There has never been a more critical time for recruiters to focus on prioritising their job orders. Clients are tentative and decisions are slow to come, so we simply cannot waste our time on briefs that were never real in the first place. Working with clients who are not ready, willing or committed to hire is a disaster.

Indeed, making sure you apply yourself to where you will get a return is the mantra we all should be living by every day. I wrote on this blog about tight talent selection, and also about the art of job order triage, and asking qualifying questions, and it might be wise for all of us to review the sentiments expressed there.

But still I find recruiters are too ‘generous’ with their time. Every order is treated as equal. Every client is king. This is wrong (Indeed we need to fire some of those clients!), and this little checklist on qualifying job orders, put together with a lot of help from Firebrand Director Simon Lusty, and our very good friend Susie Hall of Vitamin T, is a great place to start increasing your productivity. (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge)

It is a recruiting skill to actually dig into and expose each of these criteria, and maybe I will blog separately on that in future. But for today, from now on, run every job you take past this template. Be honest. Be brutal. If you don’t know the answer, then get it, before you start any work on a new order.

If you can’t rate every question, then don’t work the order.

Then rank all your job orders by this scoring system. If you have plenty of jobs in the 19+ bracket… well... only work those! Don’t be distracted by unqualified, hard to fill orders with uncommitted clients.

Better to work on 8 jobs and fill 6, than slave away on 20 messy orders and fill two!

*****************************************************************************************************

Subscribe to The Savage Truth, ‘Like’ our Facebook page, and connect with Greg on LinkedIn to ensure you get your recruiting brain-food fix.

******************************************************************************************************