Last week’s first post for this series of 12 – 1. The Competencies of a Recruitment Consultant – Planning went down very well, with it being read every day since by over 100 people. This week I will focus on monitoring. The act is described in the dictionary as ‘Observe and check the progress or quality of (something) over a period of time; keep under systematic review.’
2. Monitoring
I have had many discussions with MDs of recruitment companies that say that they don’t want to ‘micro-manage’, they came from an environment where they felt KPI’d to death. This isn’t about micro-management as it shouldn’t be the manager that’s doing the detailed monitoring, but the individual, based on their plans. The manager / MD should be getting the review of the details and their responsibility is to make sure that this review happens on a regular and consistent basis.
Once you have your plan, then work out what elements of the role needs to be monitored to make sure that you are on track and if your objectives have specific and measureable outcomes – then it makes it easy.
Purpose: -The purpose for a recruitment consultant is to be disciplined in monitoring their business on a daily basis. That they understand their performance through referencing against their plan and to operate with a sense of urgency to overcome barriers to business performance.
Questions to determine monitoring competence:
1. Tell me about how you monitor your business?
- What specifically do you monitor in your business?
- How often do you monitor these?
- What processes have you put in place to keep the records?
2. Tell me about a time when monitoring has assisted you in your business planning:
- What happened?
- What were you aiming to achieve?
- What particular areas did you monitor and why?
3. Give me an example as to when you have had to change your approach in the middle of a project or plan?
- What was the situation?
- How did you know you needed to make changes/alterations?
- How did you use monitoring as a skill?
High level of competence shown:
- They create smarter monitoring methods in order to create more time to develop their business performance in other areas
- They understand the importance of monitoring in order to be able to challenge their own business thinking
- They understand the importance of staying disciplined within the monitoring process
Each week I’ll tackle a new competency and I will follow the same format of Purpose, Questions and Examples of what a high level of competency would look like.
For the original post with a snapshot of all of the competencies I will be covering this summer, click here – The Key Competencies of a Recruitment Consultant.
