I am going to share real life stories about mistakes I personally made, and mistakes I see being made across the staffing industry.  By sharing these mistakes with you, our goal is to help you avoid making them yourself all with the honest intent to help you and your company.

Dave Fogg

Office Appearance and Furniture
I know of a staffing company that tried to expand from clerical into accounting as a niche to focus on.  They were originally into light industrial.  The branch offices still had a light industrial look.  The walls had finger prints on them.  The desks were tiny and people were scrunched right next to each other.  There were 12’ dividers, barely separating the staff from each other.  When I tried to recruit experienced people from the accounting/staffing niche to come work for this client and help them kick off the accounting division, nobody wanted the job largely because of the office appearance no matter what the salary offer was.   There are a few lessons to learn from this.  In a professional niche such as accounting, a recruiter is going to have deeper conversations by phone then a recruiter who is talking to warehouse workers.  If the recruiters are sitting too close together with little to no noise barrier, they will not be able to hear themselves think.  And this fact alone can prevent a company from succeeding in such a niche.  When it comes to recruiting accountants, if they come into an office to interview and find it to be cluttered and unprofessional looking, what do you think they are going to tell the other accountants they know? Bad News.  When it comes to recruiting an experienced staffing professional who can head up such a new division, they are going to compare the work environment they are used to with what your office looks like.  If your office has a cheap, cluttered appearance – you are not going to succeed at attracting top talent from your competition, especially when it comes to professional niches such as IT or Accounting.  The solution is not to lease a fancy office.  Just make sure the walls are painted, and some money is invested into decent furniture where each person has some space so they do not feel like they are sitting on top of each other. An office can look like class A space inside, even if it is located in a class C building.

I know of a VP who would pay me a fee to recruit a person for his branch offices, but would not spend a dime fixing up the offices to make them better work environments from which to attract higher caliber people in the first place.  His attitude was that a qualified person should welcome the challenge to grow the branch numbers, build it, and eventually move out of that space to something larger and nicer. In other words, he wanted the person hired into the job to take all the risk, do all the work to solve this VPs problems, all for a mediocre salary.  No wonder why he never hired anyone who could turn the branch around, and the office was closed.

Should the Branch Manager have a private office?
Here is the best floor plan:  The work stations face the walls creating somewhat of a bullpen.  The manager should have a work station out on the floor in the middle.  This way the backs of each recruiter face inwards, and the manager is in the middle.  When a manager has a private office odds are they are going to spend 50% of the day being unproductive.  When they are out there on the floor working with the staff, that motivates the manager to work harder, and it provides peer pressure that causes the branch staff to work harder.  When the manager sits in their office not only do they work at a slower pace, so does their staff.  But there does need to be private space for the manager to conduct private meetings with staff, customers, etc.  75% of the time the manager should be working out on the floor with their staff, producing personal results or acting as a coach helping build up the experience of the people on their team.  25% can be in a private room conducting whatever private business they must attend to.

In a large branch with multiple lines of business the Branch Manager should have their own office, but Team Leaders should be out on the floor acting as managers over their business unit. An example is if there are 20 people in a branch, surely the manager needs a private office. Yet the staff should be divided up into business units, each headed up by a Team Leader who works on the floor directly with their teammates.

Lack of Patience & Budget
Here is a very real example of what often happens out there.  Let’s pick a name, ABC Staffing. Not sure if there is such a company, if there is, no harm intended.  Suppose ABC Staffing wants to start up a new branch or expand into a new niche.  At first there are no clients or candidates in the database. Or, maybe a new person is inheriting a junk drawer of useless information from the person who was in the job previously.  Here is what often happens.

