As a manager in a recruitment agency, it is that time of the year to do a performance review of your recruiters. They look forward to your feedback which is vital for their growth, setting goals, and guiding them towards betterment. But, the challenge often lies in choosing the right phrases for performance review. Your words can have a significant impact on how your recruiters would react. Let’s take a look at what phrases you need to use and avoid potentially detrimental ones during performance reviews.
Things That Matter Before the Interview
In a performance review, you need to evaluate your recruiters' performance against their key responsibilities and goals outlined in their job description which provides a clear benchmark to measure their success. Understanding their strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement is crucial to providing constructive feedback during the review. For example, their ability to identify top talent, engage candidates effectively, and successfully negotiate job offers are indicators of their success in the recruitment process. Providing specific examples of successful placements, candidate interactions, and overcoming challenges can help paint a clearer picture of the recruiter's performance and contributions to the agency.
With Manatal, you can leverage its generated reports to get insights into their strong suits and areas of improvement by analyzing data on each of their past placements, sourcing methods, and candidate interactions. These metrics are good as they give you an objective view of how efficient your recruiters are. But there are other points that you can include in their performance review including candidate experience and hiring manager's satisfaction[1].
Ultimately, you can make informed decisions and provide targeted feedback to your recruiters, improving their performance and driving success in the agency.
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6 Phrases for Performance Review You Can Use
Now that we’ve covered what you need to know before the interview, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. What phrases for performance review you should use during the interview?
The main thing to remember is that it’s about recognizing their accomplishments and their overall performance for the year. Also, you must remember that a performance review should be an equal exchange of conversations between you. It’s not just you telling them how and what they have done and calling it a day.
In general, it’s a safe space for you and your recruiter to be truthful, clear up any issues, and ensure everyone is on the same page.
With that in mind, using the correct phrases for a performance review can benefit both parties as you identify which area they have improved and need to work on. Meanwhile, they can use the opportunity to express their satisfaction and give their suggestions on how to improve.
Here are six things you should say during a performance review
1. “Congratulations on achieving A, B, and C last year.”
It’s good to start the conversation with something positive. So, acknowledge their accomplishments first. As a good manager, you should have come prepared before stepping inside the meeting room. Compile reports such as attendance records, summaries of discussions, and client feedback. Basically, anything that indicates the expectation you’ve set of your employees the year before.
You can use Manatal analytics suite to have a comprehensive insights into each of your recruiter’s performance metrics including the number of successful placements, revenue, and number of clients signed with your agency. This way, you and your recruiter have a better of view of their achievements and make it as a benchmark for new goals for the following year.
2. “What do you like best about working on any past projects?”
While you’re still on the topic of their achievements, ask this follow-up question. Because, most of the time, your employee might acquire new skills or learn something new after being involved with different projects.
Give this chance for your employees to express their positive takes on handling those projects. Empower them to share their opinion; from here, you can give suggestions on improving their skills. You even can suggest to HR what sort of training they can attend.
3. “What were your concerns about completing your daily tasks and projects?”
When your employees were completing their tasks, they would have encountered some concerns that they rather keep to themselves. So, this is the time for you to ask them the question and listen. Because you never know exactly why they decided to keep quiet about them. Take some notes of what kind of issues they faced prior to their performance review.
For instance, if one of your recruiter says they have to manually email each candidates either to invite them for an interview or to inform about their status in the hiring pipeline, you can opt for a recruitment tool with automation. With Manatal’s email automation, candidates will receive an email every time your recruiter move their profile from one stage to another. This reduces the time that they spend on an applicant.
4. “I noticed that you’re having issues with task A while working on project Y. Here are my suggestions.”
If one of your team members seems to be having trouble but hasn't brought it up, it's a good chance for you to step in and address the issue. Be honest and clear about when you noticed these difficulties.
When you talk to them about it, try to find a middle ground between being too strict and too easygoing. They should know that your feedback is meant to help them improve. And it's important to be straightforward in your communication.
For example, let's say you've noticed they're having trouble communicating with other team members. You could mention that you've seen some room for improvement in their interactions. This is where Manatal's tools can help. With Manatal's collaboration features, you can show them effective communication methods by sharing examples of successful interactions on the platform. You can also use Manatal's learning resources to give them access to online materials that can help them improve their communication skills.
5. “What are your goals after this performance review?”
After spending some time conversing with your employees, they might think of setting new goals or you could even draw up new goals for them before the meeting. But, since the appraisal is about their performance, ask your employees first if they have new goals after hearing your feedback.
Assuming that their answers align with your thoughts, tell them you’re available to help them suggest online courses they can take. Conversely, you can use Manatal’s ATS to monitor their progress towards their goals. For example, if they want to improve their candidate conversion rate, you can use ATS to track their progress.
6. “How do you feel about working here in general?”
At the end of the day, you need to remember that your recruiter is a human being with feelings just like you. It’s not only about work, even though you might talk about achieving great results. You need to be mindful not to neglect their emotional well-being while they’re an integral part of your agency.
In fact, there’s research that says expressing emotions can be beneficial in the workplace. When they talk and work through their emotions, your recruiters can come up with good and better ideas and are more engaging in discussions.
