Following a year in which the recruitment industry suffered from devastating hiring freezes across the majority of industries, recruiter jobs are currently rising at breakneck speed. WaveTrackR’s Emily Buckley looks into the data and digs into the reasons behind the surge in recruiter jobs and strategies for successful hires.
Jobs are on a seemingly unstoppable upwards trajectory. If you’re a recruiter you’ll no doubt be very aware of this and the data confirms experiential anecdotes. WaveTrackR’s July report found that job posts climbed to a huge 254% above the 2020 monthly average – fantastic news for the economy and for the recruitment industry. Yet applications are down for the second consecutive month, leading to a tough job for recruiters – lots more jobs on the books but a scramble for candidates. This has inevitably caused a dilemma for many agencies – not enough staff, particularly given the number of recruitment businesses that were forced to make redundancies during the lowest months of the pandemic. The result? A significant rise in recruiter jobs.
WaveTrackR data has shown that Recruitment Sales posted higher numbers of jobs in June and July than in any other month this year – and by quite some margin. Meanwhile, applications are far lower than they were in the final few months of 2020. What we are seeing now is a far cry from the dark months of 2020, when hiring freezes across the majority of industries left many recruitment businesses with no option but to either place staff on furlough or make redundancies. A survey of REC member businesses found that 47% of respondents made redundancies between March and November 2020. With low jobs and a vastly increased talent pool, it is unsurprising that WaveTrackR’s Recruitment Trends: Lockdown Report 2021 found that average applications per job in Recruitment Sales soared in the final quarter of 2020.
Things start to change in January, despite the third lockdown. As the vaccination roll-out began, businesses started to tentatively gain confidence and jobs gradually began to rise. Meanwhile, the average number of applications per job declined, from a massive 166 in December 2020 to 98 in January 2021. That trend continues steadily and by June Recruitment Sales has vanished from the 5 industries receiving the highest numbers of average applications per job. LinkedIn research, too, has recorded a steady increase in the number of recruiter job postings around the globe and across the majority of industries since the start of the year. Its findings show that recruiter jobs have now risen above pre-pandemic levels, growing at a greater pace than the job market overall. In the UK in June there were over twice the number of recruiter jobs posted than the 2019 average.
With many of those recruiters made redundant in 2020 having already been hired or moved industries entirely, what can recruitment businesses now do to attract talented recruiters and where can they find them?
- Get your job ad right – Pay attention to keywords, stick to conventional job titles, get the word count right, only include true must-haves, flag in-demand benefits such as flexible working and mental health initiatives. It all makes a huge difference to whether quality candidates even see your job ad, let alone connect with it and apply.
- Emphasise non-financial benefits – LinkedIn data confirmed that, as well as financial compensation, work-life balance and company culture remain priorities for recruiters when searching for a new role. In a post-pandemic world, candidates are also looking for job security and a ‘purposeful mission’.
- Recruit from other industries – LinkedIn’s data highlighted one of the reasons for a shortage of candidates – a far higher number of recruiters are being recruited from a previous recruiting role. 59% of recruiters hired between April 2020 and June 2021 were recruiters prior to their new role, compared to just 33% between January 2019 and March 2020. It’s unsurprising – redundancies meant there were more recruiters in the pool and they would require less training and therefore less time to get up to speed. However, there are a wide range of industry professionals that could bring relevant and valuable skills to recruitment, particularly in Sales, Marketing and HR. Hospitality and Retail, too, will endow the candidate with great people skills – essential to recruitment. They will need training in how to recruit but the additional skills they bring, plus a fresh perspective, could prove invaluable. It’s also well worth considering hiring a non-recruiter from the industry in which you recruit. For example, if you recruit for the Education sector, an ex-teacher would bring industry experience and contacts with them. It’s something that many recruitment businesses already do and can be a highly successful strategy.
The search for talented recruiters may be a challenge but the reason behind the rising demand for them is an incredibly positive sign for the economy as a whole. A strong recruitment industry has always been a great indicator of the market in general. Job activity is booming, meaning business confidence is soaring. It’s hard to believe that just a year ago recruitment was was facing one of its toughest challenges in recent history. This data heralds a monumental shift as recovery begins to truly move at pace.
WaveTrackR is an intelligent multi-posting tool, data analytics platform and candidate management system. It will advise you when, where and what to post, boost your recruitment power online and increase your ROI.
