by Patrick Glynn 
Recruiting and hiring is the basis for any organization bringing in new talent. Branding, reputation, advertising, and more are all aspects that help in the recruiting operation, but the actual process of recruiting is what identifies candidates and fills positions. This makes your recruiters’ success your company’s success.
New technologies—particularly Gen AI tools and agentic AI—have vastly changed what process and productivity look like in the recruiting field. Insight Global ran a survey and found that 99% of hiring managers are already using AI in the hiring process in some form or fashion. But the role of a recruiter at its core is to identify and bring top talent who will help into an organization.
So, how do you improve the productivity of the people tasked with bringing in the people who will be productive for your company?
Let’s talk about some tips and tools you can use to improve recruiter productivity!
Watch our webinar, The Future of AI in Hiring, to learn how Gen AI has affected recruiting.
What Makes a Recruiter Productive?
The first step in improving productivity is “understanding what makes a recruiter successful in your organization,” Alex Walker, a solutions architect at Insight Global’s professional services division, Evergreen, says.
What is recruiter productivity to your company? It may include:
- How many candidates a recruiter has called
- How many interviews they’ve sourced
- The volume of positions filled
- How fast they are at filling positions
Productivity for recruiters can also look like improving your process of inbound applications or developing candidate profiles.
You need to lock down the definition of success before holding recruiters to a standard. Then let your employees know what success looks like. “There is nothing more frustrating than knowing you are being managed against productivity but not knowing what the expectations are,” Walker says.
Tip No. 1: Set Goals for Recruiters
Now that recruiters know what success and productivity looks like, set goals with them. These goals should be specific to the recruiter’s strengths and weaknesses.
Perhaps a recruiter is excellent at finding candidates and getting them on the phone to talk about positions, but they have weaknesses in selling the company to a candidate in the initial interview process. Perhaps set more ambitious goals of how many candidates they get to take an initial phone call interview, but also create goals to help improve their weakness areas. (This is done hand-in-hand with more training and intentional support.)
Some examples of goals and metric for recruiters you can set include:
- Gather profiles on 12 candidates per week in Q1.
- Have four candidates start per month across the last six months of the year.
- Decrease average time from initial contact time to start date from 21 days to 19 days in three months.
Remember to be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time sensitive) with goal setting for your recruiters.
Tip No. 2: Develop Steps for Recruiters to Meet Those Goals
“Each goal should come with a plan to meet that goal,” Walker says. If you want a recruiter to average four candidates starting per month, how do they reach that goal? Is that through the same processes you’ve had but with more intentional investment and planning? Or do you need to change processes that are only around because someone did it that way in the past?
AI technologies have presented a new tool and process to add to the recruiting process. As we mentioned before, it’s engrained in most recruiters’ day-to-day already, whether it’s helping them generate job descriptions or interview questions, or scheduling interviews and drafting emails. It’s helping recruiters with their productivity.
Whatever you establish as your most effective processes, baseline the goals and see how the recruiters do under those plans and processes.
With that baseline, “you can start identifying gaps in the recruiting lifecycle that may have an impact in the recruiters being productive,” Walker says.
For example, maybe the recruiter who needs to have four candidates start per month is excellent at interviewing candidates and finding the right fit for a position, but the manager the recruiter works with takes a long time to get feedback to the recruiter. That can cause the candidate to drop out of the process or take another offer. That’s not wholly on the recruiter. It’s a gap you can identify and work to fix, though.
As you’re establishing proper protocol, these goals can be malleable. You might identify a solution to a problem in the recruiting lifecycle, then four candidates starting per month seems easy. Or maybe that solution might take months to implement. Either way, work with the recruiter to make sure the goals are always realistic and achievable.
Tip No. 3: Define How You Will Track Recruiter Productivity
Tracking productivity in a software helps you identify gaps in your recruiting processes with qualitative and quantitative information.
There are many talent acquisition, applicant tracking, and customer relationship management software out there, and your organization likely already has one. You might’ve even made your own software. When using whatever software you have, though, you must make sure you’re using it to track and measure the goals you set for yourself. Staying on top of software updates will help you optimize its features.
If you don’t think the tool can track metrics you measure success with, contact the software and see if there is a way to fully utilize the platform. Walker, as a solutions architect, says that many companies aren’t using these software to their full advantage. It might take some extra training, but most talent acquisition software should be able to help you keep track of the metrics you need to.
Recruiter productivity is vital to your organization’s success in bringing in talent and retaining it. Establishing what productivity is within your organization is an important first step toward it improving. Set goals based on that vision and create actionable steps and processes to achieve the goals. It’s an evolving process that won’t change overnight, but with clear steps for all involved in the cycle, improved recruiter productivity can transform your organization.
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