This is Day 11 of the journey from the point where I started from scratch.  To be quite frank, I'm feeling a little wobbly and brain dead that the best thing I could come up with was a misleading title for this.  I have no profound thoughts.  I look back on this weeks activities and see no, as this guy at MRI used to say at all of the conferences, "nuggets of wisdom".  I look back and see the metrics. 

I mentioned one time before that we're, as headhunters (3rd party recruiters), NOT NASCAR drivers.  That would mean we work one job at a time until we get the placement.  We don't do that.  We multitask ourselves until we're silly and pick up the pieces at the end of each day.

So I suppose my profound thought of the week would be to do what you're supposed to do and trust the metrics.  Placements will occur.  Is there doubt showing through.  No.  Not when everything we do, calling existing clients, calling new clients, and calling candidates, is all additive.  We DO make placements.

I have a litmus test to quickly gauge my activity to see if I'm on the right track and this works in our office and industry.  It's called the "Rule of 27".  What you do is you add up all of your Job Orders, the number of people interviewing, and the number of job offers that are pending or out there and it should equal 27 or greater.  If the number is too low, then I can only affect two parts of the equation:  # of JO's or # of sendouts.  If I only have a few (ya just gotta be honest with this one folks) real, live job orders (say 3). Then to get to 27 I have to have 24 people actively interviewing on those 3 job orders.  Well shucks.  That's no good because it's very hard to get a company to interview six of your candidates for one job.  So if this is the case (having only 3 job orders), then I know I need to market more and increase the number of job orders.  On the other hand, let's say you have 14 job orders and your equation ends up less than 27.  We know we need to find more candidates. 

This "Rule of 27" is something we fall back on probably five times a week or more with each recruiter here.  Our business can boggle the mind.  Right now, I have one recruiter that has (and I'm not making this up) 17 people interview on various JO's!!! Isn't that amazing!  Well, I have another recruiter that has 3 people interviewing right now.  In our world, if you have 17 people interviewing, there is a MASSIVE temptation to go on cruise control.  Anyone out there ever had one of those months where you had tons of interviews and everything tanked?  In this case, she's been marketing for new job orders because the number of interviewees is dizzyingly high.  The other recruiter is spending his time finding more candidates.

Try it or call me (866-913-5111 X535) if you don't get it and want to learn more.  It's a neat little tip.

So I end this week with a variety of goods and bads.  One of my client's has an HR person who's been sandbagging my candidates and let's just say her circumstances are soon changing.  Good.  I had another client that fibbed to me because I'm not that much of a jerk to call him a "freaking liar". Bad.  Another client is planning (uh oh ... treading carefully) on interviewing four people next week.  Maybe Good or Bad.  I have a client that I've lit a fuse with and rattled HR and I'm supposedly getting an executive phone call next week to deal with it.  Good or Bad...dunno.  Another client asked to schedule interviews with two candidates and both are traveling for the next two weeks.  Bad. 

So where do I stand with the Rule of 27?  ONLY 15.  That means it's time to market early next week.

Shutting down now and going to see a live local band at a festival.  Time to recharge the batteries!

- Steve