An HR Projects Co-ordinator is a recruiter without sales targets, focused on candidate matching, market intelligence and consulting for a select group of clients. It’s a role Verita HR created in response to some quirks of the Polish market, and to understand why, it helps to know how recruitment here has evolved.
Recruitment in Poland doesn’t work quite the same as it does elsewhere. In the early days, the market was shaped by three things: executive search firms, the Praca jobs supplement in Gazeta Wyborcza, and a hiring boom. Of the three, only the boom has really lasted. Printed job adverts have all but disappeared, and executive search, while still thriving, now shares the market with many other players.
First pracuj.pl, then LinkedIn took over job advertising. Executive search firms are more numerous than ever, but large high street brands now hold dominant positions too. Temporary staffing, mass recruitment and RPO are all here, along with everything else you’d associate with a mature market, in roughly the proportions you’d expect.
There are some unique differences to consider though.
The Rise of the 360-Degree Recruiter in Poland
In executive search, consultants have always handled the selling while researchers back at the office find the candidates. But when Hays and other well-known recruitment brands entered the Polish market, they brought a different model with them. Their recruiters had to find candidates and win clients themselves, just as they did in the UK. The 360-degree recruiter had arrived in Poland.
The main issue with how this works is that there are very few recruiters who like sales. Fewer still are good at selling to local businesses. Trying to find a good recruiter who has excellent candidate matching skills as well as highly developed sales abilities is hard in any market. In Poland this challenge was harder due to one big difference. The average age of the recruiter.
In Poland, many recruiters start working in an agency before they’ve finished their studies. Most Polish students go on to complete a full master’s degree rather than stopping at a bachelor’s, so it’s common for a 22- or 23-year-old to join a recruitment firm while still attending lectures and writing a thesis. That’s a lot to juggle. On top of their studies, they have to learn the market, the clients and the craft of recruitment all at once. Very few have any sales experience, and fewer still have spent time in a call centre making 80+ cold calls a day, the kind of grounding that makes hitting sales targets much easier.
What About Non-Compete Clauses?
In the UK, recruiters’ contracts typically include a restrictive covenant: if they leave, they agree not to approach their former employer’s clients or candidates, usually for six to twelve months.
This clause gives recruitment companies some comfort that disgruntled recruiters who want to leave will refrain from taking clients with them. And, in most cases, the recruiters adhere to the clause.
In Poland, it works differently. Under the Polish Labour Code, if you want a former employee to stay away from your clients, you must keep paying them at least 25% of their previous salary for the length of the restriction. For most recruitment agencies, that’s a significant extra cost.
So, in Poland, an agency whose client relationships sit with individual recruiters is exposed. Verita HR chose to hold those relationships centrally, through sales and key account management.
Verita HR’s Answer: The HR Projects Team
Just like any agency in Poland, the initial teams at Verita HR consisted of mainly 360-degree recruiters. However, unlike other recruitment companies, Verita HR had a strong sales and marketing team working alongside the recruitment team.
Instead of relying on individual recruiters to win business, Verita HR invested in sales and marketing specialists to help develop a business development strategy. With time, this approach to sales started to give much better returns than the business individual recruiters were able to win. The idea of removing sales targets from young recruiters started to take shape. Not because recruiters were under-performing, but because if they only had to match candidates and advise them on the market, placement numbers could be expected to rise.
This raises a question: is recruitment a human resources function or a sales function? For a 360-degree recruiter, it’s both. In the model Verita HR was moving towards, it would be mainly HR. That meant rethinking what the head of the team should be called, and what they should do.
HR Projects Manager
Instead of a Recruitment Team Manager, or Business Manager, what Verita HR proposed was the position of HR Projects Manager.
An HR Projects Manager would be the natural leader of the Verita HR Recruitment Team going forward. KPIs of the role included:
- Meeting net revenue targets
- HR projects managed
- Number of placements
- Business unit cost control
- Productivity of HR Projects Co-ordinators within the team
On the surface they look the same as those a recruitment manager would have. However, there is one distinction. The concept of “HR Projects”.
