What does your daily recruitment timeline look like?

With multiple tasks and moving parts across the recruitment process your day can take an unproductive turn quickly.

Did you know having a routine can increase your productivity and improve your placement rate?

From a time management standpoint, there are two ways to work your desk, production-oriented and activity development-oriented.  

Many recruiters work their desk reactively – that means jumping from one boulder of criticalness to the next all day long. 

Reactive recruiting makes us production-oriented as opposed to activity development-oriented. This concept is unquestionably the finest methodology of working the desk as recruiters who concentrate on developing activity, end up with more production than those who concentrate on production alone.

It’s a matter of breaking things down into parts rather than projects.

Start by focusing on similar parts of the whole process. This means marketing calls, recruiting calls, submit send outs, reference checks, etc.

As a Recruiter, and now a Recruiting Team Lead, I encourage those just starting out or in a recruiting rut to get the most out of their day with a simple schedule that allows for some flexibility.

8:30 am – 9:00 am: Call Active Applicants

This is the time of day that I call people who are out there pounding the pavement looking for jobs.  These candidates carry more market intelligence than someone who is making 30-50 marketing calls a day.

If you can follow up with someone who is actively interviewing and find out where and who they are interviewing with, you will hopefully land more leads and pick up more job orders.

9:00 am – 10:00 am: Job-Lead Follow-up

At this time, I am following up with client and candidate leads that were generated from the previous day.  

10:00 am – 11:30 am: Hard to Reach Activity

Mid-morning, I try to do marketing emails, LinkedIn messages, and calls to non-existing candidates and clients. This is the time you should message the candidates and clients that are typically harder to get in touch with or who I have never reached out to before.

Typically, people are settled into their desk, have already had their morning coffee and their brain is more active. The likelihood of them responding during the work day is greater.

Check out The Best Time to Send Emails for Replies via the Beamery blog.

11:30 am – 3:00 pm: Pipeline Review and Growth

This is where most of my ‘ideal recruiting’ calls tend to take place because I am focusing on evaluating new talent and talking to existing connections. Lunch is also eaten during this period giving me a boost of energy and focus.

This seems to be my best time to reach someone who has been sourced but not yet qualified.

3:00 pm – 4:30 pm: Send-outs and Submits

In preparation to close my out my day, I put together my send-outs and submits. I am following up to phone calls and messages that weren’t necessarily ‘urgent’ and responding to messages via LinkedIn or emails to set up calls and appointments for later on in the week.

4:30 pm – 5:30 pm: Manage and Plan

Manage existing candidates with ATS updates, calls, Thank You notes, etc. Try not to get wrapped up in todos throughout the day, take a moment at the end of the day to think about the next day and week.

This business is chaotic and things change all the time.

If you can try to stick to a loose schedule, and plan your day accordingly, I promise that you will reap the rewards and the work won’t seem like work.

For more on staying productive, check out my colleague and super-sourcer, Robyn Carney’s take on procrastination: Why it pays to not procrastinate; from an ex-procrastinator.

Stay connected. Kevin Kluge is a Recruiting Team Lead, Account Manager and Salesforce Specialist, at Objective Paradigm. His work with Talution’s Group’s Salesforce Practice has him identifying and placing technology professionals in the Chicago Market and across the US. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn here.