A favourite client and I were chatting this week about why so many people, many of them successful billers, are still leaving the sharp end of recruitment and going into ‘internal’ recruitment or ‘account management’ positions.
His perspective was that recruitment is full of bad managers and bad management practices, and that perpetuates itself through the generations of recruiters to come.
If a boss finds it necessary to micro-manage all their staff then there is something fundamentally wrong with either their management of the company, or their own internal recruitment decisions.
What they are also doing is breeding a new generation of micro-managers to follow them. I’m not saying micro-management is always wrong, like bureaucracies are not always wrong, but humiliating conference calls, endless box-ticking, stone cold sales lists and the like all take consultants away from doing what they need to do to make placements.
If that’s the case in your company no wonder people are leaving.
Hi Duncan, the person you spoke with is so correct - the whole industry is full of poor managers, I have experienced some very bad managers, and currently experiencing one at the moment.
ReplyDeleteA director many moons ago told me he will only higher a manager that can bill, and guide a team to make more money. if that said manager starts dictating to people what they need to do - including KPIs then he/she has lost the battle.
There was a team of 3 Recruitment consultants all billing £20k+ a month with 2 resourcers and one admin.
The Team manager went on Mat leave leaving the senior consultant to manage the team.. "business as usual" the SRC said.
One day the Area manager introduces a new team manager to the team, who was from a London based recruitment company. The team is based 100milles away in a different location and a slightly different sector.
The said new manager first says to every one - "I am changing nothing, and will be billing, Business as usual!"
That managers decided to promote the resourcers to consultants, and make the consultants split their desks, Resourcers where there as a support mechanism so that the consultants can concentrate on BD, and build business, all of which where extremely good at their job. So suddenly the RC's have lost a support arm over night, and half the desk.
One by one the consultants left to competitors, and pretty much stole the business. This team is now billing just under £10K, I last heard.
The bad management part to this story is - from day one this manager lied to his consultants, under estimated the billers, didn't listen to concerns, didn't take on board that the team didn't need a "manger" but just need to keep the wheels moving. Too many times managers try to fix things that are not broken. His argument was the KPIs are low... mine would be so what - your consultants are billing and billing well.
Recruitment management needs to change, micromanagement is not the way to manager people, if the managers picked up the phone as well and billed, and lead from the front there would be less turn over..
I don't work in recruitment, but it's a common problem throughout. God save us from micromanagers! One of the main reasons I left my previous job was that it got taken over by micromanagers who dictated everything (my response to one memo from head office of 'would they like to come and actually run the place for us, too and cut out the middleman?' was deemed to be not constructive), the amount of paperwork to be filled in doubled, if not tripled, every head office department thought they were the most important and their priorities must be our priorities, and the attitude was if all the boxes are ticked, then how can there be any problems? And the area manager was box-ticker extraordinaire (which is the politest name I can call him, but he is the worst manager I have ever worked for). But I'd better stop ranting, it's been a year since I worked for them, several months since my partner worked for them - moving on...
ReplyDeleteThanks Tracy, I know exactly the organisation you mean as I worked there myself. Rarely is it a good strategy. Thanks for your comments.
ReplyDeleteKPIs are low... mine would be so what - your consultants are billing and billing well.
ReplyDeleteI take it KPIs are Key Performance Indicators? (That's what they were in my old job - ah, jargon, I don't miss it)
KPIs definitely aren't everything. Previous boss always had the lowest staffing costs of any area manager, every quarter, there he was being lauded for keeping his staffing cost percentages way below average - corollary was, he had the highest staff turnover too - partly because he got rid of all of his most expensive long-serving managers (all bar one, who is still hanging on in there) and partly because he grinds everyone into the ground by keeping them understaffed and heavily 'performance- manages' them, so they leave, even in this economic climate.
And I can't imagine anyone disagreeing that high staff turnover is a definite sign of bad management.
But that's enough on that depressing subject, Duncan - I'm so glad I left, as is R (but you saw how much less stressed we both were recently).
Cheers for telling me about your blog - I did forward the link to R and he has read this post (he didn't roll his eyes too much at my comment :))- I will continue to read it, doubt I'll post that often though.
Take care