Struggling to Manage Your Recruitment Team? 3 Smart Ways to Spot your Star Recruiters and Groom them into Leadership Roles
It’s a question that every recruitment firm has to face sooner rather than later – how to grow leaders within the team as we grow our profits?
Identifying and grooming the next level of leadership is key to taking your business to the next level. As with planning your business moves here too timing is of the essence – it requires a keen eye to spot the talent within your team and groom it at the right time.
How to tell the stars from the also-rans? The future leader from the follower? Follow these 3 smart techniques.
Start Early
The most important rule is its never too early start spotting your in-house talent. So start right with the induction of your new recruit.Yes that’s right.
Use the initial period when a team member starts working on live assignments to identify & segregate people having skills suited for specific roles in your recruitment workflow.
Some examples would be:
- Headhunting
- Client interactions
- Salary negotiations
Then constantly observe & judge how your team members perform specific roles – track their client-facing skills and attention to detail in interactions. This will give you the best insights on your team’s potential for higher level tasks.
Delegate, Give Higher Responsibilities
This is a fool-proof way to get the future leaders in your team to stand up & be counted. Once you’ve spotted potential leadership material – the next step is to expand their role to include new, higher level responsibilities.Provide more authority for the employee to self-manage and make decisions. Invite the employee to contribute to more important, department or company-wide decisions and planning.
But what can you delegate? Here are some scenarios:
- Client Feedback– At times when you’re out-of-office/on leave etc. a team member can be assigned to take feedback on submitted resumes from the client
- Reporting– Consider delegating the task of consolidating individual team member reports (daily/weekly etc.) into a single team report to one of your team members
- Candidate Interactions– When headhunting senior candidates, consider involving a team member for routine tasks such as explaining documentation, joining formalities etc
Become Their Mentor
Okay, so now you’ve identified the people in your team and decided the higher level tasks you can delegate. But how do you make sure that these team members will deliver on their promise?This is where your mentoring skills play a crucial part. Master coaching skills for use with teams. Once you’ve zeroed-in on the people you want to groom take them under your wing.
Support/build on ideas or proposals, acknowledge members’ ideas by summarizing. You mentoring initiative should include all or most of these:
- Training resources such as scripts & PowerPoint presentations
- Mock sessions/role-plays on client interaction scenarios & issue escalation handling
- Training on specialized recruitment methods such as Headhunting techniques & interacting with senior-level candidates
- Consolidating/compiling reports of the team
- Using recruitment automation software for generating team reports and tracking work items.
So there you have it – start early, delegate with thought & once you’ve identified your leadership talent do not hold back – invest your time and resources in single-mindedly mentoring your stars to become leaders.
Do you have a story to share from your organization of developing leadership within your teams? What other initiatives can encourage leadership-oriented behaviour in a recruitment team? Do share your insights with me.
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