How to Use Internal and External Data to Get Ahead of Your Competition

With live vacancies falling by 13,000 in Q1 and the unemployment levels climbing, it’s no surprise that most agency owners are looking for ways to get ahead of their competitors and maintain profit margins. In a candidate-rich market, it’s essential that you’re first to present an outstanding candidate to a client.

The key to success in a candidate-rich market is to have a pool of active and engaged candidates who are ready to be placed the second a new job comes on – and in order to do that, you need real-time information and data analytics to make decisions at speed and activate your candidates and make the most of them.

Stay on top of industry insights

The first step to becoming more agile and ready for market shifts is to know what is happening in the market at all times. Make sure you regularly check available industry insights, especially around:

• The number of new jobs being created: The number of jobs being created will have a big impact on strategy. In fallow times aggressively targeting BD to bring new jobs on will help to protect you from job shortages.
• The number of placements made across each sector: Knowing how your agency is performing against a benchmark from your sector will allow you to better understand whether performance fluctuations are attributable to internal or external factors.
• Industry application sources: Knowing where the applications for other agencies within your sector come from will help you understand where your competitors are focusing their efforts – and where the money lies.
• Employment and unemployment rates: Keeping track of the current employment rates will give you even more insight into which strategy to follow.

Explore internal reporting

The next thing to look into is your internal reports dashboard. If you want to be able to anticipate success and understand what steps lead to it, you need to keep a close eye on the actions your recruiters are taking and what results they’re bringing. The key aspects to look at include:

Sales performance

If you know the revenue your agency has generated, where it came from, and what actions impact your profits, you can easily make data-driven decisions that keep your revenue growing. This is where you consider placements made, which will tell you about the number of placements your agency makes and needs to make in order to be profitable. After you’ve learned that, you can go further down the funnel and explore which of your recruiters’ activities impact the placement success ratios.

Recruiter activities

The actions your recruiters take on a daily basis and their individual KPIs are all you need to know to identify gaps in your strategy. If your recruiters make 100 calls a week on average and only progress 1 candidate to an interview stage, you know that they’re either targeting the wrong candidates or need to work on their skill set. In both cases, it gives you a clear action for you to take to make a fix and tighten your strategy. Firefish users managed to increase their revenue per recruiter by 30% on average by utilising the right tools within their CRM and training their recruiters in working smarter instead of harder.

Candidate sources

Another area you should have a closer look at if you want to understand your agency’s results are candidate sources. Knowing where your candidates and placements come from will give you insight into which communication channels, job boards, or job advertising platforms are the most effective. Then, you will be able to minimise the cost of using ineffective channels and focus your efforts on those that bring you candidates. And with the current market situation, 67% of agency owners decided to focus on re-engaging their existing databases this year.

It's clear that especially in the current market, you can’t base your strategy on intuition – and having a consolidated tech stack that allows you to track your activities and their outcomes is what allows you to become competitive and agile. With data, you can adapt your strategy and see where the profits (or losses) come from at any time – so there’s no guesswork. To take your data analysis to the next level read on to learn about Industry Benchmarking, which allows you to measure your internal data against external data.