At Verita HR the team doesn’t just recruit. The team is tasked with being able to “consult”. Not just on matters related to recruiting the role they are tasked with. They need to also have a very thorough understanding of the market.
At the head of the team is the HR Projects Manager who has a deep understanding of recruitment. Additionally, they know about all aspects of Polish employment law. They work with a select group of clients who need more than just recruiting. They need market maps, salary surveys, maps of the key people in the market, details about events these people attend, and much more. Essentially, it’s more about “HR consulting”, and less about sales or recruitment.
The HR Projects Co-ordinator Role
To support the HR Projects Manager there are several HR Projects Co-ordinators (HRPCs) at varying levels of experience working within the Verita HR Recruitment Team. Instead of sales targets, though, an HRPC needs to maintain a heightened level of visibility on social media.
They need to post regularly, and not just job adverts, but insights into market activity that could affect their clients and candidates. To do this they need to be aware of their competition. Their clients’ competition, and even their candidates’ competition.
They also need to know organisations such as ABSL (Association of Business Service Leaders) and ASPIRE (the Kraków-based IT and business services association), and follow HR events and industry events like SQLDay or ETHWarsaw. They need to know their way around GitHub, if they work in tech. If they work in language recruiting, they need to be aware of trends affecting citizens of the country the language derives from. If they work with select banking clients, they need to be aware of the biggest events that quants or fixed income specialists are also interested in. Sometimes they need to attend those events too.
At Verita HR, HRPCs also have a select group of what are referred to as “Gold Candidates”. These are people who have been actively engaged with the team either because they’re selective about where they work, or because they’ve built a strong rapport with their HRPC.
HRPCs must embody the “consultant” part of the recruiter role, covering both HR consulting and wider market consulting. As they grow, business planning becomes part of the job too: spotting niche areas such as data centres, building an ecosystem around them, and helping the sales team turn them into new Verita HR specialisms.
Every level of the team shares the same core: internal communication, new team initiatives, client satisfaction and candidate satisfaction are compulsory for everyone, from Junior HRPC to HR Projects Manager. Meeting targets, however, is only compulsory for the HR Projects Manager. For everyone else it’s necessary but not the main focus, which reflects Verita HR’s decision to take sales pressure off its recruiters. Responsibility for assessment, training, client relationship management and business planning grows with seniority. Gold Candidates work the other way round: they’re compulsory for HRPCs and Junior HRPCs, while more senior colleagues play a support role.
The full breakdown is below:
How an HR Projects Co-ordinator Can Help Your Organisation
Companies looking for the right recruitment partner in Poland have plenty of options, from global brands to boutique specialists, and it can be hard to know who to choose.
Recruiters from these firms will be able to help with a specific hire you might have, but they might not be able to do what an HRPC at Verita HR can. They can create a long list and contact candidates, but most of those candidates will be sourced from LinkedIn. It’s the passive candidates that an HRPC is more adept at sourcing that often make the difference.
HRPCs need to be technical. They need to know about individual technologies, who invented them, how popular they are, where people work with knowledge of these technologies. LinkedIn isn’t enough to provide all this data. You need more.
Because HRPCs follow events and industry trends closely, they can build a candidate attraction plan far more easily than most agency recruiters, which gives Verita HR’s clients insight they won’t get elsewhere.
HRPCs are tasked with maintaining high-quality standards through candidate and client commitments they make. They do this with the support of a large key account management team that works with Verita HR’s customers, often alongside individual HRPCs.
Finally, Verita HR’s HRPCs have deep experience. Most of the team have at least four years’ experience in the field of recruitment, and some have much more. They have chosen to work with Verita HR’s clients instead of changing jobs every few years to try pastures new. Working with an HRPC will mean a stable contact who gets to know your business and your challenges.
Reach out to the team at Verita HR today if you need help understanding the market better. You don’t need to sign a contract with Verita HR to gain insights into how the team works. Schedule an exploratory call with the team today.
See Also:
Should your Recruiter be a Social Media Influencer? – Verita HR
HRO Personnel: From Invidia HR to the Outsourcing Arm of Verita HR – Verita HR
Beyond Just Hiring: The Commitments Your Recruitment Partner Should Make to You – Verita HR
