The first thing any recruitment agency owner should do if she or he wants to grow a recruitment business is create a framework or a process for their own recruitment. Because what I find is recruitment agency owners have been great at recruiting for their clients, but are actually pretty terrible at recruiting for themselves. And why do they do that? Because they go on gut instinct, they have a chat to someone. "Oh, Brendan seems like a good player." "Oh, Harry's optimistic. He's, you know, chatty, we'll give him a go." Rather than well, let me really drill into Harry's achievement drive. Has he really got the level? How coachable is Harry? Let me ask some competency based questions to understand his coachability. Like it's pretty basic stuff, but being clear, what are the competencies that I need to satisfy myself that the candidate has? And then ensuring you've got some documentation to support that. In fact, the immediate coaching session before I've met with both of you is actually going through this with a recruitment agency owner. Do you have your own recruitment process? Pause. Slight sheepish look. "Oh, no, I don't Ross" Right? Ok, let's start with that. Just even just a one pager is kind of better than nothing. This is the criteria. What are the three reasons that I think this person will succeed working for me? What are the three question marks or the reasons this person may not? How do I explore those? Maybe it's a second interview, reference check, maybe it's appropriate to do some sort of profiling or psych assessment. Like it's just the lack of discipline that most recruitment agency owners have around their own process. That's what holds them back from growing their business at a faster rate than they do.
