Recruitment in focus

February 7th, 2020 | Industry News

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation has recently reported that on any given day in the previous year, the recruitment industry had placed over 1.1 million people in temporary and contract roles. It’s a great success story for the industry, especially as the report goes on to say that 82% of the firms that used recruitment agencies were satisfied with their service. A warning note is sounded by the average operating profit of 3.8%… suggesting that many agencies are not able to convert enough of their gross profit to operating profit. The reasons for this may be:

1. Excessive agency costs

The best online recruitment software helps agencies streamline their back office costs so they can reduce expenditure and create more operating profit.

2. Fire fighting

Recruiters can get stuck in a cycle of working on last minute placements or filling and refilling temporary placements in hard to recruit sectors. Over focusing on this kind of problem recruitment means they miss out on opportunities to expand. Recruitment management software that is sophisticated enough to automate many processes can free up consultants to look past the immediate issue and pursue longer-term strategies to grow their sectors.

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Recruitment 2020 – how to ride the trends to success

January 24th, 2020 | Industry News

There’s been a vast amount of change in the recruitment industry in the past decade, and no sign of these changes slowing down. In fact they seem to be accelerating. So how can recruitment agencies ride the crests and avoid the troughs?

The best recruitment CRM builds resilience in recruiters as well as in placements

Candidate relationship management software isn’t obviously a solution to the problems of recruiter stress and resilience, but increasingly we see that truly good recruitment management software actually helps an agency to be more adaptable and buoyant, for three reasons:

1. Recruitment software that supports relationship building with candidates often frees consultants up to focus on clients, building strong links and creating bonds
2. Recruitment CRM software allows consultants to check out their intuitive responses to a candidate boosting that difficult-to-define but invaluable element that allows a good consultant to make a judgement call about the way a candidate will fit into an organisation
3. Web-based recruitment software provides recruiters with the ability to instantaneously review and update candidate profiles and client vacancies, meaning that the agency moves faster to fill need, which boosts confidence as well as income.

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2020 – the vision for recruitment

January 14th, 2020 | Industry News

APSCo (The Association of Professional Staffing Companies) says that the number of recruitment companies in the UK has increased by 500% since the turn of the millennium. It’s an astonishing figure – even given the short life of a reasonable percentage of recruitment start-ups – so why the massive growth?

1. There isn’t universal agreement on the figures… other analysts suggest lower numbers are more accurate. Recruiting software isn’t purely purchased by recruitment agencies, many enterprises, such as consulting firms, purchase web based recruitment software as they have elements of head-hunting or employee retention activity in their remit.

2. Recruitment has become a much more specialised business in the last twenty years. Recruitment management software allows sophisticated applicant tracking, automated communications with potential clients and deep investigation of CVs to help highly focused recruitment decisions to be made rapidly but with stringent analysis. This individuation of the recruitment sector has led to many more smaller agencies establishing themselves in niche areas of the job market.

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Volatility and dishonesty: what recruitment software must contend with in 2020

December 23rd, 2019 | Industry News

Employment turbulence and recruitment agencies

Hong Kong and the UK are experiencing similar recruitment problems – for somewhat different reasons. Hong Kong’s democracy protests have had a huge effect on business activity and a recent survey shows that 84% of those who took part believe their business has been negatively affected. In addition, more than two-thirds believed that their business would either shrink or not grow (37% expected to lose turnover, 33% thought that turnover would remain flat) and only 11% of employers were planning to hire more staff, whilst 28% were intending to raise staff pay to try and retain key employees. Online recruitment software needs to be able find flexible employees for crisis situations, which is as much an exercise in exploring soft skills and risk profiles as in calibrating qualifications and experience.

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Back to the future: Recruit So Simple’s recruitment forecast for 2020

December 11th, 2019 | Industry News

Every year we like to take a look at the recruitment industry, exploring everything from recruitment software to heart-warming, or heart-breaking, stories.

Out of the world job on offer

It’s been a decade since the European Space Agency ran a recruitment campaign, but in 2020 a British candidate may be chosen to head to the International Space Station. The average recruitment database software programme might struggle to find the ideal person who should be “27-37 years old with a masters degree in science, engineering or medicine and ideally a qualified pilot”. Speaking Russian is a definite advantage – otherwise you have to learn it, and public speaking, a calm temperament and psychological robustness are also valued. Finally, while you don’t need military experience, you will have to go through an intense physical testing process. Of course, if you’re the lucky candidate… the sky’s the limit.

