Top seven insights internal recruitment could be providing - By Abigail Fitch

While working for a recruitment agency , I was expected to make a large number of headhunt and client calls daily, my boss at the time taught me something that’s really stuck with me. He said,” there is no such thing as an unsuccessful call”. He asked me after every call to list three pieces of information I got from the call and write a weekly intel report. We all know cold calling can be soulless, but I urge you to start to look at it differently. The insights I gained made me consultative and well informed within my market, subsequently, clients wanted to meet me for a coffee and chat about the market , gaining credibility and therefore more business.

I believe there is lots to be gained, from C-suite meeting with their in-house recruitment teams regularly and here’s why….

• Accurate salary surveys? We pay large amounts for salary surveys in order to know the market rate and to ensure we stay competitive, however, they may not be accurate. Companies providing this data drag it from CRM/ATS systems using a reporting function or from online platforms where candidates register their details or apply for jobs. As an internal recruiter, I would estimate from getting a new role signed off to making an offer, I probably speak to 50 people in the industry including candidates from our competitors. During this process I will be given salary information and salary expectations from them, this data is both real-time and accurate.

Salary surveys from external sources are often inaccurate for a number of reasons listed below :

• Candidates are not always honest with recruitment agencies or online applications/ logging systems.
•  Recruitment agency consultants sometimes encourage candidates to log a higher salary, in order to get a bigger placement fee (Fee’s received by agencies on placement, are a percentage of the salary and therefore this can be a conflict of interest )
•  Candidates often confuse base salary and total earnings i.e. they include bonus etc. to their base, making the information inaccurate
•  Candidates could list salary expectations as current salary in error when making online applications.
•  Recruiters forget to get salaries or candidates refuse to give them, so in order to complete candidate registration, they guess .
•  Information logged, on ATS’s , for candidates registered a number of years ago, may not have been updated.

  Other insights include

•  Competitors Structure ? What is the structure of our competitors ? Do other companies use the same job title as us for the role ? What are the responsibilities for this role in other companies ?
• Reasons for leaving and staying with a company? Both are useful to know to retain and gain the best talent.
•  Competitor information : What are your competitors doing strategy wise and why.
• Market information :What’s happening in the market ? What are the challenges, this information is often communicated in candidate calls
• Recruitment functions are your voice in the market , they are selling your brand and getting your name out there, on average a recruiter makes contact of some form with over 2000-5000+ candidates a year. These could also become customers of your product or service
• Candidate and industry maps for each role: Don’t pay thousands for inaccurate none real time information, these maps can be easily completed for each role , by your recruitment functions, using research, CV data bases and tools like LinkedIn . These enable you to see talent pools and understand where your talent is located, who your talent currently works for and what the risk areas are. After receiving this information you may reconsider location, if it should be off-shore, changes to role level or specification to expand the pool . 

 Business information, what are competitors objectives and sales strategies, how are they building their function and what is their USP