It’s always a bad feeling when one of your top billers leaves. Even worse is the realisation that it wasn’t a one-off incident. If you’ve been noticing a trend and your agency is steadily losing some of its best recruiters, now is the time to shake things up and put some new practices in place.
Understanding churn in the recruitment sector
Recruitment may be an industry that’s well known for its high levels of churn, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit back and let your top billers go. What you do need to do is to learn from other people’s mistakes.
Recruiter Juice looked at exit interviews and found that the majority of recruiters who left weren’t leaving the industry altogether. Instead, they were joining similarly-sized recruitment agencies, often at similar rates of pay and commission.
This suggests that the biggest problems are around job satisfaction and engagement, offering you plenty of scope for change.
Most common reasons for losing your top recruiters
There are many different reasons a recruiter decides to move on. Here are some of the biggest culprits, as well as our suggestions for getting on top of them.
Poor work-life balance
The recruitment industry is fast-paced and centred around deadlines, so it’s little wonder recruiters can quickly get caught up in the hustle. But a poor work-life balance can take its toll, and when a top biller feels overworked and burnt out, they may start looking to other agencies to help them break out of it.
Promoting a healthy work-life balance and prioritising rest and flexible working is a great way to help recruiters take a step back and better manage their time.
Extremely competitive atmosphere
It’s a competitive industry; there’s no getting around that, but when it comes to your team, you need to build feelings of mutual respect and teamwork.
High-performing recruiters can sometimes be pitted against each other. This can quickly lead to feelings of resentment and unhappiness, and while it might garner some high results in the short term, it can lead to a long-term talent drain.
Turn things around with a strategy to boost internal collaboration and help your top billers support each other rather than feeling like they are constantly trying to outdo each other.
Lack of appreciation and recognition
In recruitment, you’ll often find that attention is paid to those employees who are hitting their targets but not much else. How you celebrate individual successes can make all the difference to how valued staff feel.
Setting up a rewards and recognition program that makes it easy to spotlight positive outcomes or personal growth can help top billers feel appreciated beyond their numbers.
For example, working collaboratively, helping a new hire settle in, and managing a stressful situation well are all things that could and should be celebrated. Best of all, ensure your platform allows for peer-to-peer recognition to help improve connections in the workplace.
Management issues
As in many industries, recruitment can fall foul to the age-old problem of people being promoted due to their skillset – and not on their ability to actually lead a team.
Of course, some people can be extremely proficient recruiters and also excellent leaders, but the two don’t always come in the same package.
A high-performing leader needs to know how to nurture as well as manage. Good communication skills are a must, as are an empathetic outlook and an understanding of what makes people tick.
Most of all, it is about achieving balance and understanding what management style will suit an individual. Many recruiters are great self-managers and may only need occasional check-in and encouragement; a micromanager is likely to drive them away.
What’s more, Tandym found that 54% of professionals said that their leadership skills were not being developed, suggesting there is an opportunity to grow the talents of the recruiters you want to keep.
Absence of tech support
Recruitment is a very manual role – did you know that the average recruiter spends 78,352 minutes on the phone a year? There are also a lot of technical elements involved in keeping track of a wide range of clients and potential candidates.
When recruiters don’t have the right tech and tools to help ease their workload, they can quickly feel burnt out – and start looking for somewhere that will offer them the tools that would help.
From time management programs that give recruiters one place to store all the information they need to online skill tests to pass out to candidates to assess their suitability for a role before the interview process, there are plenty of tech options out there to make their day-to-day work easier.
Cut-throat KPIs
You may only want to help your recruiters achieve all they can, but putting unrealistic or cut-throat KPIs in place will only cause issues. Sometimes recruiters just can’t land the right hire or give the client exactly what they need through no fault of their own and it’s not fair to create KPIs based solely on figures.
Help build resilience and contentment in your team by focusing on what they can actually control – such as their own learning or personal development. Put time into finding ways to motivate recruiters, even when they’re working remotely, and you’re more likely to see a holistic uptake in KPIs. The carrot can be far more effective in the stick!
Transform your culture with Mo
- Improve employee engagement scores
- Reduce employee churn
- Build a collaborative culture
Mo is an employee recognition and engagement platform that can help leaders improve collaboration and morale, reduce employee churn and drive change.
Our platform creates a vibrant culture by developing team habits, encouraging people to celebrate success, recognise results and appreciate colleagues.
Your complete toolkit for connecting and motivating teams in the new world of work. Book a demo with our team today!
