by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
I want to share with you a part of a session that I did with my Recruiting Made Simple Coaching Group.
When you decide it’s time to get your recruiting organized, I find that it is no small task,
To get organized, you really have to get down to the details and break down the components of the recruiting process if it is going to have a meaningful impact to your program and your life in the future.
The goals I had for the coaches in this coaching session was:
- Understand the separate parts to your recruiting system. (Identification, managing leads, qualification, building relationships, campus visits, and getting them to commit are the ones we talked about).
- Brainstorm areas of system improvement. Now that we know and have identified the separate components of recruiting, how do we improve those in a meaningful way, in a repeatable and predictable way, in a systematic way, in a way we can count on, that we can delegate, cross train, and automate?
- Plug the leaks with your daily execution of your plan. I knew in the session that we would probably identify that there are leaks in the way that you are recruiting. What can we do to plug those leaks?
Together as a group, we went through each of these separate parts and broke down the pieces. Here is an example of the first part:
Getting the leads-
These are the some of the questions I walked the coaches through-
What ways are you currently getting recruits? I had them make a list of the ways that they were currently getting recruits on the organize your recruiting template that was provided.
What new ways could you be getting recruits?
What documented systems needed to be generated?
Who on your staff will manage this part of the process?
Cross out ideas that will be distraction during the next six months. It doesn’t mean delete them, just cross them out so you can still see them. These might be future ideas, but just not yet.
This is the routine we went through for each part of the recruiting cycle.
When I went through this exercise myself, I identified that I needed to find a better way to identify recruits. I had been doing the same ol’ watching recruits out at tournaments, was then going through the process and it seemed like it was such a long process of figuring out if they were going to be a good fit. I found a leak and then went in search for a better way.
In the soccer world, ID camps are a huge thing. What I started to do is instead of spending 4 days straight out watching games at tournaments 2-4 weekends a month, my staff and I would try to get into as many other college programs ID camps as we could each month.
For my first 6 years at South Dakota, we had a crappy field and not too many people even knew that we had a team. We found that by working ID camps and getting in front of more kids face to face, we were starting to overcome people’s perception of what South Dakota was and started to take a more serious look at actually playing there for us. At these camps, we could work with them where we could see how they reacted to our coaching and personalities, and we could get to know them a little bit.
Not only did it save on my recruiting budget, but it moved us along the recruiting process so much faster with some of the recruits we wanted. I wish I had thought of it sooner.
It was only when I sat down, broke down the steps and analyzed my return for what I was currently doing was I able to make improvements.
This is just a small part of the Recruiting Made Simple Coaching Program.
Every week, I am not just trying to help coaches get various pieces of their program’s organized, I am trying to make them better. We break things down, analyze the parts, then try to find ways to tweak what is currently being done so improvements can be made.
It is hard work. It is more work on top of what you are currently doing. It is. But once your systems are set up and firing on all cylinders, you will spend less time on your day to day operations because you will have systems in place to help you work through things quicker and with a much higher quality. With the time you will save, you could spend more time on recruiting, more time with your team, more time on strategy, or you will have more time to go home and be with your family.
If you are interested in being a part of this group month by month or if you have any other questions, email me. You can get more of the details here at Recruiting Made Simple. Our next call is Monday May 4th.