Putting data at the heart of your recruitment agency.

Module 1: Lesson 1

The right communication is at the heart of engaging your database – and keeping your data active at all times. Without targeting the right candidates with the right message, it’s like throwing jobs at a wall and seeing what sticks – ineffective and time-consuming. In order to improve your targeting and increase the results of your communications, you need to know exactly who you’re talking to at all times – and tailor the communication style and channels to each persona. The key benefits of developing candidate profiles include:

A key aspect of creating candidate profiles that enrich your database is understanding what the previous placements you made tell you about your agency’s strongest and weakest links. Knowing what brings you the most profit will allow you to maximise the return on investment by focusing your resources only on strategies that convert.

Without an understanding of what works, you can’t successfully strategise for the future – meaning you’ll be making decisions based on intuition rather than data. The best approach is to analyse your precious placements – successful and failed ones – to know exactly what lead to the end result. Things to consider include:

The key to connecting with your ideal candidate personas is to know everything there is about them – especially where they spend their time online. If you’re trying to recruit construction workers but post your job openings on LinkedIn, the likelihood of them coming across it is pretty slim. You need to understand their online behaviours before you go into adapting your messaging.

 It can be easy to get lost in ICP creation – recruiters often find themselves trying to create too many individual types. The key is to identify the core of the value for your business. Consider:

Module 1: Lesson 2

A single source of truth is the one location within your recruitment agency that should hold all candidate data and track every interaction that your agency has. When all funnels point into your CRM you will be able to track every activity and truly understand what is happening in your agency. Everything that you do needs to be managed from within the CRM – this way, you will get the highest ROI, optimise your recruiters’ performance, and earn more, faster. ​

Technology often becomes your strategy 

Any tech should compliment and improve strategy but agencies often find themselves working around their CRM rather then with it. This then means that the limiting factor is the tech itself rather than the skill and expertise of recruiters. 

Tech stacks are bloated and data is siloed

When tech stacks become too big and the data in your agency gets 'stuck' in a number of independent systems, your agency is working far less efficiently than it can do. This adds extra admin work, slowing down your recruiters. It also means your data is incomplete making it harder to turn into placements. 

Agencies overpay and see no ROI

When agencies invest in recruitment software they can lose sight that this is designed to help them make more money. Perhaps through poor adoption or by having large tech stacks with various integrations, it can often be the case that the software doesn’t improve the bottom line and has simply added extra cost without contributing to increased revenues. 

Adoption is often low

Low use of any software makes it incredibly difficult to provide ROI and poor adoption has a snowball effect of often making the software less effective. Low adoption with a CRM means a lack of quality data, which means the value adding features cant properly kick in. ​

To ensure all funnels lead into your CRM, you first need to understand what systems your agency is currently using. Once you have a clear picture of your tech stack use, you need to start eliminating data gaps one by one. With every data gap eliminated you will strengthen your database and improve agency insight. 

The first step to increasing your agency’s profitability is to ensure your candidate database is not only rich, but also highly engaged. When surveyed, 67% of agency owners said they were prioritising re-engaging their existing databases to maximise each candidate's value. Live job vacancies have fallen by 13,000 in 2024, so your strategy must ensure you have a talent pipeline that is ready to place when jobs become available. With an enriched and engaged database, your agency will be more agile and ultimately more profitable. 

In order to identify a candidate’s intent to find a new role, there are a variety of indicators you need to consider. Trying to sell a role to a cold candidate who’s not ready for a change is not only a waste of your time, but more importantly, your resources. If you focus on engaging your candidates and focus on the ones who are already willing to change, you will speed up the placement process and maximise your return.

The key signals to watch out for include: 

Module 1: Lesson 4

The main reason your recruiters are not making the most of your database is because it’s full of unusable, messy data – and if they can’t easily find what they are looking for, they simply don’t priotitise the database.

Your CRM is supposed to make your life easier and more efficient and without a structure, it’s only adding manual labour. The data might be consistently coming in, but there’s no way to identify intent or create valuable candidate lists to your clients – and so you might as well not have a CRM at all. 

