Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership

Champions keep score! So why not conduct a year-end assessment of whether you are among the top recruiters in your organization?

One of the reasons champions remain on top is that they set aside the time to conduct self-assessments periodically. So, during this late December lag in recruiting, why not act as a professional would and complete your own year-end “recruiters scorecard.” First, it will tell you where you need to improve, but if you share it with your manager, it may also positively influence your job security and your future requisition assignments. Now, in this case, by “recruiter of the year,” I’m not referring to recruiting industry giants like Arie Ball at Sodexo or John Vlastelica of Recruiting Toolbox. But instead, the goal is to merely provide you and others with some informal evidence covering where you rank among the best recruiters within your organization. 

Unfortunately, few organizations actually use formal recruiter scorecards (samples of informal and formal recruiter scorecards can be found later in this article). However, that doesn’t prevent you from taking the lead in creating your informal year-end assessment that highlights the areas where you excelled during this year. Remember that the mere fact that you are voluntarily conducting your year-end assessment also demonstrates to your leaders that you are result-oriented and use data to improve continually. The primary deliverable is a compelling single sheet report that highlights the areas where you have performed well. 

Contents Of Your Assessment And The Report 

I recommend that your year-end report cover four areas; performance on formal departmental recruiting metrics, your qualitative assessment of your work, assessments by your hiring managers, and your plans for next year. The possible content that you should consider including from each of these four areas is outlined below.

Part I –Your Performance On Departmental Recruiting Metrics 

If you are lucky enough to work for an organization with metrics that capture individual recruiter performance, start your year-end self-assessment by gaining access to that data. Next, look for your performance in the most impactful performance categories. Normally, they include the performance and retention of your new hires, hiring manager satisfaction, the number of jobs you filled, and your average requisition load. Then, begin your year-end summary report by providing accomplishment bullet points highlighting any of the important performance categories you performed in the top 25 percentile. And then, as space permits, highlight those performance categories where your performance is above average, unfortunately, because many departmental recruiting metrics are incomplete or weak. You will likely also need to provide some qualitative assessments of last year’s work. 

Part II – Provide Your Qualitative Performance Information 

The second assessment area should include some of your own qualitative performance information that makes you stand out from other recruiters in your organization because few recruiting statistics cover qualitative areas. You may need to write a few of your own performance/accomplishment bullet points covering your work’s quality. Because you may not have many performance numbers in these qualitative areas, you must make sure that each accomplishment bullet point is compelling. Consider providing qualitative descriptions in a handful of these performance areas.

• Highlight your most impressive hire – in a narrative accomplishment bullet point. Consider highlighting your most impressive hire during the last year. Include descriptions of your work quality and any innovations that you may have used.
• Show the impact of your jobs and the breadth of your capabilities – if it applies to you, include an accomplishment bullet point that shows that you have filled high-impact jobs. And that you are capable of hiring top talent across several important fields and business units.
• Include relevant quotes – make your list of key quotes and statements you have received from executives throughout the year. Focus on those that praised your work and that revealed that you are among the best. Also, include statements from top candidates that revealed that you helped to build the employment brand. And that you provided an above-average candidate experience.
• Show relative hiring volume – where possible, include an accomplishment bullet point that shows that you filled a high volume of jobs and that you carried an above-average req load.
• Show you made a conscious effort to increase hiring speed – when possible, include an accomplishment bullet point that reveals that you proactively took steps to accelerate the hiring process to keep from losing candidates that were in high demand.
• Hires from target firms – if your hiring managers have identified high-talent firms to target. Include an accomplishment bullet point that gives examples of new hires that came from these “targeted” competitors. 
• Candidate experience – if you’ve taken actions to improve the candidate experience for top candidates. Include an accomplishment bullet point that gives examples of those actions and their impacts. 
• Cooperation and level of sharing – if you have taken proactive steps to cooperate and share with other recruiters. Include an accomplishment bullet point that highlights those actions. 
• Employer brand contribution – if you have been highly visible on social media to build the organization’s employer brand. You should highlight those activities in a bullet point. 
• Highlight your working from home capabilities – be sure and highlight in a bullet point how you handled the transition to working at home. And how you helped other recruiters when they struggled in this area.
• New recruiting skills you added – you should highlight in a bullet point the recruiting and business technical areas where you polished current skills—or upskilled into any essential “future skills” areas. 
• New technology knowledge added – you should highlight the recruiting technology areas that you have strengthened. 
• Leadership roles taken – you should highlight any areas where you took a leadership role in your department during the turbulent times of the pandemic. 
• Significant improvement areas – if you have made significant improvement in areas that were a problem last year. It makes sense to highlight them in a bullet point.

