How many Staffing Professionals are too many?

Is the answer to an increase in staffing needs always to add more recruiters, or sourcers? Do we really think the answer is always to add more. Is more really better? The answer is not always more but perhaps better, or perhaps  educating what you have, or even breaking apart the Staffing Lifcycle (SLC) into parts and assigning different parts to different people, ie sourcing, calling, etc.                                                                                                                                            

What if you have a team of 4, 2 account management recruiters (AMR) and 2 sourcers. If you are having problems filling your openings perhaps the answer is who is doing what. Perhaps one of the AMR’s would make a better sourcers and vice versa. I was speaking to a friend of mine who manages a staffing team of 6. He was talking to me about the fact they are not filling enough positions fast enough. I asked him what he thought the problem was? He said he was not sure, but the management wanted to add more recruiters. I said okay that is one way to go, but perhaps before you do you should do an analysis, find out were in the SLC the issue is. He agreed and we talked about how he should do it. Long story short after doing it, he discovered the issue was 2 fold. One a lack of training, and 2 not taking advantage of what he had. What he had was 3 strong AMR’s and 3 strong sourcers. However since all were full-cycle, he was not talking advantage of their strengths. So a simple switch to a AMR and sourcer model, and 3 months later all was good.

The point is before you go adding people look at what you have, look at their skills maybe the answer to your problem is not adding more, but utilizing the skills of what you have.