For a previous post about recruitment coaching, visit here.

Phired Up Productions recently announced the formal roll-out of their newest recruitment service for fraternities and sororities, DYNAMIC RECRUITMENT, MD. The real guts of this service is the year-long weekly coaching relationship that a Phired Up MD builds with a chapter. This post is meant to shed some light on why recruitment coaching works, and how recruitment coaching works. 

Josh Orendi and Matt Mattson, co-founders of Phired Up recently presented a presentation at the Fraternity Executives Association annual meeting that was titled, From Recruitment Band-Aids to Recruitment Coaching. This session started the discussion amongst professionals of the benefits of shifting from ADVISING and CONSULTING to coaching. 

For years fraternity and sorority strategies for helping their chapters to recruit has been to come up with new slogans, manuals, brochures, web sites or even T-shirts for their undergraduate chapters. The best organizations have offered recruitment training, which is an important start, but for real results to take hold, there must be more. Advising from alumni or headquarters professionals has been the common response, but too often these advisors neither know good recruitment techniques, nor do they know how best to work with the undergraduates to get results through those techniques.

Enter the concept of RECRUITMENT COACHING. 

Phired Up Productions has started to deliver RECRUITMENT COACHING services that are based on their “4 Cornerstones of Recruitment Coaching.” These four cornerstones are what makes recruitment coaching different from advising or consulting, which have been the traditional methods of delivering education to undergraduates. Phired Up's recruitment coaching methods focus on 1) the level of action, and 2) measurable results.

The coaching relationship starts with something called a Designed Alliance. The Designed Alliance is a co-created, clear, formal relationship between the coach and the client. This is an important cornerstone because coaching balances support and tough challenges to push a client toward their desired results. This clearly established alliance gives the power to the relationship, and not to one particular party in the relationship. A recruitment coach delivers services based on the agreed up on designed alliance. For example, a recruitment coach might request an alliance where the coach does: 1) ask the tough questions, 2) offer every resource available, 3) focus on measurable results, and 4) let the client determine the agenda, but the coach might not: 1) give answers even though he thinks he has them, 2) shy away from uncomfortable conversations, 3) be afraid to interrupt for the benefit of the client, and 4) accept excuses.

A second cornerstone of successful recruitment coaching, according to Phired Up is Measurable Outcomes. Typically, an alumni recruitment advisor might ask, “How's recruitment going?” And if they do ask questions like that, they’ll get similarly vague answers, like “Recruitment is going great, we've got a lot of awesome prospects.” This type of conversation is quite different from how a recruitment coach would work. A recruitment coach focuses almost exclusively on measurable outcomes. You might hear a recruitment coach ask, “Precisely how many names were added to your names list this week? Can you E-mail that names list to me right now?” “Of the 50 phone calls you promised to make, how many did you complete successfully? Can you send me the notes you took on those calls so that I might more closely analyze your work for peak performance?” Recruitment coaches help a client understand that effort and results are two different things, and they assist clients in discovering for themselves which efforts get results, and which do not.

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