INNERGISE!

I said I wouldn’t do it, but I am! I just couldn’t resist jumping on the bandwagon and extracting a few business lessons for recruitment organisations from the colourful carnival that is the World Cup, as they seem to be as a prolific as is Messi’s goal scoring!

We’re approximately half way through the festivities now, so I will add some more thinking to this in a further blog post once the competition is over.

So, what do we have? Four weeks of watching some of the world’s greatest soccer talent on show in 32 teams, officiated by 25 referees during the most expensive World Cup in history, culminating in the Estádio Maracanã, (Rio) for the final on the 13th July. 

Four weeks of drama, shocks, scandal, tears… with a little bit of football thrown in.

Sad as it is, the splendour of the 2014 World Cup is being overshadowed by a number of unscrupulous events occurring on and off the field, which I suppose feels almost expected after the recent FIFA corruption scandals that emerged in the build up to the first game in Brazil. However, it is within these events that I believe the nest lessons came been learnt for us as business people.

The Pinto Effect – Getting a Return on your Talent Investment

You can never get away from the question around football players’ remuneration as it is continuously in the press being challenged and / or defended, and the World Cup stage is no exception to this. With all this talent from around the world, earning (to many) unthinkable weekly wage packets, you would expect the highest paid players to be really delivering something special in return and yet, in many cases, they are not.

Even at manager level, the three highest paid coaches of international teams (Cappello, Hodgson and Prandelli) earn a total of $21m in salaries between them and yet each of the teams they managed failed to make it past the first round! At just $440,000 salary per year, I bet the Costa Ricans are overjoyed with the ROI they are getting so far from Jorge Luis Pinto who (at the time of writing) has taken the international team through to the last eight.

One of the greatest measurements of a successful business is the ROI it is getting from its talent. In recruitment we push businesses to monitor the average annual GP (NFI) per billing consultant and the average GP across all employees and use these metrics as decision making ‘triggers’. 

Any strategic decisions around future headcount increases, expanding operations, benchmarking good / poor performance, performance management and so on should be influenced by these triggers as they become key measurements of success.

This will also enable you to benchmark your business against your competitors. 

For example, after analysing the figures of 40 high performing recruitment organisations recently, I noted that 68% of the 40 were experiencing between £100k and £300k average GP per consultant, and almost a quarter of the 40 were seeing averages of at least £150k per annum (a handful were almost double that!) as the following graph demonstrates:

GP per Consultant – Market Snapshot (40 Recruitment Organisations)  

Whilst it is not for me to question the remuneration that any of the World Cup players or coaches are commanding per se, I will challenge the ROI that they are producing as will, I am sure, the rest of the world.

Diving in the Mirror – a case of Self-Actualisation

The American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, used the concept of Self-Actualisation as the pinnacle part of what really drives people’s motivations, focusing in large on the ability to look in the mirror, with absolute pride in yourself and truly believe that what you are doing is a good job. This comes last, after you have got others around you to feel it.

The World Cup 2014, certainly for the first two weeks, seems to have been known more for periods of deceit, cheating and outrageous (non-footballing) activities than periods of high class talent and displays of football genius (and there have been many so far).

We all have opinions around the issues of diving to ‘win’ a penalty, on how much a defender can put his arms around a striker in the box waiting for a corner to come across, or to what extent sinking your teeth into another players body is deemed ‘unfair play’, but no one can argue the fact that all of these things are becoming more and more prevalent every day and sadly becoming almost the norm in the game of football.

As a player, you have to ask the question that at the end of the 90 minutes, televised live in front of millions of children all aspiring to be international football stars, whether you have won or lost the game, can you look at yourself in the mirror and experience self-actualisation? Did you play with pride and passion, the values and honesty that an international badge deserves or did you have to cheat to get your outcome?

Great recruitment businesses build great reputations and use those reputations as a medium to generate more business. It drives candidate and customer acquisition alike and should be the pivotal focus behind any business development strategy. Reputations are built by not only delivering great service, but doing it in a way that is ethical and honest and the number of times I have seen unethical, poor practice achieve a short term goal but then come back to bite someone in the long term (as Luis Suarez recently discovered!).

As individual recruiters, as team leaders, as directors and as an industry we must continue to deliver high value, highly ethical and highly effective services to our customers and be able to look in the mirror at the end of each day and feel a real sense of self-actualisation.

Good luck to all the players in the final 16 in Brazil, and in particular to the low-paid, principled ones who just want to play football…