How to Run Recruitment Agency Competitions

In this article, we’re going to show you how to run recruitment agency competitions to boost your results!

Recruitment agencies depend on their numbers:

Your clients want to fill empty positions. 

You want to know that your time-to-fill is faster than a bullet train. 

However, your results depend on the performance of your recruiters.

Why Should You Run Competitions in Your Recruitment Agency?

Competitions are beneficial to any business that relies on employees to bring in new business and retain existing clients.

This is especially true for recruitment agencies. You need your recruiters to constantly attract new candidates, schedule interviews, and pair the most successful applicants with companies looking for people just like them.

However, recruiters can become disengaged from their jobs.

Sure, they’ll perform their tasks. However, they’ll be more prone to slouching off, or simply going through the motions.

All of this is potentially problematic for recruiting agencies. 

You need your recruiters to stay sharp and creative.

But if they don’t feel recognized, if they don’t engage with their jobs… Then you’ve got a problem. According to Best Companies Group, 67% of employees are not engaged, and that disengagement costs companies $450-500 billion annually. 

Fortunately, you can easily fix recruiter disengagement with competitions. 

Healthy competition improves productivity and job engagement. 

And if you can make a game out of it, you’ll have a team of happy recruiters hungry for more results.

It’s true. Engaged staff produces amazing results:

• They are more productive
• They are less likely to be absent from work
• Staff turnover is reduced at highly engaged workplaces (employees love their jobs) 
• Engaged staff have higher customer scores and see increases in sales
• Businesses with engaged staff increase their profitability

And while motivating your recruiters is a process, you can kick-start engagement with the help of recruitment agency contests.

How?

We’re glad you asked!

How to Run a Competition at Your Recruitment Agency

It’s time to add a little healthy competition to the mix. Here’s how to get started: 

Know Your GoalsBefore you set up a competition, make sure you know what the goal is.

While recruiter engagement is the #1 goal, you should also set SMART goals. They’re easy to track, and they help motivate employees in the short and the long term. 

Start by looking at your current results.

Are there any areas that need improvement?

For example, your placement rates may not be high enough. 

Understand the causes behind the issues. In our previous example, placement rates, your candidate pipeline may need some work. 

Your goal, in that case, could be to attract more candidates within a specified timeframe.

1. Set Your KPIs

Some of the most important KPIs to track during a contest are:

1. Fill rate – Your fill rate is indicative of your recruiters’ engagement, as well as your agency’s overall success. 
2. Time to fill – The quicker your recruiters fill positions, the more efficient will your agency be. If your recruiters take a lot of time to fill positions, it may be a sign of job disengagement. 
3. Interview to placement rate – How many of your candidates have been successfully hired? This is a great, tangible metric to use in a competition.
4. Activity – Tracking activities is a great way to motivate your recruiters. You can track activities related to candidate pipelines, as well as hiring activities. If your recruiters take a lot of action (e.g. send emails, increase their submittals, etc.), they’ll be more engaged.

The KPIs you’ll track for your contest depend on your particular goals. 

However, activities are always a great KPI to track as they instantly improve performance.

1. Set Up Your Contest

The first rule of the contest club is: you visualize your data.

If recruiters can’t see that their effort counts towards the ultimate goal or target, they won’t be motivated to put in the work.

Now, you could set up an informal contest and track it as you regularly would. Perhaps, through your CRM.

However, that means very little to your recruiters. 

They still won’t be able to see that their work is meaningful. They won’t get the feeling that they’re actually competing. Instead, it’ll be just another “thing” the top management is doing. 

It’s much better to use a gamified dashboard like Spinify.

Gamification in general is a great way to motivate your recruiters. Even if you’re not currently running a contest. 

Spinify visualizes your recruiters’ data; from the KPI-related actions to scores. It even has a few cool tricks up its sleeve:

You can set up engaging leaderboards.

Your recruiters will be able to see how they’re performing in comparison to other recruiters at your agency.

This alone will make them more engaged. They’ll be more motivated to improve their productivity and come out on top. At the same time, your agency will get more results. 

You can play traditional games like Elimination within Spinify. 

You and your recruiters will go through rounds, and eliminate the lowest performing recruiters. Then, you can make the top two performers go head to see, and see who will come out as the winner. 

If you want to run a contest in your recruitment agency, do it with Spinify. 

Your recruiters will be more engaged every time they see the leaderboard. 

4. Keep the Motivation Going

Finally, you can integrate the competitive features of contests into your daily routine.

Give points for meaningful actions such as increasing the candidate pipeline and successfully filling open positions. 

Set up tiers and levels for recruiters to go through on their way to meeting the target. 

You can even let your recruiters choose special celebratory music. Spinify will play it every time they reach a milestone.

And while a bit of healthy recruitment agency competitions are great for contests when you want to boost your numbers quickly, it works like a charm when you add it to your standard success formula.

After all, your recruitment agency’s success depends on your recruiters.

Motivate them with Spinify!