Are those new hires just not making the grade? Not making enough money? Does it seem like they have potential that’s just not getting used properly? There are two issues you need to deal with here.
1) The short term problem of having staff who are not contributing enough to revenue
2) The long term problem of how you prevent this happening whenever you hire.
Steps you need to take to start improving their performance for the short term
1) Identify their strengths and remind yourself why you hired them
2) Identify their weaknesses or what it is you’re disappointed with – beyond “they’re not making enough money”.
3) Speak to them and see what their concerns are. It might be as simple as they’re intimidated by industry jargon and unsure of how to interpret job descriptions, in which case some time spent learning about the industry, studying previous placements to look at job descriptions and the backgrounds of successful candidates and talking to other staff members should help. However it could be more of a long term concern, in which case you need a thorough plan of action.
The main reasons for new starts underperforming are, in our experience
1) The trainee is too focussed on just achieving sales volume, and doesn’t appreciate the value of the candidate experience.
2) The trainee is reluctant to make cold calls, they’re nervous selling and don’t handle the rejection well.
3) The trainee is disillusioned with the role – having come onboard with big promises of bonuses and culture they feel they have a mountain to climb to achieve anything and can’t see a clear path to success.
What you can do about it
Point number one is understandable. Recruitment is primarily viewed by most as a sales role and attracts a lot of sales hungry young people focused on making money. In a way that’s great, you’ve got someone willing to hammer the phones and bring on new business and earn a lot. Partly, this lack of attention to the candidate experience is down to naivety. They’ve probably not experienced the frustration of letting down a new client by not prepping a candidate well enough or managing the process and having that great candidate suddenly take another position. But you need to play your part in their development by helping them to perceive recruitment as a service industry as well as a sales industry.
Reason number two is trickier. It’s important that in this situation you go back to remembering why you hired them. Did they show a flare for making people like them and building rapport? Did they have a call centre background that you thought would benefit them? Did they seem very conscientious, target focused and hard working? If you believe they have a natural ability to build relationships quickly then you need to work out what’s holding them back. They might feel too out of their comfort zone in terms of what they’re selling so need training on how to pitch it. They might just need to be pushed into undertaking a large volume of calls so that they can see that successes do happen and when they do they outweigh all the rejections. If you hired them because they have a great work ethic, exploit it. Give them additional targets, update them regularly on their KPIs and give them a reason to be motivated. Obviously these are just suggestions and generalisations, but the point is you need to think about a solution which works for that trainee.
Reason 3 is even trickier, and brings us on to the issue of your long term solution for overcoming this problem. If you have a continual cycle of bringing on promising new hires only to leave them disappointed and frustrated by a lack of support or motivation, you will never grow your business. A strategy for training and developing your staff will not only overcome all the problems we’ve discussed and more, it will also make them feel like a valued member of your company, who you are willing to invest in, and let them visualise their career path with you.
Recruiter Hub’s Academy product will put this structure in place for you so that you have a comprehensive framework for training new staff which takes their personal needs into account but also lets them contribute to revenue from an early stage. You’ll have no more floundering around trying to work out why they’re not performing – our Academy’s performance measurements will show you, and your trainees will feel valued and motivated.