Colour Coding For Better Results
The lesson that stuck with me
One of the most powerful lessons I learned as a recruiter came from a simple spreadsheet. One of my team introduced the concept and it stuck with me.
Whenever I took over a new team, the first thing I did was map out the market. Across the top row I listed the major segments our clients played in. For enterprise tech, that meant hardware, software, services. Then we broke those down further: PC, mobile, OS, data, server, SaaS, consulting, and so on.
Mapping the market
Once we had the structure in place, we added every single client under the relevant category. Then came the fun part: colour coding. Every recruiter on the team was assigned a colour, and we highlighted the clients they managed.
It sounds simple, but the effect was immediate. Suddenly you could see each recruiter’s client strategy in full colour.
What the colours revealed
The low performers had their colours scattered randomly across the sheet, like islands in a vast sea. A client here, another one over there, no pattern and no depth. No possible way to develop any form of subject matter expertise.
The top biller — who went on to build his own successful recruitment company — looked completely different. His colour appeared in blocks. He had depth in each category, multiple clients in the same sub-segment, and clear specialisation. It was a perfect visual representation of the difference between dabbling and owning a market.
The first thing I did as the new leader of that team was to reassign accounts and sharpen everyone’s focus. Instead of chasing random accounts wherever they happened to land, recruiters built clusters of clients in chosen sub-segments. They went deeper instead of wider.
Results that followed
The results came quickly. Within a year, half the team had their best-ever results. The team as a whole broke records, or at the very least came close. People who had struggled before suddenly had clarity and direction, and the heavy hitters became even more dominant.
Using it ever since
I’ve used this approach in every company where I led — including my own. The lesson is simple: specialisation wins. When you can see your coverage mapped out in black and white (or colour), you know instantly whether you have a strategy or just a scatter of activity.
This isn’t just a recruiting thing either. Any business that manages accounts or customers can benefit from mapping and clustering. If your coverage looks random, you’re probably wasting energy. If it looks like blocks, you’ve built strength.
An AI coaching opportunity
What excites me now is how we can take these same principles and build them into AI. Imagine giving this account-planning model to the AI in our platform, so it automatically maps a recruiter’s market: which accounts are active clients, which are business development targets, which are candidate-led opportunities. You could even assign a “focus score” to each recruiter’s portfolio, giving an objective measure of how strategically they’re working their patch.
That kind of AI-guided account planning won’t replace the recruiter — it’ll simply give them clarity and direction, the same way my old spreadsheet did, but in real time and at scale.
What about you?
So, have you ever tried this kind of market mapping strategy? Does specialisation work in your field the way it does in recruiting? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