#1 – Instead of paying whatever it takes to attract a truly qualified leader, the company comes up with a budget, salary range, and then hires whoever they can get within that range.  Normally such people are not serious producers, so the company burns through 2 or 3 Branch Managers before finding someone who is a keeper. A lesson to learn here is if a branch is new, or struggling and needs to be turned around, that is a huge risk and effort on the part of the person who takes on the challenge.  Why would anyone who is capable of this, quit their job to take on such a challenge for a mediocre salary?  It is going to take a long time to build the branch. As such, a truly qualified person is going to require a high salary so they can maintain their standard of living.  They are not going to quit their job, walk from an attractive commission pipeline, to start all over again helping another company grow their business for a mediocre salary.  But what I see happening very often is the lack of will power to pay a higher salary from which to attract the better people. So it is not uncommon for staffing companies to hire marginal people into key jobs, which results in turn over and bleeding of money, all because they are hiring who they can get on a limited compensation rather then do what it takes to hire the right person and build a branch or division under that individual.

#2 – As people are hired, often times they are not trained well.  Nobody is watching what they input into the computer.  Months go by, the person is fired for lack of performance and another person is hired.  I see this go on for 3 to 5 years sometimes. Imagine, 4 years after a branch has started and they are still struggling as if they had just started.  Each time a person is fired, the next person inherits not only lack of information in the database, but a junk drawer full of bad information. So not only do they have to build from scratch, they must sort through all the bad information that was left for them from the previous person.  Why does this happen and what lessons can be learned?  Well, one reason is if the Branch Manager is too highly compensated on personal production, that is what they will focus on instead of paying attention to the smaller details inside the branch.  An example is if I were too heavily compensated on personal performance, I might spend most of my time trying to make my own money, and not paying attention to the quality of data being entered into the database by my recruiters.  Yet the information we put into our database is the key to our success or failure!  The other lesson to learn is every staffing company needs an Audit from time to time, an expert who can come in and inspect each branch to determine if the people are following process and policy, or if they have strayed into doing things their own way.  What would happen if McDonalds did not have Auditors?  Over time each location would change as the owners and managers began to run things their own way.  Pretty soon you would have one McDonalds with golden arches and another with blue arches J  This is exactly what happens with many multi branch national staffing organizations.

#3 – Many temp staffing companies are trying to expand into perm placement.  So they hire people who have some perm recruiting experience.  The normal expectation is these new people will produce results within 90 days or possibly get fired for lack of performance.  What is the reality?  Successful recruiting is all about relationships, not throwing paper against the wall to see what sticks.  And building relationships and contacts takes time.  It might be possible for a person to produce results in 90 days if they are being hired into a well run company that has a long standing existing perm business, healthy database of contacts and candidates and immediate job orders to work on.  But that is not the norm.  Usually such a person must develop both clients and candidates from scratch.  Most people have a non compete, so if you hire someone odds are they cannot go back after their previous customers, which means there is no short cut to their ramping up quickly.  What often happens out there is staffing companies will fire person after person until enough information, resumes, etc is added to the database that finally when someone is hired there is enough to go on for them to have a shot at producing results more quickly.  One must ask this question; What if the company was not so quick to fire all those people?  What if the company understood building a solid staffing business is all about relationships, and that building relationships takes time, and invested in helping that first recruiter brand their name and build a vast contact database.  It seems to me if a person is making the calls, and if they have the right personality, sooner or later things will happen for them. And one thing is true in this business, nobody will ever do well long term until they become a very well connected and respected recruiter in their niche, in their territory. And it takes time and a great deal of work to reach that level.  Hiring and firing over and over is not the way to build a staffing company.

Business Model, should Sales be Separated from Recruiting?
It all depends on how mature a branch is, and how experienced the staff are.

Example:  I hired Liz and Melissa to work for me.  What would have happened had I run my own desk while trying to teach them both the sales and recruiting side of the business?  I would have spent too much time focused on my own results, and they would have become overwhelmed trying to learn too much, too quickly.

Instead, here is what we did.  I gave both Liz and Melissa a territory and a niche to target.  Their job was to recruit, recruit, recruit.  They were to build a prospecting list and make calls to populate that list with names, showing who is working at which company.  They were to recruit for my job orders, setting me up to be their Sales Rep.  I would conduct 3 way calls with them so they could listen to me interview candidates, prep candidates for interviews, and close candidates on accepting offers.  Not only did they learn to master the recruiting side of the business, they developed a large database of contacts which is the key to becoming a successful recruiter. This is true of both temp and perm.

