What's your magic number?

As recruiters we all have a number over our heads- those all-important billing figures!

Some of us are working hard, doing amazing, and happy to tell anyone who’ll listen what we billed last year, this month and how many deals already we have in the bag for next quarter! But what happens when you aren’t yet the office big biller, how do you know if you’re doing well? Are you aware of what expectations are at the moment, not just within your company but in the industry? Well here’s where we come in!!

At Harrison Sands, the 5 of us are speaking to Recruitment Consultants daily, and if you’ve ever been one of our candidates you’ll know that as well as finding out all about your career aspirations and culturally what you’re looking for in an employer we also want to go into detail about what you’ve billed. While this is so important, we also want to find out how you got to those figures.

Over the last month we’ve had quite a few conversations about billing with clients and thought it would be great to share some insights of the clients we supply to.

Often we deal with recruiters looking to gain their second job in recruitment, and to put it bluntly worry what employers will think when they say they haven’t yet had a ￡150K billing year. If you’ve made it to the top of your company sales league this post may not be relevant, but we want to let you know if you’re still getting there, great companies out there do have realistic expectation and can support you. Here’s what some of our clients had to say:

“We target Consultants in year 1 to bill ￡50,000. It’s all about putting the right behaviors in place and learning the sector properly and setting yourself up for year 2.”

“I value the ability to build relationships in junior consultants, I can teach you how to manage a candidate through the offer process but I can’t teach you how to truly win your client’s trust, that’s something you have to naturally be able to nurture.”

“We’re a small boutique business, as long as our consultants are billing over ￡7,000 per month, we’re happy with their performance.”

“One of our top billing consultants really didn’t set the world on fire in their last two roles. He was honest about his performance with us, but we really liked his approach and knowing this we still hired him, making sure that we’d properly identified his training needs. 9 months in and he’s already been promoted and developed such a strong desk. Environment is such a key influence in performance.”

While billings are a massive part of a recruiter’s life and they always will be I would encourage any developing recruiter not to be afraid of being asked about them and to realizes that success looks different depending on your market (and if you like the sound of anything that our clients have said, we’re always up for a call from you!!)