by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
It’s really easy to brush off bringing the staff together for a recruiting meeting. After all, isn’t EVERY minute “in the field” working with your current team or communicating with a recruit the most important use of everyone’s time?
I’d say, NO, always being in the field isn’t the most important use of your time.
The time you spend developing yourself and your staff to be more competent and confident with recruiting pays huge dividends with increased commitments of a higher caliber recruit, and gives you precious time back because you are multiplying your efforts with a team!
The benefits of consistent and timely connections outside the “front line” include improvement in:
- Readiness: Prepare to maximize every recruiting opportunity by strengthening their skills, mindset and knowledge.
- Recharging: It’s tough out there. All of us need time to be re-energized to give it their all back in the field. Better with you and their colleagues rather than the local coffee shop.
- Repeatability: The staff needs time to review and learn from each other so all can repeat what goes well (and stop what isn’t working as soon as possible). Coaches on your staff like to know they’re not alone “out there.” The other coaches have the same frustrations, challenges and home-runs. Now they can stop wasting time trying to figure out what they should/should not be doing or calling each other.
- Retention: Turnover decreases when there are regular touch-backs with you and the rest of team.
Recruiting Meetings Must Be Timely
Okay, if these benefits are important, then how do you ensure your meetings are timely? There are several ways:
Hold regularly scheduled recruiting meetings often enough to keep your staff at top performance. Weekly is most ideal.
There is a very successful D1 volleyball program we work with that breaks her 60 minute weekly recruiting meeting into 45 minutes of training and 15 minutes of need-to-know info. Her results speak for themselves. “Our staff had less turnover and higher results that many of the other teams we compete against.
Here is a simple guideline to follow for how to break up your meeting time:
- 10% focused on the past (recruiting results, wins, losses, etc.)
- 10% on the present (current top recruits you are speaking to, operations updates, etc)
- 80% building for the future
For a 60-minute meeting, that’s about 10 minutes of what happened, 10 minutes of present information and 40 minutes to help them better recruit in the future!
A meeting becomes timely when more focus is on the future — equipping the staff to sell your program in more and better ways, get in front of more recruits, build their confidence and competence to keep the recruiting process moving along.
You will capture and expand more of that elusive time and multiply your efforts as you deliver more timely and effective recruiting meetings.
Mandy Green is a national recruiting advisor for Tudor Collegiate Strategies and the founder of the Busy Coach program for college coaches. Her advice and training has helped hundreds of coaching staffs around the country for years. To discover her resources that might be right for you, click here.