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Cost-per-hire and back office: areas that trip up recruitment agencies

November 24th, 2019 | Industry News

Understanding cost-per-hire (CPH) is vital if any recruitment consultancy is to master and improve its internal metrics. Cost per hire includes all the financial expenses that relate to successful recruiting for a role: travel, fees, advertising spend, time etc. but doesn’t include induction and training costs. If costs per hire are too high, there are problems with the recruiting process itself and evaluating CPH allows you to identify your team’s successes and failures.

Industry costs – the hidden costs of recruiting

In 2017, one research programme calculated that it cost an average of £11,000 to replace a UK employee earning around £28,000. That’s a huge amount for the average organisation. CPH also varies from sector to sector, recruiting for healthcare tends to average around £7,000 whilst manufacturing recruitment runs to £8,500 to £10,000.

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Transport and travel – the recruitment industry faces 2020

November 8th, 2019 | Industry News

Transport and driving – the challenges ahead

A recent American study of recruitment in transport shows that the impact of the Internet of Things is substantial, and the problem for recruiters is equally weighty. 82% of those who responded expect their transport workforce to increase in 2020 – and 79% expect that to be a problem. Recruiting software faces the challenge of finding suitable candidates for a relatively low paid but highly demanding job sector and online shopping: from Amazon to grocery ordering, is a major influence on where transportation workers choose to spend their time. 40% of drivers, from PSV to ‘last mile delivery’ have more than one driving job. This means that online recruitment software is often trying to balance portfolio employees with the complex legal demands of different forms of driving. Applicant tracking system, UK based systems have to balance employer need, legal constraints and the individual’s desire to pursue a range of driving jobs that allow them to balance their hours and their routes. In the US, companies are advertising more aggressively and offering better referral incentives to try to obtain the driving staff they need, while in the UK retraining and benefit packages appear to be the major strategy that employers are using to try and find the right employees.

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Recruitment: from slavery to digitalisation

October 28th, 2019 | Industry News

At Recruit So Simple we’re rarely surprised by anything we see in the recruitment industry, but every so often we come across a story that completely blows our minds. And this is one of those: The Global Slavery Index says that Malaysia has 212,000 slaves – and pretty well all of them are domestic workers. Recruitment in Malaysia is complex: ‘formal’ workers can be forced to pay up to a month’s salary to the recruitment consultancy that gets them a job, but ‘informal’ workers, such as cooks, cleaners, nannies, gardeners and chauffeurs, often travelling from the Philippines, can be charged such high fees that they are essential trapped forever in low paying jobs that never allow them to clear their recruitment debt. It’s a staggering and terrible statistic and while we do occasionally hear people complain about recruitment agencies in the UK, we’re a million miles away from that kind of horror story.

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Brexit pangs and LinkedIn pledges

October 14th, 2019 | Industry News

Two major recruiting companies have posted results that show the negative impact of Brexit uncertainty on recruitment in the UK. Applicant tracking system UK wide information shows that many firms have put hiring on hold. The supposed deadline 31 October, bad as it was for UK recruiters, may not even end the confusion as the Benn Act requires the Prime Minister to ask for a further delay by 19 October if a deal isn’t achieved at the summit on 17 October. That would mean pushing the deadline back to 31 January 2020… and more misgivings for UK recruiters. With profit declines being reported by big recruiters, online recruitment software needs to contend with a hiring market that is unpredictable, cautious and prone to reversing decisions based on current events. Recruitment agency software has to move fast to align a largely static recruitment pool with the wavering positions being taken by many businesses. The ripples spread far from the UK, with companies from Brazil to Uruguay to Portugal refocusing their energy from the UK as a potential market to more predictable new territories. As a result, web-based recruitment software has the edge, as it permits recruiters to find the widest possible circles of talent, and to craft opportunities that appeal to candidates who might have subtle reasons to seek work in the UK.

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What recruiters can learn from Homeland Security

October 2nd, 2019 | Industry News

It’s not every day that we get an insight into the hiring algorithms used by government organisations, but just this week, the US Homeland Security Department’s Chief Information Officer John Zangardi gave away some of their recent system designs. As all SAAS recruitment agencies know, the algorithms that shape decisions are a vital component of web-based recruitment software, so when Homeland Security say they are adopting ‘creative new hiring practices’ people pay attention.

What it boils down to is that they are accepting people without computer science backgrounds for their cyber workforces. It doesn’t sound that radical, does it?

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