With the ever-changing recruitment market, it’s not enough to put a strategy in place for the year or the quarter and review it at the end of that time period. The competition is fierce and new agencies popping up everywhere wanting a piece of the recruitment cake. There are now over 30,000 agencies in the UK alone, with a 6.5% increase in new ones being established YoY.
With the current market shifting yet again, reports showcasing the lowest number of new jobs created in the UK in the past 3 years, it’s time you work on your agency’s agility and the ability to thrive under all market circumstances.
Make sure you have relevant industry insights
The key to sustainable growth is having the data insights and skills within your team that allow you to predict the market changes and notice gaps in your strategy straight away so that you can adapt. Without the data, you won’t be able to make data-driven decisions and will be operating on intuition, which isn’t enough to succeed.
One of the main places to look are recurring yearly and monthly industry reports, which will give you a clear overview of what’s happening across the board. Keeping an eye out on the placement, jobs created, or candidate application fluctuations will help you get a feel of the market at any given time and provide an indication of whether you should be preparing for any shifts.
However, industry data won’t help you much if you don’t know your own agency’s performance data and key statistics. You need to keep track of your placements, job ads, candidate applications, application sources, and more to identify areas for improvement. Having a real-life reporting dashboard is key to strategising for success.
Benchmark against competitors
The second vital part of being prepared for market shifts and growing sustainably is the overview of how your agency is performing against competitors. If you know exactly how other agencies within your market sector are performing, you can see if changes in your agency are due to the generic market situation, or something your agency is doing. It will also allow you to identify your unique value proposition - something your agency is doing exceptionally well in comparison to your competitors.
The first step in understanding how your agency is performing is comparing your key metrics to other agencies within your sector. Look at:
- Sales made per month, which will give you an indication of whether the time of year is slower for everyone in your niche or if it's just your agency and you need to make some shifts in strategy;
- Placements by recruiter: This will allow you to determine whether your recruiters are performing well against competitors, and if they aren't, you can dive deeper into your recruiter activity metrics to find the reason;
- Application sources, which gives you an overview of where the majority of your applications come from compared to other agencies. It lets you know whether your applications from new or existing candidates are better than others and helps you control spending. Good results here can also be leveraged as a USP!
After you've considered your performance against others, you can easily determine what areas you're stronger in than your competitors. With that, you will be able to find your unique value proposition and leverage it in your marketing strategy to increase your profits.
Make sure you have regular insight into your agency's data, but also the newest recruitment industry statistics, and base your strategy on real-time insights.
