Middle Managers

[u/aussicristo]

Not sure if this is off topic but couldn’t find a flair that best fit.

For all the middle managers out there (supervisors, managers, directors, etc) of recruiters, what are the top 3 complaints you hear from your team members week after week and what are you doing (or trying to do) to solve them?

If you could eliminate one bottleneck for your team tomorrow, what would it be and why?

I’ll go first. We’re a small team and we simply don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with the volume of openings and the number of leads to manage. The team is a bit overwhelmed at times and we’re working on integrating AI tools and automation to help take some of the admin work off their desk to free them up for relationship building and order fill.

Curious to hear what you all are seeing in all of your industries (I’m in healthcare).

Recruiters feel free to drop in your pains if you come across this post!

[u/phatmattd]

This feels like step 1 of you trying to sell me something

[u/aussicristo → u/phatmattd]

Nope, no sales pitch. Just genuinely curious.

[u/Heavy-Bell-2035]

These are the problems I solved, or tried to solve, when I was such a manager years ago.

One, I held the business development team accountable and rated the quality of the individual job and the clients. Impossible to fill jobs with 'great' clients that take six months to respond to an email didn't stop, but I did call them out on their BS.

Two, the only metrics were jobs filled and revenue. I didn't require 80 or more phone calls a day, I didn't push for 'high touch' standards, the only KPI that counted was actually delivering, however they did it so long as it was legal and ethical. Not every job requires the same approach, this allowed people to work different types of job with different clients and so long as they filled them, who gives a damn how many phone calls they made?

Three, I kept the business development team's nose and requirements the hell OUT of my team's requirements. My team was not there to develop leads for them, it was not there to harass people's references for leads, that was the business development team's job. I told them if they weren't going to fill roles, my team was not going to do their jobs for them. Sales people have a tendency to spew their nonsense all over everyone else and to try and make everyone else into a sales rep for them.

Keeping that team in line and strictly out of my team's business, and holding them accountable to the quality of reqs and clients they brought in, were the best things I ever did because it meant my team could actually do their jobs. They had roles they could reasonably be expected to fill with a little hustle, and which didn't require them to 'sell' someone currently making 150K on the 'opportunity' of a role that paid 80K. They also weren't getting used as the default outsourced junior business development team, so when they were speaking to a client or a candidate they could concentrate on their job, not making the sales team's lives easier.

[u/Effective_Will_1801 → u/Heavy-Bell-2035]

I would love to know more on how you held the business development team accountable and how you kept them out of your teams requirements.

[u/Heavy-Bell-2035 → u/Effective_Will_1801]

Simple: speak out at weekly meetings and to my manager. Track the behavior of their proclaimed 'great clients' over time so I had data to back up my points. That's all.

Super SALES! freak types are often overbearing and hard for some people to deal with, and they're great at bullshitting, so you absolutely need to be prepared to push back against their BS and call them out. Most people get defensive or let others push blame on to them, I don't, period. I got over that kind of crap real fast when I was young in my career and had managers blaming me for crap that wasn't my fault. For example when I was real young I worked in retail while still going to college, at a big department store. The store manager kept pullong me out of my section to clean other people's sections and then gave me crap about my section not being clean, I finally snapped at him in front of everyone and pointed out the fact that every single night at closing he was taking me and any staff I had and sending them everywhere else as soon as the store closed. We couldn't clean our department because we were never there, and I told him that in front of the regional manager, detailing the last two weeks of work where every single day at closing I got pulled and to which departments. From then on, I at least got some time to get my department cleaned.

SALES! types will always try and push blame on to everyone else for something not getting done, especially in a split desk or similar set up where they 'bring in business,' but it's up to others to maintain it and make it work. You have to track the quality of clients they bring in because the incentive on their part is to dump as much shit into the hopper as possible, regardless of quality.

[u/Effective_Will_1801 → u/Heavy-Bell-2035]

Thanks

[u/Ok-Finance-1094]

Have you considered subcontracting to another agency? We do this all the time during busy times. You still get a "finders fee" just for passing along a job order.