Did you leave any money on the table?

Over recent weeks we’ve conducted some interesting analysis with some of our clients. We looked at how many candidates they acquire, for what cost and how many candidates turn into applicants and ultimately enter the hiring funnel. The outcome in all cases was the same: stacks of money is being left on the table.

Let’s put some meat on those bones. One example is a recruitment agency specialising in placing IT candidates, especially contractors. They use (as most agencies do) LinkedIn and job boards to attract & source people for their roles, which results in a healthy advertising bill.

At the same time they have over 250,000 CVs tagged as IT contractors in their database. As recently as 2014 there were only an estimated 100,000 in the UK! That means our client is clearly buying candidates over and over and over again even though they no doubt have a large chunk of them already in their system.

In the last 12 months our analytics suite shows that consultants only actually viewed 25% of the monthly glut of candidates that came in from this repeated buying! So 75% are dormant – or as we call them: Zombie CVs.

Now, you might say, “Hold on Martin, they didn’t have enough roles to fill.” Good point. But remember during that time, they continued advertising with the same monthly spend and the all important RPS licenses.

The conclusion was this: Serious amounts of money were being left on the table – on both sides of the equation.

We are now helping maximise their investment in a number of ways:

1. Our analytics gave the wake up call to the activity and wastage.
2. We are now helping identify untapped CVs and also match relevant candidates by talent pool search prior to any advertising.
3. Increasing value by keeping the existing CVs fresh through candidate engagement and therefore becoming the go to consultant for a contractor, ensuring exclusivity and faster time to placement/hire, which leads to improved revenues and NFIs.
4. Advertising spend is now much more targeted with job boards and Linkedin.

“How much money did they make on the back of using idibu?”, I hear you ask. You can calculate it yourself. Don’t reduce your marketing spend completely; you don’t want to cut off your lifeblood. But redirect some of it – spend it on a better website, spend it on tools like idibu that help you manage your job board spend, keep your candidates engaged (beware of the Zombie!) and surfaces the best matching candidates in your talent pool prior to the knee-jerk job ad. This result in your consultants spending less time on calls and admin and means more time for them to work more jobs.

I know it is easier said than done, especially if you have to break through ingrained behaviours, but it is more than worth it. If you want to continue competing with the likes of Hired.com, you’d better upgrade your analytics and your tools.