How Technology Helps Recruitment Agencies Adapt To A Changing Economy

For many in the recruitment industry, this is a time of great change. The fortunes of key sectors of our economy are being impacted – causing many recruitment desks to thrive whilst others suffer. The pressure on recruitment firms to adapt has arguably never been greater. So how can you respond to this?

The Backdrop – Changing Market Fortunes

Look at the economy around us and we are seeing whole industries decline or relocate as a result of economic pressures and societal changes. Consider what’s been happening to our high street retailers of late for a simple illustration of livelihoods being changed – and skills falling out of demand – probably for good.

Then there’s Brexit – and whatever your take on it, there can be no doubting that Brexit has accelerated change across many sectors, by forcing companies to think differently about how they operate and where the opportunities in their sectors lie. That can mean the difference between a recruitment niche that’s thriving and one that’s now in sharp decline; whilst the opposite is also true, with new markets springing up to reflect new pockets of demand.

On the one hand, we have the decline in nursing staff coming to the UK from Europe – and the need to therefore attract staff from further afield. Similarly, we see the moving of headquarters to reflect the new economic realities. Whilst on the other hand, we have the creation of thousands of new posts related to our new customs relations and all the demand for business consulting and legal advice that this will undoubtedly trigger.

All the while, the impact of artificial intelligence and automation is increasingly being felt – and in the coming years may cause entire classes of jobs to disappear. We don’t have to look too far into the future to imagine a time when taxi drivers and even lorry drivers will have been replaced by autonomous vehicles.

How Adaptable Are Recruitment Businesses Today?

Given this upheaval to our world of work, a great many recruitment businesses will have to branch out into new sectors in order to thrive – and a key question is, how achievable a goal is that for your average recruitment agency?

The good news is that technological advances and the availability of data both make it more likely that a recruitment business could reinvent itself to serve different markets. On the data side, there is greater transparency about where talent shortages lie – and where they are likely to develop in the coming years – than we have ever had before. A business owner can therefore expand into new markets with greater confidence that the demand will be there than in any previous time of economic change.

Technologies – and the platforms on which recruitment businesses have been built – also play their part in helping the modern-day recruitment business owner to adjust to new markets.

On the business development front, lead nurturing and lead generation tools like HubSpot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator mean there are scalable ways of opening doors with potential new clients that can work as well in a new market as they do in your existing markets.

The same is true of candidate sourcing. With the manual work increasingly being undertaken by AI tools such as Hiretual, tapping into a new market is as simple as entering a new set of search criteria and hitting go. The market expertise will need to be developed, of course, but the elimination of this much manual work makes the reality of entering a new market far more palatable.

This is equally true when we turn our attentions to talent attraction software such as idibu. Today these candidate attraction platforms give business owners a clear picture of how effective their different candidate attraction channels are in terms of attracting shortlist-quality candidates and tracking activities right through to placements being made.

This is critical insight for the running of a profitable recruitment business. But it’s particularly crucial when entering new markets, as recruiters will not have the same knowledge of the channels available to them and therefore where their limited budgets are best invested. Being able to take decisive action based on the results that each channel is producing makes it much more likely that a business can venture into a new sector without running short of the funds needed to succeed.

Of course this ability to easily check on ROI via on demand reporting is just one of many reasons why a tool like idibu can help recruitment businesses move into new sectors with greater confidence than before. If the technologies you use ensure great candidate experience and manage the workflow for you, make it easy to create landing pages for new campaigns and integrate with the aggregators and job boards you need to experiment with, the ease with which you can replicate the success you’ve had in other sectors is greatly enhanced.

So the only remaining questions are – do you have the technologies in place to make your recruitment business agile and adaptable to a changing marketplace? And if so, which new markets are you going to pursue to cement the future success of your business?

idibu provides intelligent candidate acquisition to hundreds of recruitment businesses of all sizes as well as analysis of activity and hiring funnels to greatly improve ROI and performance. If you’d like a demo of our reporting/analytics suite, get in touch on 0800 311 2750.

PS. Check out the latest idibu index here!