Recruitment Blog 2024 | Firefish Blog

Team Meetings That Will Get You the Results You Want

Written by Katie Paterson | Wed, Jun 02, 2021

This pandemic has likely been full of change and learnings for you as a leader – some positive and some a bit harder to swallow.

But one area I’m sure we can all agree on is how much remote working has highlighted how important well-structured team meetings are – and how we were getting them wrong before we left the office.

Here are 5 types of meetings to consider bringing into your recruitment business to ensure everyone stays focussed on what really matters, boost team morale and keep productivity levels up.

1. Daily morning standups

Stand-ups are short and snappy meetings at the start of the day that shouldn’t last longer than about 10 minutes.

These meetings should be in small team-focused groups to keep them relevant. The idea is that these short meetings give your recruiters space to communicate what’s happening on their desk while encouraging them to stay organised and plan ahead.

A basic stand-up structure involves going round each recruiter to cover:

  • What they achieved yesterday (so not how many calls they made, but how many jobs they got on or Terms they sent out, for example)
  • What they plan to do today
  • Anything standing in their way (this gives them space to highlight any road blocks that you or another team member might be able to help them with so they can move forward).

As a leader, these meetings are your insight into how your team are progressing and who needs your support.

At Firefish, daily standups have been the standard for almost a decade now, but since going remote we’ve realised just how important these daily check-ins really are.

Weekly review & focus meetings

Running a weekly team meeting to review key metrics and progress towards goals is the perfect way to get everyone focussed and ready to tackle their week.

It’s a good idea to run these meetings early on in the week so it works as a planning meeting of sorts. You could begin the meeting be running through some key metrics from the week before so the team know where you are in terms of progress towards monthly targets each week.

Use your CRM’s reports dashboard to run through the numbers that have made a positive impact on business for that week. So again, not the number of calls made, but whatever the signifiers of progress are for your business.

For example:

  • Number of Terms of business sent out to clients
  • Number of new jobs created
  • Number of placements.

Once you've run through the previous week's numbers, each team member can give a brief overview their own live jobs, projections, and any new starts for the week ahead.

This also gives them the opportunity to share any learnings, challenges or insights they’ve seen the last week that could help moving forward.

Weekly bootcamps

A Friday bootcamp is a great way to laser focus on ironing out any potential challenges your team might be having and if your processes could be updated or improved to make your recruiters’ jobs easier.

At Firefish, we run bootcamps in a ‘four Ps’ structure, which consists of…
  • Progress
  • Plans
  • Problems
  • Positives.

The success of bootcamps relies on everyone doing their prep in advance. We all know there’s nothing worse than a meeting that could’ve been an email (!), so task your team to draft their four Ps up at least a few hours before the meeting and email them round.

Having your team send their four Ps in advance gives you a complete overview of what and how each recruiter is doing while not getting bobbed down on the detail during the meeting.

The idea is to use bootcamps as an opportunity to laser focus on the important stuff and drill down into the areas they need your support in.

Monthly leadership focus meetings

Whether you choose to run leadership focus meetings monthly or fortnightly, these meetings are essential to ensuring each team is striving towards the wider company goals and managers are thinking strategically about how to get there.

It makes sense to either have these meetings at the end of the month or very start of the next one so that teams have had time to put strategies into practice and start to see the impact they’re making.

The structure of these meetings could be something along the lines of:

  • Review of key stats for this month past
  • Targets/goals for the following month and why
  • What activities and outcomes will be necessary in order to achieve those goals.

Managers can then use these insights to guide their teams throughout the rest of the month, ensuring they focus on the areas that matter to the business.

Monthly company progress updates

In an industry as busy as recruitment, it’s easy to get so occupied with the day-to-day that we forget to communicate the wider picture to our teams.

But transparency about the company’s goals and progress towards those figures is an excellent way to get buy-in from your recruiters.

All the big agile businesses make a point of doing this to create a sense of belonging and show employees the impact they are making on the business – and it works.

In practice, all of the above meetings are ideal for supporting forward-thinking businesses towards a more agile way of working.

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