Curtis Mackenzie

Co-Founder / Business Development

Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Curtis is the Co-Founder of KPI Manager. Currently residing in Tokyo, Japan, he has been living and working in Asia for over 20 years, most recently founding, building and selling a successful IT recruitment firm in 2018.

For over 12 years, I owned and managed a recruitment agency in Tokyo. Over many quarters of analyzing sales results, I found that the size of the sales pipeline was the key metric to predict a profitable quarter. Why was this? Here is the issue,… you can't know which particular deals in your sales pipeline will close successfully, and which won't. You can have an incredible team of "sharp shooter" recruiters, but you will still only close a smaller number of deals than go into your pipeline. After many years, and hundreds of deals, I still couldn't predict the results. The "perfect match" candidates get multiple offers or counter offers, headcounts get suddenly "frozen", clients simply don't offer enough money. There are a myriad of reasons why a "sure thing" deal can fall through and your quarterly sales results are falling short. You can't control these events entirely, however you "can" control the number of deals that get started and worked on. This focus on higher activity levels, coupled with the skills of great recruiters, leads to consistent billing from quarter to quarter.

The Problem

Clearly the challenge was how to create a large sales pipeline consistently every quarter, but how do you do this without overly aggressive targets, micromanaging, and putting your staff under pressure? Recruiters will have one great quarter but then take their foot off the accelerator, and suddenly they're behind on their targets. Other recruiters get discouraged, some lose motivation when team members are not pulling their weight. Junior recruiters take time to get up to speed and can become frustrated when results don't come as quickly as expected. What do you do when a new hire is under-performing and you need to turn their results around? How do you solve all of these motivational problems?

The Idea

Understanding that consistent day to day activity created the consistent sales pipeline I needed, I decided to introduce a "game" to my team. We created a competition on the office white board. Key "critical" activity were identified, each of these "KPI" were then assigned a different number of points based on how important it was to the business. For example, attending a new client meeting may be rewarded three points, sending out a C.V. to a relevant job may be one point, and securing a client /candidate meeting might earn five. Each time a team member completed one of these critical tasks they were awarded the allocated number of points. The points translated into entries into the reward draw, so the more points a team member gained the greater the chance they had of winning the reward at the end of the campaign. Finally, the length of the campaign was agreed to be one week, we set three different rewards, and the game was played.

My Concerns

I did have some concerns, "...aren't my senior staff too busy to 'play a game?'", "…maybe the rewards won't be attractive enough?", "... will staff get bored?".

The Results

Thankfully my concerns were unfounded, both my senior and junior recruiters enjoyed the game. Daily activity increased immediately, and so did teamwork, office morale, reporting, and information sharing. Not only that, my staff wanted to start a new campaign the following week, … and then the week after that. Team members could see what each other were doing on a day to day basis and work more efficiently together. The game created a fun and positive competitive spirit in the office. Rewards were seen as a "bonus" on top of commissions, so they didn't need to be huge monetary value. Campaigns ended with fun sales meetings; employee engagement was up. Organization wide activity increased significantly, and we eventually closed more deals that quarter.

Did this solve ALL of the challenges of profitability in a competitive recruitment market? No, but it was one of the most effective processes we used over the years. This is why we created KPI Manager. Simple and easy to use software for recruitment agencies to motivate their teams and get better results.