It’s no secret that recruitment is a demanding business to be in. Clients expect results when it comes to sourcing quality candidates, and it’s a recruiter’s job to deliver them. Failure can see you dropped like a bad habit and replaced by one of the dozens of other recruitment firms eagerly knocking on their door.

In pursuit of the best results, recruitment companies often use key-performance indicators [KPIs]. However, far from being encouraging metrics, these often result in highly competitive and stressful working environments, as recruiters are pitted against one another, while those who underperform are singled out and penalised for their lack of success.
But while it’s true that KPIs can be a useful learning tool for those new to recruitment – helping them to stay on top of key priorities, learn their trade, and get into the swing of things – recruitment firms place too much stock in them.

What sets a great recruiter apart from the crowd is their ability to understand the needs of their client, take a deep dive into who’s who in the jobs market, and deliver top-quality candidates. All of these things are vital ingredients to success in recruitment, but recruitment firms are constantly in pursuit of meeting ridiculous KPIs rather than creating real value, then they’re simply not allowing junior recruiters to learn the skills needed to build meaningful, long-lasting and lucrative relationships.

Not only can KPIs stifle development, they can also create barriers to achieving results. This is because recruiters – through no fault of their own – may never get round to developing those relationships, or in some cases even responding to some candidates because there is so much pressure placed on them to make a certain number of calls per day, and a reprimand if they don’t. Being that recruitment is such a results-driven sector, it seems completely backward that so many recruiters are being forced to work in this way, particularly when many of the calls they make will not generate the sort of tangible results that spending a little longer to find the right person or cultivating the right relationship would.

It’s high time that recruitment managers stopped making KPIs a millstone around recruiter’s necks, instead trusting them to operate without them, or with less of them, once they’ve been trained up. In short: giving them the freedom to focus on delivering genuine value to their clients and candidates.