Gone are the days when $20k a month in billings could be considered a baseline performance for a junior to mid-level consultant, according to new research.
The ongoing survey carried out by rec-to-rec blog The Written Reference has received more than 1,000 responses from agency staff at all levels.
Just under one third of respondents (326) identified as recruitment consultants, and of this group 28% were billing less than $10k a month.
A further 16% had monthly billings of between $10 and $15k, and 11% were billing between $20 and $25k.
Billings were higher among the 226 senior recruitment consultants who responded to the survey, with the majority (53%) billing between $25 and $35k a month.
Scott Recruitment Services director Craig Watson, a co-author of the blog, said the results showed there was a gap between what most employers in the industry considered a reasonable target, and what was achievable for consultants today.
Watson told Shortlist many agencies were setting sales goals for current and potential employees based on the pre-GFC market, when junior to mid-level consultants who weren't billing at least $20k a month had been considered underperformers.
"Maybe in Never-Never-Land [those targets are realistic], but not in the real world anymore – or very rarely," he said.
Recruiters were facing constant price pressure, and the continued shift towards internal recruitment, and managers needed to realign their expectations accordingly, he said.
"If you exclude parts of the WA market, and parts of the senior executive search market, the industry has come nowhere near to rebounding to pre-GFC [levels] and I don't know whether it ever will."
Most respondents with employer for under two years
Watson said the patchy economy was also affecting turnover, with some 66% of respondents reporting they had been with their current employer for less than two years.
In particular, recruiters with less than a year at their current company were "much lower on the billings scale", and Watson said the results showed that it typically took consultant around two years to build up to a solid level of sales - rather than the three months that most companies planned for.
"The expectation after three months is they'll be a full billing consultant - they'll be billing $20 to $25k a month - and the reality is that they'll need to ramp up to that [over a longer period]," he said.
"Companies need to build this into their budgeting and hiring plans."
The survey also found that while some 63% of recruitment consultants surveyed were female, this number dramatically reduced to just 23% at a general manager level.
Watson said feedback from his candidates indicated that because recruitment at a mid-management level was dominated by men, this made it harder for female recruiters to make it through to the senior ranks.