One of the top five things I love about recruiting is the warm fuzzy factor. Besides the ability to hunt out the right talent, the ability to build a warm and fuzzy relationship with a candidate or hiring manager is absolutely crucial to be a successful headhunter. But, like most professions (and like life), it has a dark side.
Recruiting is, for all intensive purposes, a sales job. A really complex, messy, sticky, intricate, technical, nuanced, exhausting, I-have-no-control-over-my-product, sales job. We are individual contributors, incented to make placements with a finite group of decently-interviewing engineers in our local area. And as most recruiters are alpha-ish (translated: aggressive), healthy competition can quickly derail into a big, fat can of snarky worms. The two worst drivers of this? Candidate ownership and commission.
Candidate Ownership: Recruiters "own" resumes. We tag them with our name, our notes, our greedy little fingers.
The good: It enables recruiters to build long-term relationships with candidates, keeps things organized, easy to track for managers.
The bad: Candidates sometimes don't get "found" by their owners; other recruiters don't point out the good candidates for fear that it will minimize their ability to fill the role with their own, "owned" candidates.
The ugly: Candidate Snatching. If managers aren't careful, CRM permissions can allow the recruiter to make changes to ownership without much ado. Recruiters can slightly alter names when they save resumes; then feign ignorance if called out on it. Snark factor: 10
Commission: This is the teetering balancing act that recruiting managers need to perform. Group commission=team synergy and collaboration. Individual commission=teamwork evaporates.
The good: Individual commission plans (which is something I've always been a fan of) is great to reward strong performers and incent low performers. Team plans: (which is something I've historically disliked) are great to keep recruiters working together and decreases candidate ownership snarkiness. (I know that's not a word).
The bad: Individual plans increase the snarky factor, because candidate ownership is everything. The biggest problem I see with these plans is there is no monetary incentive for another recruiter to pitch in and help a deal close (example: "What do I care if Bill is out to lunch and his candidate calls, completely lost on the way to his interview? Sweet – then they can interview my guy tomorrow"). Team plans, for lack of a better term, tend to screw over great performers and allow slackers to ride along on their coattails. DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying teamwork exists solely because of monetary incentive. But it helps.
The ugly: Attracting and retaining star talent is nearly impossible on a group plan. And individual plans demolish teamwork. So now what?
Unless you're willing to deal with snark-infested waters, I think it is critical to do both. I would argue that the best bet is to have an individual plan to keep your stars happy, yet combine it with an attainable monthly team goal – one that your team members decide on themselves. If executed well, Bill will make it to his interview, snark will be minimized, and in all likelihood, you'll get to go to Vegas with your recruiting team when they hit their goal. And nothing creates a group bond like Vegas.
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