How much time does your team of recruitment  consultants waste? Could this be why they are not reaching their targets? And how do you fix this. In recruitment manager training I share the T….X time matrix. It’s a theory taken from Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. One manager decided to put this matrix into practice with his team and had astounding results.

 

Understanding the T…….X Time Matrix

If you analyse your day to day activities you can segment them into four categories. 1 – Important and urgent. 2 – Important but not urgent. 3 – Not important but urgent. 4 – Not important or urgent.

 

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Urgent relates to things that are happening now.

For example a phone that rings demands attention to be answered. Therefore it is often seen as being urgent. Urgent things demand our immediate attention and we often give them priority even if they are not important.

Important relates to results.

In other words something that is important will contribute to your purpose, your values beliefs and higher priority goals. Whereas urgent matters demand our attention and we react to that, important matters require our effort in being proactive about doing them.  If we don’t understand what’s important it is easy to be distracted by what’s urgent.

How did this recruitment manager use the T….X tool to turn around his team’s performance?

He started out with sharing some training on time management and the different theories relating to effectiveness. He introduced the T….X model as well as the 80/20 principle – Pareto’s Law. Then he got his team to go back and map their daily activities in the time matrix. What they discovered was that activities in box 2 simply weren’t getting done. These were things like business development, candidate marketing, client relationship building. They were all important but not urgent tasks.

They found they were spending most of their time working in box 1, 3 and 4 and realized this was why they weren’t getting results. The biggest time bandit was spending too much time working on jobs they were never going to fill.

They decided to do as a team to stop doing all the activities in boxes 3 and 4 and spend their time only on activities in boxes 1 and 2. The results were astounding. They literally went from zero to billing £250k in one month.

 

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Another key result that came from this exercise was that consultants started to plan. They created a weekly planner and stuck with it, making sure they spent their time on important activities. They planned with the end in mind. They knew what results they wanted to get and worked back wards this meant that people were working with a purpose and this resulted in a major shift in motivation

I hope you found this article useful.

If you want to learn how to set up your business, so that it stops under-performance once and for all, then join my free webinar:  The 5 Secrets Our Clients Use to Build 7 & 8 Figure Recruitment Businesses