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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Google search, payroll fraud and financial adviser recruitment

September 25th, 2019 | Industry News

As 23 European job search sites write to the European Competition Commissioner complaining that Google’s online recruitment tool is ‘a lever to dominate yet another online industry’ other online recruiters are adjusting their web-based recruitment software to cope with the new Google offering. The complaint is that Google’s job adverts appear above the websites of other search companies and, the signatories claim, on mobiles, the Google Jobs box fills the entire screen, reducing click-throughs to other competitor sites. Google disputes all the claims.

Fighting fraud with online recruitment software

Recruitment software should have the capacity to help recruitment consultancies protect themselves against fraud and the best recruitment software for agencies is robust enough to recognise patterns that could indicate fraudulent behaviour.

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Avoiding the recruitment mistakes that cost big businesses plenty

August 30th, 2019 | Industry News

Recruitment agencies that make use of SaaS solutions have a real advantage when it comes to avoiding the kind of errors that huge businesses and sectors are prone to falling into.

Recruiting for oil and gas – and where it goes wrong

Once there was a well-worn groove from science and engineering departments to the oil and gas industry. But since 2014, this resource has slowed, partly because the price of oil has dropped and graduate recruitment was cut by around 50%. Although there has been a turnaround in the industry, recruitment hasn’t benefitted. In fact, it’s reported that 90% of executives in the oil and gas sector say skill shortages are damaging productivity. Even the best recruitment CRM struggles to find candidates to fill the shortages in this sector… bad press is definitely one reason, like tobacco and armaments, oil and gas has become a field that can turn off bright graduates, but unconscious recruitment bias has played a part too. Adverts that use language like ‘challenging position’ or ‘great benefits for candidates willing to accept adverse working conditions’ may sound honest, but in fact they read like code for ‘men only need apply’.

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Successful recruiting in international markets

August 16th, 2019 | Industry News

Recruitment software used to be a blunt tool that recorded facts and kept track of payments. Today it’s a sophisticated contribution to an increasingly challenging endeavour – finding the right candidate in challenging marketplaces. SAAS recruitment agencies are ahead of the game, relying on online recruitment software that can handle complexities like Brexit and the Deutsche Bank layoffs to provide the best possible service to job seekers and clients.

Brexit and Deutsche Bank (DB)

For big international recruiters finding that activity in Europe is essential to offset the slowdown in the UK market, the balancing act has just become more tricky. Even the best recruitment CRM can’t disguise the fact that net fee incomes from UK recruitment are falling – big agencies are posting between 4-8% drops this quarter, small agencies may be feeling it even more. This makes Deutsche Bank’s 18,000 job reduction a major impact on an already fragile market.

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