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How the Best Recruitment Agencies Build a Futureproof Talent Pipeline
Futureproofing your agency means ensuring you are prepared for market shifts and are agile enough to continue generating profits, even when times are tough. With job board prices rising as much as 30-40% in 2023, keeping your agency's talent pipeline full is challenging. When surveyed, 67% of agency leaders told us that they would be focusing on re-engaging their existing databases this year to combat these rising costs. So, we're diving in to explore how you can build a future-proof talent pipeline from your CRM.
The key is knowing exactly where your candidates come from, what talent you've got in your database at all times, and then having the ability to place them quickly. That can only happen when you centre your operations around a recruitment CRM that streamlines your manual work and tracks data.
The goal is to create a high-converting talent pipeline that sits at the heart of your agency. I must become the first point that you and your recruiters reach for when a new role appears. By creating a warm and automated database, you will less susceptible to market fluctuations and will be able to make placements faster and more accurately.
Read on to explore how to:
Embed the right processes to amplify ROI
Make data valuable by correctly qualifing candidates
Maximise your data for optimal results
66% of applications from web sources were generated by Job Boards in 2023.
Firefish Job Flow Index | Annual Summary 2023
While job board costs may be on the increase, there is no denying their relevancy in the industry. It is vital, therefore, that agencies are able to make every job advert count to maximise the ROI of every job.
To achieve efficient use of job board adverts there are some key steps that your agency needs to follow.
Step 2: Make every job advert count
Enrich every candidate application
Win faster by prioritising data
How to maximise every job advert:
Collect candidates through your CRM
To get the best out of your recruitment CRM it must be embedded into all of your internal processes, making it the first touchpoint your recruiters go to when a new role appears.
Listen to Firefish CEO, Wendy McDougall, explain the problem, then hover over the tiles to learn how to set your CRM up for success.
Step 1: Embed a CRM-first approach into your agency
Make the data valuable
Embed CRM-first processes
Create a single source of truth
Step 3: Make your data work for you
Once you have an enriched database sat at the heart of your agency, it's time to make that data work for you.
A rich database can unlock business development opportunities by giving you the confidence to know you'll find a candidate for your potential client and by giving you the tools to prove that.
How to demonstrate your agency's data-driven results:
A potential client for your recruitment agency is going to be impressed by only one thing; a demonstration that you can fill job roles, quickly, cost-effectively and with fully compliant candidates.
There is no better tool to demonstrate this than a database enriched with quality candidates and segmented into relevant talent pools. Having the confidence to refer to your database of candidates, and knowing that you have the right people to fill the roles will set you apart from the rest.
Sending Spec CVs is one of the most powerful tools in a recruitment agency's business development armoury and by creating a CRM-first operation you will naturally equip yourself to have the best candidates ready to present.
Firefish users fill roles 12 days faster than the industry average.
12 Days
Putting data at the heart of your
recruitment agency.
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In order to futureproof your recruitment agency's talent pipeline, the most important step you can take is to embed a CRM-first approach to activities to enable you to put data at the heart of your agency. Without centralising activities, you will be blind to the true performance of your agency and reliant on individual talent who may not remain with your agency indefinitely.
With a CRM-first approach your agency can unlock a range of benefits when it comes to candidate acquisition, candidate placement and business development.
Embed CRM-first processes
To make your agency a CRM-first operation, it is vital that you embed processes into your agency. The key here is to communicate the value of using and updating the CRM and demonstrate how it makes your recruiters' lives easier. Many legacy systems can be seen as additional admin, but a finely tuned and enriched database becomes an essential tool that your recruiters won't want to live without.
Instead of heading to the increasingly expensive job boards as the first action, your agency needs to focus first on the rich resources within your database. Firefish clients make 85% of placements from within their CRM, so starting by exploring talent pools and potential matches is an obvious choice.
Win faster by prioritising data
By treating every job advert and job board posting as an opportunity to collect and nurture candidates who can fill not only the role you’re exploring, but also future roles you will immediately begin to win faster.
If every action adds to your talent pipeline with valuable information your agency will place candidates quicker and demonstrate excellence to candidates and clients alike.
Collect candidates through your CRM
Creating jobs and adverts from within your CRM means that you will continue to feed your talent pipeline, building for the future at the same time as sourcing for a particular role.
By doing so you can ensure that adverts, applications and communications are all contained within your CRM. And by tracking every application in this manner you will find it far easier to enrich your database and futureproof your talent pipeline with candidates who will be relevant for future roles in your sector.
Enrich every candidate application
Adding candidates to your talent pipeline is not just a numbers game. In fact, quality is far better than quantity and you should actively prune candidates who are unlikely to be put forward for a role from your system.
To understand which candidates are likely to succeed with your agency you should look back at the candidates who have been successfully placed in the past. Consider candidate skills, role titles, and experience to qualify candidates who have the best chance of placement. Focussing your efforts on these candidates will pay dividends by creating a database that’s bursting at the seams with relevant talent.
Make the data valuable
The first step to making the most out of your CRM is to ensure the data in it is engaged, valuable, and easy to find - because otherwise, your recruiters will default to looking elsewhere. If you want to make your CRM the first place they go to, you need to make it relevant.
To achieve this you need to create ICP talent pools.
After determining your ideal client persona (ICP) for different types of roles you're recruiting for, split them into relevant talent pools. This will speed up the search process and allow you to automate communications whilst maintaining the personal touch. If your recruiters have clear pools of candidates ready to be placed in different roles, it will be easy for them to go CRM-first because they will see the value in doing so.
Create a single source of truth
The key to maximising ROI of your recruitment software is to make the data within it the heart of your agency.
Instead of having separate tools for different actions, make use of CRM-integrated tools, such as a LinkedIn Chrome Extension, Outlook Integration, or job multi-poster. Keeping all of your communications inside your CRM and managing all of the operations from one place will instantly make it easier for your recruiters to focus all of their sourcing efforts around the recruitment software and increase efficiency. Every layer you add to your tech-stack creates inaccuracy, so the more you can contain within your CRM, the better futureproofed your agency's talent pipeline will be.