Part III – Consider Adding Hiring Manager Assessments Of Your Work 

Many organizations don’t collect data on important performance areas like quality of hire or hiring manager satisfaction. So if you served your hiring managers well, it might benefit you to survey them to provide some evidence of your performance proactively. Now don’t get nervous because you don’t have to be a statistician to do a quick informal email survey of your hiring managers to find out how they rated your work this year. Start by limiting the number of managers you need to survey if the number of hiring managers you serviced is too large. Restrict the survey to those that you worked closest with during the past year. And to get a high response rate, remember that the secret is to make the survey short and easy to respond to. So pretest the content of your survey to make sure that it’s understandable and that the survey takes less than five minutes total to complete. Some of the handful of questions that you might want to include in your survey include:

• The quality of this year’s hires – to get your hiring manager’s assessment of the quality of people you have hired. Ask them, “What percentage of those hired with this recruiter during this past year would you rehire without hesitation?” Alternatively, ask them, “What percentage of this recruiter’s hires during last year would you estimate to be very good or better performers?”
• Satisfaction with diverse hiring – ask them, “With 100 as the highest score, how would you rate your satisfaction level with the diversity hiring results from this recruiter during the last year?”
• Recruiter service and responsiveness – ask them, “With 100 as the highest score, how would you rate the service quality and the responsiveness of this recruiter during the last year?”
• Recruiter skill and knowledge – ask them, “With 100 as the highest, how would you rate the recruiter’s skill and knowledge level during the last year?”
• Relevant quotes – ask the hiring manager, “Can you provide any meaningful quotes or short statements that best describe your positive experiences with the recruiter this year?”
• Highlight a few areas of excellence – ask the hiring manager, “Would you highlight 2 to 3 recruiting areas where this recruiter excels?” And “Are there any areas that require significant improvement?”
• Overall recruiter ranking – finally, ask the hiring manager, “Where would you rank the overall performance of this recruiter in the top 10%, or top 25%, when compared to other recruiters in this organization?”

Part IV – Highlight Some Of Your Plans For The Next Year

To show that you plan for the future. You should also consider adding at least one bullet point covering your plans for the next year.

• Plans for next year – in a single bullet point, highlight any plans you have during the next year for continuous improvement, self-development, or adding new recruiting capabilities.

Format And Content Of Your Year-End Report

After you have compiled all of your preliminary results, you need to place them in a logical order within a single page year-end report. This report must be completely positive, and it should reveal the significance of your contribution to the team during the last year. I suggest using an easy to scan a bullet point format. Put the most impressive accomplishment bullet points first from each of the four performance categories (corporate recruiting statistics, your qualitative bullet points, results from your hiring manager survey, or plans for next year). The secret is to make sure that the bullet points taken together tell a compelling story about your performance this year and what they can expect next year.

Samples Of Recruiter Scorecard Content

I’ve written extensively about the content of recruiter scorecards. Below you will find the sample content for an informal year-end scorecard. And then a more formal version that could be used for recruiter assessment across the entire recruiting department.

Final Thoughts 

One of your goals is to find a way to show your year-end accomplishments report to your manager. So I suggest that you tell your manager what you are doing in advance. And then ask for their help by providing you with input as part of your year-end self-assessment process. If the input session with them goes well, be bold, and ask your manager to informally rank your performance among other recruiters (top 10%, top 25%, around average, below average). And if it’s in the top 10%, buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

Author’s Note: Please pass this article throughout your team and network. Next, please follow and/or connect with Dr. Sullivan on LinkedIn. Where you can leave comments on this article. Over 1300 other talent articles can also be found at www.DrJohnSullivan.com