Candidate intent refers to behaviours and indicators that tell you if a candidate is willing to engage with potential roles – and if so, which ones are closest to their aspirations. Knowing what your candidates are looking for and what drives them in their search for a new role is crucial to effectively target and engage them with the right communications and channels. With that understanding, you can further split your targeting strategy to passive candidate nurturing and in-market outreach.

Module 1: Lesson 5

When you build a multi-layered tech stack, you create opportunities for data loss with every layer. Data transfer is never perfect, so the more steps you have in your stack the more data you will lose and this not only damages the health of your database, but also your understanding of what is happening in your agency. 

By directing all funnels into your single source of truth, your CRM, you will minimise data loss and ensure that you have a true picture of conversion attribution so your agency can focus on valuable activities. 

Module 1: Lesson 3

Data enrichment is the process of creating full candidate or contact profiles within your CRM. It’s the collated of information including CVs, preferences, location, post codes, and other necessary data. Enabling your CRM to prioritise and segment profiles based on the enriched data. Additionally, it’s also about making your CRM a space where all the other funnels meet. When you conduct most of your recruitment actions via your CRM, you maximise the potential that it holds, speed up your processes, and optimise your operations. 

 Data enrichment is not just a nice to have these days – it’s a necessity of sustainable growth. In the ever-changing market, you can’t rely on intuition to make strategic decisions, and if you wait too long to make shifts, you will sacrifice agility and quicker success. With data enrichment, you’re not only able to make more placements from existing candidates – but also make a higher profit in general. A rich database means faster placements, fewer candidates leaving their new roles, happier clients, and the ability to handle a higher volume of roles. It gives you a chance to increase your revenue per recruiter, decrease operational costs, and clearer financial forecasting, so you always know what to expect.

It’s no secret that targeting the in-market candidates is the key to winning faster and increasing conversion rates - but the value that lies in tailoring your strategy to them is often missed by recruiters. Explore some of the top benefits you can reap from choosing to target them…

Instead of sending all of your roles to all of your candidates, you can categorise the data within your CRM and tailor the communications for better results.

The more structure your CRM has, the easier it is to use it, and so it becomes your recruiters’ first touchpoint for all processes.

Now that you know how vital candidate intent is to your agency’s success, it’s time to figure out how you can track it without having to spend hours on going through your reports and finding the right data.

Step 1 would be to make sure the candidates are being split into relevant talent pools based on their experience, expectations, location, and any other requirements you have for specific roles. These automated talent pools will then show you the right candidates for the right jobs – and, what is more, also rank their engagement levels within the system, so you have a clear overview of who’s active and ready to be placed.

Another action to take would be to set up automated job alerts that go out to your specific talent pools – with these, you can easily see which candidates engage with your new roles without lifting a finger. 

 Keeping your CRM at the heart of your recruitment agency holds multiple advantages to how your business operates, how fast you can make placements, and what volume of candidates and clients that your agency can handle.

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Module 1

What sectors does your agency operate within? If it’s just 1, you will only need 2 or 3 different ICP types differentiated by levels of experience or expectations, but if you work within multiple sectors, it will be more.

ICP differentiation is about splitting people into relevant information, so a question to ask is “Is the ICP group I created all going to be interested in a message from me?”. If you’re diluting your message, then ICP isn’t focused enough. 

Ask these key questions to determine the state of your tech stack: 

• What systems does your agency use?
• What is the purpose of each system?
• What information does each system collect or use? 
• Where is the data stored from each system stored? 

In order to create an enriched database, you need to have a scalable process in place that allows you to quickly identify the gaps in your data - and eliminate those areas that are filled with dead or inactive information. If you can automate the search for data gaps by creating a list of possible missing information, and then grouping your contacts in alignment with that missing information, you can then easily go through all of the missing data.

Knowing exactly where your data gaps lie gives you a quick and easy way to get rid of it – and an automated process in place makes it that much faster. Simply divide your data based on the missing information. 

So that you can ensure you are capturing the correct data for all candidates you first need to understand what data you need, and this will vary between agencies as well as between sectors. 

Ask these key questions to determine data quality: 

• What criteria do you use to sort candidates?
• How do you determine location, by city or postcode?
• Is it this same for all desks?
• Are the fields universal across all platforms?
• For example, do you need city or industry?