Recruiters: Why data, and not hard selling, is your next big key to success
We all know it: recruitment agencies are built on great salespeople. From encouraging a wary candidates to interview for a company that may not match their desires, to convincing a hiring manager to take a chance on someone who isn’t quite a skills match, recruitment can be just as much about manoeuvring and influencing as it is actually recruiting based on a job spec.
But in 2024, as your average candidate or client gets wise to the typical recruiter tricks and techniques, and can access the magic tools that only recruiters used to know about, the game becomes a little harder to play.
However, there is a not-so-new approach that many recruitment agencies are keen to adopt, but aren’t so good at using to its full potential: data.
Yes, having a great database and KPIs are at the foundations of recruitment, but we’re talking about going beyond just names, emails and phone numbers. We’ve already talked about metrics for hiring managers, but we want to look at some of the deeper data techniques and tools that can turn successful recruitment agencies into recruitment agencies that are truly smashing it – so let’s dive in.
Data vs. Data Measurement
We’ve already touched on how data should be nothing new to good recruiters. But must recruitment agencies’ approaches to data are top level at best.
Question time: How in depth is the client and candidate data in your CRM? does it go beyond personal information, last contact note, and maybe info about their current role?
While this is all fine for your typical placement, why wouldn’t you also be including data about how often they’ve opened an email from your agency? Or whether they responded to your salary survey or annual report? If they’re engaging with you regularly, and your teams aren’t trying their best to find them a job because they don’t know they’re engaged and actively interested in your brand, then you’re losing a placement because of your data.
And how about tracking your candidates when they’ve been placed and turning them into hiring managers? Does your CRM have the option to link your placed candidates to subsequent new data and hires? If you can turn your placements into an extension of your team, ready to pass data to you, then you go from typical agency to slick operation, with little effort.
Measuring marketing ROI
Recruitment agencies usually rely on some form of mass marketing to bring a stream of both applicants and open roles to their inboxes. But in many cases, this is limited to a monthly mail shot, fired into the ether with a hope of one or two bites.
Some weeks may bring a handful of good candidates, other weeks nothing. Just luck of the draw, right?
Wrong! The content of the email, the information that goes with it, even the subject line all have a huge effect on the open and interaction rates of the marketing you send out. And if you can measure things like open rate, click through rate or even applications that can be linked directly to a sales email, then you can really get to work.
From tweaking copy to learning which types of role or candidate really get your audience’s attention, measuring the success rate of your marketing is a very easy way to ensure each message shared with your network isn’t just a hit and hope while you spend all your time bashing the phone to reach the right people.
However, just rememeber that email marketing is a numbers game, with UK companies averaging just a 1% engagement rate in 2024. But lifting that to a 1.5% or even 2% could make a difference to revenue.
Measuring your team’s time
Recruitment agencies fall into this trap all the time; the time and money goes into great systems that are packed with data management features, then their teams fail to see the value and stick to their comfort zones. And the worst part is that agency managers don’t have oversight of the lack of activity when it comes to the proper usage of valuable data.
Being able to apply simple equations and reports that can be understood at a glance is a massive benefit for agency managers. Why? Because it allows you to see who is or isn’t working smart. Being a lazy recruiter is absolutely fine, and it should be encouraged – as long as data is doing the hard work instead.
For example, having access to a CV repository or a job board application dashboard is all well and good, but your savvy recruiter may find they get more from speaking to the same contacts, or attending events. You ask why they aren’t using the expensive tools, they get annoyed because they’re performing well, and there’s conflict.
Instead, you could take your hard data from the dashboard and show your headstrong, hotshot recruiter the benefit of using the tool using data. And as we all know, many recruiters get excited when they see a money-making opportunity, backed up by evidence!
More magic tools
It’s all well and good talking about the benefits of data, but finding the time and budget to capture, manage and exploit data is another thing, especially in a tough and competitive market. So this is where a tool like Linkedin’s Recruiter can make a difference.
Yes, this may seem like the weakest plug for a service millions of us are already using, but we’re not talking about the option to search based on a job title and location.
In 2024, the real magic of a Linkedin Recruiter package lies in the ability to get the tool to do all of the hard work for you.
From tapping into granular data about which Linkedin messages work best, to benchmarking against the rest of the industry when it comes to candidate journey, Linkedin Recruiter is no longer the ‘cash for messages’ system that we may be used to. Now, you can even drill down into the length of time since their last login, how often they respond to emails, and even how active they are in terms of applications.
This means your teams are now getting a full picture of the candidate’s true position before they do the qualification call. Imagine being able to give your sales teams a detailed dossier on their passive, hot candidate before they apporach them with a hard-to-fill role?
The big data advantage
All of these tactics are great for the small wins, but the real big wins come when they’re done together, consistently. And guess what? Being able to measure it all at once is the real game-changer here.
Rather than relying on the age-old beans-in beans-out KPI system, creating a data strategy that includes highly individualised outcomes for every single action that your agency undertakes could take your business into the stratosphere.
After all, recruiting is a time-based activity, and the quicker you can do things, the better for your bottom line.
For example, being able to see how many minutes on the phone it takes to get candidate A into job B could be invaluable. If your teams are encountering a high drop out or low fill rate, it could simply be down to not spending enough time on the relationship itself.
Your application to fill rate is another area where big data management can be tweaked and refined. Are your consultants spending their days sifting CVs, but not converting them because they’ve run out of time? Or are they not even bothering with data scraping from the CV in the first place, then wondering why the hiring manager has already seen that candidate put forward by eight different agencies?
As you can see, the small battles that recruitment agency managers fight every day can boil down to how hot your data is. And with Artfully, we can make sure your agency’s data, and data approach, is up to speed.
As a Linkedin gold partner, we can not only get you hooked up with the right Recruiter package, but also show you how to use it properly. We’ll evem help you to ensure your teams see the value and use it properly too.
On top of that, we can assess your job board spend, look at the data and reporting, and identify ways of increasing overall quality applications, while spending less rather than more.
If you fancy making a time and cost saving, whether that’s through Linkedin or your existing job board relationships, then get in touch with us to see what we can do.
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