FRED BAYR: Financial services recruiters are being killed by KPIs
City recruitment is akin to manic depression. One minute you're higher than Charlie Sheen. The next you're lower than Sylvia Plath.
The positives include: the billings (increasingly intermittent due to the massive skills gap); paid lunches and holidays abroad; and the ego boost that accompanies not being on the dole.
The negatives centre around one thing: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
If you like KPIs it means this: you are a power hungry micro manager. If you are a power hungry micro manager, I would rather you removed yourself to a safe distance or entered an elimination programme for the terminally egotistical.
Although KPI's can be useful in areas like project management they are destructive in recruitment. Here's why:
1) KPI's reduce candidates to mere numbers
"Recruitment is a numbers game". If you are a recruiter and your manager tells you this, look for a new job.
As a recruiter, your manager, like you, will probably have a C in GCSE maths. However, this will not prevent him or her from insisting that he/she knows what he's talking about when he says all you need to do to make money is make one hundred telephone calls a day.
This approach means candidates are treated like lottery numbers. This is not right. Personally, I am of the opinion that every candidate requires a unique initial approach. When I call you, it will be because I believe in you. Honestly.
2) KPIs lead to high recruiter turnover
Companies relying heavily on KPI's have very high staff turnover rates.
Recruitment consultants do not like KPIs. Faced with them, they leave.
As a result, clients have a new point of contact every few months. Meeting the fourth new Market Risk "specialist" since January is a waste of time, even if you work in HR.
3) KPIs create a lack of independence
This, however, is the nub of the KPI abomination: they reduce the average adult recruiter to a state of infantile subservience.
Most people would like some responsibility and autonomy. KPIs are like being living at home with your parents and being told when you have to go to bed. Sometimes people need independence to grow. Sometimes it is not appropriate to spend three hours on the phone.
So, next time you take a call from a recruiter who hangs up before you're able to explain that you're happily employed, you'll know why. That recruiter is being driven relentlessly by a set of futile targets devised by a power-crazed lunatic with a computer programme. Pity him. Please.
Fred Bayer is the pseudonym of a financial services recruiter in the City of London. He blogs daily at Recruitmentrehab.
