An industry peer asked me to provide some perspective on corporate recruiting team compensation plan design as outlined below. Since this is not my area of expertise, I provided her with what I have found to work within some of my clients as in my response but would love to hear other insights the community could share on this topic.

Question: We have a client that is trying to set up an internal recruiting dept to find sales agents for insurance. They want to pattern the pay practices after external recruiters -- with incentives. What are typical recruiter pay practices for the recruiters who only source candidates vs those who perform a full life cycle recruiter role?

My Response:here are my thoughts as well as a few resources you can go to get more insights and data:

Resources:

www.Salary.com, www.payscale.com and www.glassdoor.com - Quick compensation trends and benchmarking. Glassdoor is great to gain insights from employees about a particular company's practices.

Internal talent acquisition team compensation:

- Staffing Director / Manager $95-$150K comp depending upon scope and size of team. Bonus plan tied to corporate and individual performance metrics being met.
- Research / Sourcing Recruiters: $55-85K Base + Bonus based upon skill level with a bonus pool linked to individual, team and company performance.
Total comp $55K - $110K.
- Recruiting Team: $65K - $100K + bonus based upon skill level with a bonus pool linked to individual, team and company performance metrics being met.

What NOT to do:

- Do not tie incentive comp to metrics that are beyond the person's direct control in their role. I.E. Many company's try to measure a researcher/sourcer's performance on number of hires -- but their role is to source potential talent and they do not own or impact the hiring process or decision. They DO however, impact the number of candidates sourced for each role AND the quality of those candidates as measured by the % of sourced candidates that actually move forward in the interview to hire process.
Recruiters on the other hand, impact hires more directly, because they own and drive the process forward to completion after receiving candidates sourced by a sourcing team.

NOTE: The above applies in organizations with recruiting managed by teams of dedicated sourcers and recruiters typically working in a centralized or regionalized model supporting the business. For decentralized models, you will probably have FULL LIFE CYCLE recruiters doing all their own sourcing and driving the process to completion. In this case, you CAN measure them on # hires as they can impact the candidate and hiring volume and quality.

As a general rule, my advice is NOT to incent recruiters and researchers on a fee per hire basis as it creates internal competition for candidates and does not foster team efforts. However, depending upon the structure of the organization, this model may work -- provided the per hire bonuses earned are pooled and the team shares in the bonus pool equally on a monthly or quarterly basis. Either way, I would not advise having more than 20% of total comp coming from variable incentives as you will sacrifice recruiter focus on quality and speed for QUANTITY of speed resulting in higher turnover later.

Hope this helps!

Carl Kutsmode
Recruitment Optimization Consultant
www.Recruiting-Consultant.com