This week on our Recruiter Clinic on Blab (it’s a live video chat channel) we talked with Mervyn Dinnen about what are today’s recruitment businesses doing to succeed tomorrow – with findings from the survey he’s running with Broadbean. I was joined by Stephen O’Donnell (who is my regular team-mate on the shows). You can watch it with side feed on blab and a recording of the show here:
This is my summary of what was shared:
- There is optimism. Almost half were satisfied with last year’s performance with a further 14% very satisfied. 84% expect improvement this year, almost half of them a much greater improvement.
- The focus for most is to increase niche market penetration (86%), although 30% are looking towards some form of disruption (either innovation, new service offering or tech) and a similar number want to focus on new markets.
- The main priority for this population is to increase brand awareness and marketing, expanding their business and hiring more consultants.
- 75% do expect to get more briefs from clients, although only 12% expect a lot more, with the chief threats to this coming from a drop in client hiring and the anticipated increase in clients hiring directly.
- When vacancies are briefed it is usually through the hiring manager (42%) or HR (21%). Less than 10% of SME agencies get their briefs from outbound sales calls or speculative inbound calls.
- For a significant majority of respondents, their consultants are rewarded by a basic salary and individual commission, with a third also offering a team bonus and flexible benefits. Over the next twelve months it is the latter two that will be increasing, with around 40% of respondents improving flexible benefits.
- Sourcing is their main priority with the internal database the most popular channel to find candidates, followed by advertising for new applicants and professional networks (primarily linkedIn). Somewhat surprisingly there is a low priority on sourcing through personal networks, referrals and social media, although the latter is expected to increase over the next 12 months.
- Consultants increasingly communicate with their candidates through channels other than the phone and email. Daily contact through text messaging (58%) and LinkedIn inmails (53%) are the most popular. The proliferation of messaging and video apps are not popular as yet, with only 21% using them on a daily basis, but their usage looks set to rise. 63% expect to use messaging apps more frequently over the next year, with 56% similarly using video apps.
The report will be available on the Broadbean website shortly and I’ll share a link to it when it’s live.
We should be back in a fortnight with another Recruiter Clinic and if you want to take part in one just let me know.
