Hey Coach,  

I hope you are having a great Memorial Day Weekend!  

As we head into summer, I thought you might be doing some reflecting on how to improve your recruiting performance from this last recruiting cycle.   

Let me first say that I find improved recruiting performance year after year is often about removing, subtracting, and deleting. It’s rarely ever about adding more. 

The 2^nd thing I want you to take a look at is where you can create better operational efficiencies. 

We NEED to get the right systems and processes in place AND make sure we are getting a good ROI.   

I believe a good spring-cleaning audit should do the trick.  

I have found in the coaching world there can be a buildup of rules, processes, and inefficient systems that can create team dissension.  Without thoroughly cleaning and addressing these issues there could be negative impact on productivity and retention.  

The summertime is the perfect opportunity to do an audit and to resubmit the foundation of operational excellence. Operational excellence is what powers high-performance. It requires that everything be simple, clear, and certain. When your team is certain that this is how it’s done and processes are simple and clear, they’re free to fly.

Five areas that I suggest that you audit and look to make process improvements are communication, project management, documents and data storage, finances and recruiting touch points.

A quick rundown of each of these areas: 

Communication-Do you have an email communication best practices list that you follow with your staff? I have found that atrocious email etiquette can get out of hand quick, causing chaos, miscommunication and missed recruiting follow-up, overall confusion, unneeded stress, overwhelm, anxiety, and it’s a massive hit to your overall productivity.

Just think about this. Think about the amount of time each of your team members spends on email every day. Now, multiply those hours times the number of people on your team, times five days a week, times 250 workdays a year.  

It’s massive, right? Don’t you think you should spend some time training people how to significantly optimize their performance using email? Yeah, me too.  

Recruiting Task Management System- Another important system that can get ganguli and turn into a tangled CF quickly is your project management system practices, especially if everything is in your head. Tasks get assigned and then just sit there only making you feel shame and stress. Many of those tasks are no longer valid or a priority, but they still sit there stinking up your computer screen.  If this is your reality, I recommend that you assign everyone to do an aggressive pruning of your recruiting tasks.  

In horticulture it is called hard pruning or rejuvenating pruning. This is when you cut a shrub off to the height of six to 12 inches above the ground and allow it to regrow. You’ve maybe seen when a gardener goes to work pruning and, in the end, there’s not much but a stump and sheared off branches left. You might think pruning down to the stump is bad, but the advantage of a hard pruning is that the shrub rejuvenates quickly growing back a much healthier and more vibrant version than its previous self.  

You want to do this to your recruiting task management system as well. Cut everything to the stump. Only the most essential tasks and priorities should remain. Trust me, it’ll all grow back quickly, but hopefully a healthier, more productive version than its previous self.

Shared Folders: Do the same thing for your cloud-based shared folders and file system. Talk about getting out of control. Assign everyone to do a hard pruning on all of the folders that they’re responsible for. Just create a separate folder called archive and move everything that is not actively part of their day to day into the archive. Clear it from the clutter of what you’re having to sort through on a regular basis.

Your Metrics: Summer is the perfect time to improve your data reporting intelligence for your recruiting. Simplify everything.  Let’s be real, most of what you were reporting on, no one is even looking at or using. Take this time to perfect the most important data points that make better decisions so that you can take your recruiting or program to the next level.

Your Recruits: Finally, let’s audit your recruiting touch points. By touch points I mean your weekly recruiting messages, your FAQ folder so you can create follow-up messages quickly, and brand documents you might be mailing to recruits.

Where can you do some cleaning and optimize and create more simplicity, clarity and certainty or transactional confidence with recruits?  

There are processes in every program that exists because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” However, just because something is routine, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily efficient.

Use this spring/summer cleaning as an opportunity to look around at the way you operate and ask, how can we make this better? What can we make more efficient?

In summary, understand that cleanliness creates clarity. Clarity produces happiness and productivity. The recruiting spring cleaning process, maybe arduous at first, but the end result will give you more efficient and effective team and make you a much better person to be around when you go home to your family. So do it! 

To your Success,  

Mandy Green