The ability to source candidates is no longer enough – modern employers are demanding increasing levels of market expertise from their staffing partners, and those who struggle will quickly fall behind.
Recruitment is a sector in constant evolution.
Wind the clock back twenty years and recruiters were an offline community prized for their contact books. Their key value was an x-ray view of the candidate marketplace and an ability to identify well-matched candidates for customers at a time when the global workforce was murky and opaque.
Then came internet technology and social networking platforms, and the game changed. With the professional world mapped out online for all to see on LinkedIn, recruitment became a game of brand-building and engagement.
From being gatekeepers to a community of candidates that employers couldn’t see or find, recruiters shifted to become relationship managers – helping their clients tap into a publicly visible network of professionals that required skill and experience to access.
In 2020, things are changing once again.
According to the REC Jobs Outlook report, 90% of employers who use external providers are looking to their recruitment partners for one thing above all else: expertise.
A new era of market insight
Customers raising the bar for their suppliers is nothing new.
Across all commercial sectors, spontaneous innovation by service providers is often matched by an equal push from their most demanding clients to reach new performance levels.
Staffing is no different, and employers are re-writing the rulebook for their recruitment partners when it comes to market data and employment insight.
Specifically, hiring managers and HR departments across the board are turning to staffing agencies to provide intelligence on local labour dynamics – helping map out trends and evolutions in workforce groups to better inform hiring strategies.
A data goldmine
As well as a wealth of candidate information of the type traditionally prized by recruiters (CVs, skills and contact information), recruitment firms also hold the keys to unique insights on employment data that their customers can leverage to inform their own staffing programs.
This includes a vast range of data points, such as:
- Salaries and salary trends
- Salary variation by title, sector, location and tenure
- Average employment duration
- Employer migration trends
- Job titles and variations
- Skill, pay and employment trends across demographic groups
- Interview structures, time-frames and outcomes
- Commute distances and times
- Qualifications, skill and pay correlation
- Benefits, perks and incentives
Aggregated data on these and hundreds of other information points helps employers decipher meaningful trends in labour markets, shaping their hiring programs to better align with key realities that can’t be identified without insider data.
Leveraging the advantage
Recruitment agencies and staffing companies whose technology systems allow them to quickly and accurately deliver this critical insight to customers are rapidly distancing themselves from their competitors – becoming value-add partners to their clients and cementing stronger relationships.
For many, this means going above and beyond the basics of search and candidate delivery to provide market intelligence reports, highlight opportunities for employers and give their customers a workable competitive advantage in the struggle for talent – all built around a cutting-edge tech platform that makes data analysis a breeze.
In contrast, agencies who lack the digital infrastructure to effectively leverage their data are missing a trick – unable to level up their service, and trapped working within a limited model of customer delivery that hasn’t evolved for over a decade.
The big question facing agencies looking ahead for the next ten years is: how well can they take advantage of their data gold?
Will it stay hidden deep underground, or will they find a way to bring it to the surface?
Voyager Infinity and Voyager Mid-Office are software solutions that make Recruiters’ lives easier. Voyager Infinity is a CRM used by thousands of recruiters globally to source, nurture and maintain the relationships with their clients and candidates, and Mid-Office manages the entire Pay and Bill process (IR35 ready).
