Jobscience provides recruiting and workforce management systems for employers and agencies. In the process of developing and extending our systems we routinely conduct customer surveys to determine what seems to be working and where customers need improvements. In the process, we often discover factors related to our customer’s businesses that potentially have broader interest.

This discussion summarizes a recent survey of agency recruiters that specialize in permanent placement. Specifically, we will report the factors that separate the top producers from the average permanent placement recruiters.

The survey covered just under 100 permanent placement recruiters in geographically dispersed locations, skill requirements and industry specialties. Although strong results can be affected by such factors as the markets that the recruiter serves, the salary levels of the recruiter’s job orders and the economic conditions in their location, we believe that the sample is sufficient to offset these factors.

It should also be noted that many recruitment agencies pride themselves on the longevity of their staff. They do not run General Electric-type operations that turnover the lowest 10% of their producers each year. As a result, a curve that shows the slope from the strongest recruiters to the weakest recruiters has a long tail towards the weakest recruiters.

With these caveats, there appear to be factors that separate the top perm placement producers in an agency from the average recruiters in the same agency, as well as the new & developing recruiters and the laggards. The top producers take less time to fill open job orders and they have fewer open job orders assigned to them. They also produce more submittals, schedule more candidate interviews and produce more offers.

Our survey found that the average permanent placement recruiter has 14 placements a year. 50% of the recruiters that we surveyed produce between 8 and 12 placements a year. The lowest quarter averaged 6 permanent placements a year.

By contrast, the top producers averaged 29 placements a year, 214% better than the average. They did this by producing 78% of the submittals, 55% of the interviews and 60% of the offers generated by the firm.

The permanent placement recruiters surveyed averaged 84 days to close a permanent placement. The top recruiters averaged 61 days, 73% of the time that it took the average permanent placement recruiter to fill their open job orders.

As noted, there are many factors that determine the success on an agency’s permanent placement recruiter but it makes sense that they focus on producing more submittals and interviews for fewer job orders to close their job orders 27% faster than the average recruiter.

The agencies surveyed average 16 permanent placement recruiters. It was not clear whether firms of this size allows enough specialization, both recruiter specialization, and assignment specialization, for this sample to produce findings that are significantly different than the industry as a whole.

Jobscience will continue to publish findings from its customer surveys where we believe there is the potential to have a wider industry interest and educational value. Stay tuned.