking this down super, super simple.
Adjusting for Holidays and Vacations
If you know, for example, upcoming here in the States is The 4th of July, or you want to take a long weekend, you want to take a Monday off or a Friday off, I need to talk to 9 times 5 or 45 people in a week to be on target to hit my $300,000 goal. What I want to do then, if I want to stay on target, I’ll say to myself, for The 4th of July, I am going to take two days off, Thursday and Friday; I will need to make 18 more presentations.
I might look at that on July 1st and say, 18 more presentations between July 1st and July 22nd; that is 15 working days, and I need to make one more presentation a day. Instead of 6 and 3, I might do 6 and 4 on a couple of days and 7 and 3 other days.
This is how granular we get. The reason we do is that in the 20-something years I have owned a recruiting firm and the 15 years I have been coaching and mentoring recruiting firm owners, we have never had somebody hit their activity targets and not hit their billing goal. Never. It is foolproof. That is how you can play with it when you take vacations.
![Metrics for Recruiters and Recruiting Firm Owners](https://therecruiteru.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-Recruiter-GPS-Square.png)
Allowing for Flexibility
Another thing we recommend too is to divide our activity numbers by 48 weeks, not 52. That way, we will have given ourselves time for vacations, Christmas week, and things like that. For days like Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and 4th of July, that is how you manage it. Even on just a week’s notice for a three-day weekend, it is 1 and ½ presentations a day. It is so tiny and insignificant when you are on a roll to get 9 a day to get to 10, which is no big deal.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready… here are 4 ways I can help you grow your recruitment business:
1. Grab a free copy of my Retainer Blueprint
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2. Join the Recruiter Think Tank and connect with firm owners who are scaling, too. It’s our Facebook community where smart recruiters learn to make more money and get more freedom. https://www.facebook.com/groups/there…
3. Join me at our next event
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4. Work with me and my team privately
And if you ever want to get some 1:1 help, we can jump on the phone for a quick call and brainstorm how to get you more leads, more placements, and more time. https://get.therecruiteru.com/scale-now
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