The recruitment industry has a big problem with small data.
We’re no longer having to convince agencies about the importance of data. Agency owners already appreciate that information is as precious as oil for business.
What we are seeing, is that recruiters are being increasingly exposed to enormous amounts of information every day. That they have better tools to capture that activity and can find themselves drowning in too much data.
However, only a small number of agencies are putting a real strategy behind the quality of data that’s entering their CRM and the actions they then take forward.
As a result, they find that uncontrolled data entering their CRM leaves them with too much activity and too little utility.
It becomes an activity counter, a storage locker, and means agencies can’t reverse engineer what’s actually driving performance in their companies.
Quality in. Insights out. Actions forward.
We meet so many agencies with the same problem. They can’t access useful data, when they need it, to answer the important questions they need to ask:
- How they identify the inputs that drive the desired outputs?
- How they accurately forecast?
- What the reality of each pipeline looks like?
- How every individual, team or client is performing?
Last year, we found that while 91% of agencies use data to make decisions. Of that data, over half don’t trust it and only 13% are leveraging automation to process it.
Technology is our ally and recruiters can’t compete with its efficiency to record and process activity and large data sets… and they don’t need to.
We’re naturally prone to errors and limited by our capacity. Businesses that leverage automation and technology are able to double down their resources on the human advantages of recruitment.
Start smaller with data
It’s a question of “how” and not “how much” data you’re collecting, measuring and reporting on.
Your CRM is more than an activity counter to measure lag indicators. Its real value lies in how you measure and identify the inputs that create the outputs.
That’s when data starts getting powerful. When you’re able to deconstruct the entire recruitment journey and identify where to tweak and apply marginal gains.
How small improvements to each individual’s activity can collectively deliver massive change across your agency.
Actionable insights at the right time
Do you have the data-to-hand to answer the questions that are immediately in front of you?
When opportunities surface in recruitment, we often have to make snap decisions. You have to ask if the opportunity will pass by if you have to go and find the data to support your decision?
The manual effort involved in pulling selected data sets together loses you time and ground that you could be using to your advantage.
Recruiters, managers and owners simply do not have that time to drill into their data to pull out insights. Business moves – or should move – at a faster pace and those insights need to be available when they’re most useful.
