Kolbe for Recruiting Firms
Evolving Recruiting Groups into Teams of Closers
I remember the magic. When I first started working as a recruiter, it was in the heyday of the dot-com (May 2000) and everything was falling apart. And yet … it was the BEST time to start as a recruiter because new recruiters learned quickly what made a team awesome. It was all about (and still is) instinct, how people fit together, and how they “show up.” I centered my recruiting around this reality and became the firm’s top producer, billing $1M in an era when that was a lot of billable money!
Fast forward to today and Kolbe has become a top tool I use to help recruiting firms as they grow and prepare themselves for future chapters. If you would like to learn more about how Paul Allen and I can help using the Kolbe A Index, please reach out!
What is Kolbe?
Kolbe is a strengths-based assessment that measures conative instinct: the natural way a person takes action and solves problems. It does not measure intelligence, personality, or motivation. It measures a person’s instinctive “how” — how they gather and share information, organize work, deal with risk and uncertainty, and handle tangible execution. In practice, Kolbe gives leaders and teams a practical language for understanding how people operate when they are free to be themselves and taking purposeful action.
Why It Matters
In recruiting firms, many performance problems are not caused by lack of skill or effort. They come from friction in how people work: partners who overanalyze, recruiters who move too fast or too cautiously, managers who over-systematize, and teams that misread each other under pressure. Kolbe helps explain those differences without moralizing them. It reduces conflict, improves communication, clarifies who should lead in which moments, and helps teams stop arguing about character and start talking about method. It also helps firms understand where stress, strain, and burnout may be coming from when people are working against their natural instincts for too long.
How Kolbe Helps a Recruiting Firm
Kolbe can accelerate the business value of your recruiting firm and improve team performance in four especially important ways:
Better role clarity and seat fit
Kolbe helps clarify whether someone is well-matched to the actual demands of their role — business development, search execution, candidate management, operations, or leadership.
Stronger collaboration and less friction
Teams gain shared language for how they communicate, make decisions, solve problems, and respond under pressure. That lowers interpersonal friction and helps people rely on each other’s strengths.
Healthier team design
Team distributions reveal blind spots such as too much of the same energy, missing methods, or polarization. That insight can guide hiring, delegation, succession planning, and leadership development.
Greater transition readiness and firm value
For firms preparing for succession or sale, Kolbe helps reduce key-person risk, strengthen the leadership bench, improve role clarity, and create a team operating system that is less dependent on any one founder or rainmaker. That can make the firm more transferable, more durable, and more attractive in transition.
How I Implement Kolbe for Recruiting Firms
The following methodology can be completed in as little as a single 2-hour group session, or be covered in multiple phases over 1 week. Some firms value 1:1 coaching conversations. Let’s discuss the unique needs of your teams and recruiters.
Kolbe For Every Team Member
The first step in leveraging the Kolbe within your firm starts with each team member in each practice area completing their own Kolbe A Index.
Phase 1: Individual interpretation
I meet 1:1 with leaders and team members to help them understand their Kolbe result, how it shows up in their role, where they may experience stress or strain, and how to better leverage their natural strengths.
Phase 2: Workshop 1 — Understanding Kolbe and Your Own M.O.
A 1-hour team session introducing Kolbe, the four action modes, the three operating zones, and how to interpret each person’s natural pattern of action. The goal is self-awareness, empathy, and a common language for how the team works.
Phase 3: Team analysis and reporting
I review team dynamics reports, distribution patterns, likely friction points, complementary strengths, and possible gaps in the team’s overall operating profile.
Phase 4: Workshop 2 — Team Dynamics and Optimization
A 1-hour session (scheduled the same day as Workshop 1) focused on the team itself: how the firm solves problems, where collaboration breaks down, what strengths are overused or underused, and what practical adjustments can improve communication, delegation, role design, and execution rhythm.
Typical outcomes
The result is a team that understands itself better, collaborates with less friction, makes smarter use of individual strengths, and is better equipped to scale, delegate, and operate with less founder dependence. For recruiting firm owners preparing for a future exit, Kolbe becomes more than a team-building tool; it becomes part of the infrastructure that improves transferability, leadership depth, and business value.
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