I recently posted on LinkedIn about creating a scorecard to measure and track sourcers. I had a huge number of people reach out to me about my specific scorecard and basic metrics. I want to make sure that my response to those questions is accessible to the entire community. The scorecard is basic but you really don’t need much more to effectively measure and coach a sourcing team.
I attended a session at SourceCon last spring in Atlanta that was facilitated by Jason Roberts, VP, Randstad Sourceright. That session really got me thinking about how we could do performance tracking better at our own organization. Jason spoke about tracking the business impact of a sourcing function. When you look at actual impact, all you can really track is dollars and placements. There is a gap when you take tracking to that high of a level. In order to be able to coach, mentor, and improve a team, it’s necessary to delve deeper to find the symptoms of issues that may begin to arise. Per Jason’s presentation, this process should begin by defining metrics into one of two options:
- Achievement Metrics – These are the business impact metrics. In the corporate world this metric would refer to agency avoidance (agency engaged but internal sourcing makes the placement) and critical pipeline hires. In the agency world you would just be tracking placements and fees.
- Activity Metrics – This is the old mentality of number of dials. Looking at candidates submitted, interviews, offers, acceptance etc.
The critical piece of this performance methodology is to ensure that the team is invested in tracking their actual performance as closely as possible. Achievement metrics are easy to extract from an ATS or other system (provided you have any type of source tracking). The real gap is how to keep quality activity metrics accurate? I would suggest that to make tracking as meaningful as possible to the individual sourcer, it’s important to use activity metrics as a coaching tool not as a corrective action or other tool for performance evaluation. The idea is to track activity metrics but only to go back to them when there is a problem and only for diagnosis.
If the Sourcer is achieving, it’s not important to identify the number of candidates that they submit or the number of profiles that they identify. With this approach, the Sourcer is actually vested in keeping activity metrics accurately because it allows for them to get assistance when they need it with little risk of negative repercussions. A simple old school tick sheet (literally a post it note beside my computer) at the end of each week, allows the numbers to be uploaded into the scorecard. The scorecard calculates yields at each step of the process so that it is easy to quickly identify where people are falling off and what type of coaching is needed.
The other critical piece to evaluate when looking at a scorecard like this is the goal setting component. To get the goals right, it’s critical to look at some basic workforce planning and past performance of similar candidate portfolios.
In my next article, I will walk through some personal thoughts about goal setting and workforce planning, two other important areas of focus.
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