Avoid These 6 Phrases for Performance Review
Have you got everything down on what to say to your employees? Good. Now, let’s talk about what you should not say during the performance evaluation. Because if you say the wrong thing in a performance appraisal, it can be disastrous for you, the employee, and possibly the company.
When your messages are not conveyed clearly to your employees, for the coming year, you expect to see them underperforming with less-than-average results, low morale, or worse, them quitting their jobs.
Here are the six phrases for performance reviews you should NOT say:
1. “You’re doing good. Good job!”
Yes, it’s a good thing for them to hear. But, you’ve got to be specific as in - how did the recruiter do a good job?
When acknowledging that they had done a good job, tell them why—highlight which part of the tasks leads to your recruiters meeting your expectations. Use the generated reports from Manatal to evaluate if your team members achieved their KPIs like the cost of hire, time to hire, and more.
It is important for you to follow up on feedback and check in regularly with your teammates. This way you can ensure that they are making progress and allow you to acknowledge their improvements.
2. “I don’t have much to say.”
In contrast to the previous point, you should never say that you don’t have anything to say. Your recruiters are already feeling nervous about getting their performance evaluated by you, hoping to discuss their achievements and wanting to solve any issues that they have. But hearing those words might leave them confused and feel demotivated. They’re not sure whether they did a good job or at least met your expectations.
Plus, there’s no excuse for you not to say anything because you have all the tools available to get your points across. So, don’t disappoint them by just filling in the evaluation form and consider it done.
So, instead of saying “I have nothing to say”, you can use the data from Manatal to discuss specific aspects of your team members’ performance. With metrics like cost of hire, time to hire, and more, you can share with them on which areas they met or exceeded expectations, as well as constructive feedback.
3. “You’ve done better than so-and-so.”
One thing at work that perhaps most of us don’t like is being compared with another colleague. For example, let’s say you’re telling Bob that Susan’s been doing great with a project, such as the highest candidates required and hired, as compared to his achievements. This will create a situation where he would be jealous of her and might affect their working together in the future.
If you are doing that, you have got to stop. Instead, you can use Manatal’s built-in report to focus on each recruiter’s individual performance. Then you can use the same report to provide objective feedback and avoid comparing between team members.
That said, always remember that an employee’s performance review is only about that particular employee. It’s not a place to compare them with other team members. Both of you need to discuss their accomplishments and what you can do to help them do better in the future.
4. “Let’s get this done quickly. I have got another meeting in 10 minutes.”
Performance review is not something that you do last minute. The HR department has set dates for hiring managers to complete the evaluation and send the appraisal reports to the department before the set deadlines.
So, you should set aside 30 minutes to 1 hour from your schedule for each employee to do the review because there’s nothing much you can discuss with a short one-on-one discussion. It’ll be a session of you telling the employees what they’ve done, and that’s it. There’s no discussion to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
Having that in mind, confirm the deadline to send your workers’ appraisal report deadlines, block some time to have a meaningful discussion with them on your calendar, and prepare what you need to say.
5. “Want to get a promotion and bonuses? Then, work towards hitting the target.”
Performance review should be a safe space for your team of recruiters to discuss their work and seek your guidance. However, making empty promises or instilling fear can demotivate them during the interview.
Let’s say one of your recruiters believes you and achieves the target, but you can’t fulfill your promise during the appraisal session. The employee might approach the HR department with complaints about unfulfilled promises.
Unless you have the ability to predict the future, avoid making promises you can’t keep. Don’t set the bar too high to avoid finding yourself in a difficult situation.
With Manatal, you can set realistic targets based on data-driven insights, track progress, and provide constructive feedback. This way, they know exactly what they need to do to achieve their goals.
Remember, instilling fear in your teammates won’t automatically improve performance overnight. Productivity is best displayed when they feel understood and their needs are met. Using Manatal, you can better understand their performance and provide the necessary support for their growth and development.
6. “I’m not happy with the way you handle past projects.”
So, you’re not happy with how your employee handled certain projects prior to the performance review. And, perhaps they know that you might not be happy about it. Hence, there’s no need to be too emotional about it. As the manager, you need to focus on what’s being discussed with your staff, not how you feel about it.
Manatal is a versatile tool for managing customer relationships, recruitment, and performance reviews. It helps track employee progress and areas for improvement, such as communication issues with your recruiters. During reviews, use specific examples to provide constructive feedback focused on actions rather than personal traits. Offer solutions like workshops or training to aid improvement. Continuously monitor their progress to gauge the effectiveness of interventions.
Wrapping Things Up
In a nutshell, a performance review is a formal, documented, two-way conversation between you as the manager and your team of recruiters. You would use this opportunity to highlight their accomplishments and realign their efforts to meet the agency’s business goals.
That being said, it can be quite an intimidating time for some of them. So, you need to know what to say to them and which phrases you should avoid using.
Additionally, a performance review in a recruitment agency setting requires you to look at different recruitment metrics in order to evaluate each recruiter’s performance.
Hence, you need direct reports with accurate information to have a fair and smooth performance evaluation. Only then you can identify which recruiters perform well and which of them need assistance.
That said, we encourage you to try Manatal’s ATS 14-day free trial and see how you can better manage your team of recruiters better.
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