As Liz and Melissa built their network of contacts via recruiting calls, word began to spread about them. Soon, companies were calling them asking for help finding people. And, I trained both of them how to proactively market resumes from Hot Candidates whom they recruited, and use those resumes as legit reasons to start making sales calls.

Once they mastered the recruiting side of the business, both Liz and Melissa started to develop their own clientele, weaning themselves away from me until they were both running their own desk as well connected recruiters in their own territory and niche.

I did not make as much personal income during that phase because I was not as focused on personal results. I invested my time into building up both Liz and Melissa. And the pay off was worth it because once they became solid, both turned into consistent sources of revenue – which is the whole idea behind hiring people.

I then went on to find two more people to duplicate this process with.

So the answer to the question is in a young branch with new people, there must be one expert who is equally strong at sales as they are with recruiting.  That person can act as the branch sales rep while also acting as the coach who trains recruiters.  Developing them by teaching them the recruiting side of the business first. Then adding the sales side of the business later.

So a branch can start off with sales being separated from recruiting, evolving into a branch that uses either a full desk model, or a blend of the two models.

What do I think of the rotation model, where people are rotated back and forth between sales and recruiting?  I suppose it works.  But clients do not like it.  Clients often complain about having to talk to different people all the time instead of one point of contact.  What is the old saying;  “Make the Customer Happy”  If they want one point of contact, do not try to force them to comply with the rotation model where they have to talk to whoever is on the sales desk that week.

Management Style
Let’s be honest, staffing is not the most fun career in the world.  We sales people and recruiters are basically glorified telemarketers.  Nobody wakes up in the morning feeling excited about making 75 calls that day.  And,  people only fear losing something they actually care about.  An example is if John has a junk car parked in the street and receives a ticket warning his car might be towed, he might not care. Go ahead and tow the darn thing!   The base salaries paid to people in the staffing industry are not usually very high.  Yet our work is very demanding, fast paced, sucking the energy from us every day.  If a manager threatens their staff with being fired for lack of performance as a way to motivate them into working harder, most of the time the staff do not value the job all that much in the first place so they could care less if they were fired. My point being the use of threatening management tactics is totally counter productive in the staffing industry.  Nobody fears for their job in the staffing industry because they know they can find another job paying just as much of a salary.  Threatening people for lack of performance only makes it worst, like putting salt on a wound.

People will work much harder if they are motivated with FUN Positive Energy.

Suppose John Smith is on the edge where he is not doing well, but not doing horrible either.  He is stuck in the middle, mediocre.  Which do you think will work best.  Threaten him and put him on some sort of production plan where if he fails to achieve X numbers he is fired. Or, motivate him with positive energy, create a FUN atmosphere, make him feel like he can do anything, energize him, lead him to become a believer in himself like Tony Robbins is famous for doing with people he coaches.  I can give you the answer. If John is threatened his attitude will only get worse and he will get fired or quit.  If the motivating and positive approach is taken there is at least a chance John can be salvaged and turned into a producer.

The problem with management style in the staffing industry is many companies manage by fear, micro managing by numbers.

KEY:  Managing by numbers is essential as to earn X dollars one must produce Y activity. 
X + Y = income.  But when negative and threatening management is layered on top of a telemarketing based job that is already draining makes this career almost unbearable and is why the turn over is so high.

KEY:  The sign of a good leader, or company leadership is when the people both love and fear the leadership!  This is the same way children should feel about their parents.  They should love them because of the strong moral character and nurturing personality, but they should also fear them, knowing stepping out of bounds will not be tolerated.

The sad truth is I rarely hear anyone in this industry tell me they really love their job, and love the company they are with. Most of the time the attitude is more along the lines of the job being just a job, until the next job comes along.  The only way to change that attitude is to move away from negative management and fear tactics, towards building a positive culture that energizes people to want to come to work and give their 100%

Dave Fogg