What Recruitment Leaders Need To Do To Improve The Value Of Their Recruitment Business: Greg Savage and Barclay Jones

I talk a lot online and at events about recruitment growth through technology and digital marketing and I love catching up with thought leaders in recruitment to share ideas and debate what can make or break a recruitment business.

As part of Barclay Jones’ Recruitment Leaders Podcast series, I’m delighted to be talking to Greg Savage.

"straight talking - no messing - advice for recruitment leaders who want to be more successful"

This is seriously one of my favourite interviews and I think every recruitment leader (current or budding) will benefit from spending 30 minutes listening to this and planning their 2017 strategy.

Improving the Value of your Recruitment Business: with Graeme Read, APSCo and Barclay Jones

In recent years we have seen an increase in recruitment business companies in the UK market, and a growth internationally – Europe, Asia, The Americas. Now we are post / pre / during (or wherever the hell we are) with Brexit, there’s lots of talk from recruitment leaders about “exit” or “Recxit?” They want to sell up and reap the rewards of growing a profitable recruitment business.

As part of Barclay Jones’ Recruitment Leaders Podcast series, I’m delighted to be talking to Graeme Read from 3RInside and APSCo.

Improving the Value of your Recruitment Business

I grilled Graeme about:

What kinds of things would Graeme say that recruitment leaders should do to improve the value of their recruitment business?

Which niche recruitment sectors are on the ascendance?

What is happening in recruitment M&A (mergers and acquisitions) at the moment in recruitment?

What’s the most important asset in your recruitment business?

What power does recruitment software really have in the recruitment process?

Where does data and recruitment technology sit when you are selling your recruitment business?

New Enterprise

Graeme is also Head of New Enterprise Members & International Markets and is working with APSCo on to help emerging businesses – whether they are new start-ups or SMEs looking to achieve their next level of growth. You can get in touch with him via LinkedIn and APSCo. His goal is to “professionalise” the SME space. Great goal!

Recruitment Awards: It's True! You Can Get ROI from Awards Events: with Teri Etherington, Recruitment International and Barclay Jones

As part of my Recruitment Leaders podcast series on SoundCloud I spoke with Teri Etherington, UK Country Manager for Recruitment International. Teri has over 14 years experience in and around the recruitment industry, working with well established and start-up recruiters and suppliers to provide valuable insight into the world of UK recruitment.

We had a great session around awards events - why you should enter, how you should enter, and of course the ROI.

We talked about:

What is the key to winning an award?

Which awards should you enter?

What are the key, stupid mistakes that many recruitment teams make when they enter awards?

Why is it that so many “go getter” recruitment leaders fail to win award – what an irony

How to plan for an award entry – and ultimately win.

Attracting Recruiters: Do You Really Need More Recruiters To Grow This Year? with Mike Walmsley and Barclay Jones

I had a chat with Mike Walmsley about internal attraction and what recruiters need to think about in this year:

- How to be a talent magnet

- Are you really “different”? Or are your “differences” simply what should be a given?

- Do you really need to recruit this year, in order to grow your business?

- Using predictive hiring analytics and big data to grow your recruitment team

- 3 things that every recruitment leader needs to do in 2016 to improve their talent attraction and retention

- How to get your marketing department engaged in recruitment

- What to do with your “rookie” in their first week

- If a new recruiter “can’t bill” for the first 3 months - what are you going to measure them on?

- Do you want your competition looking at you

- The average Recruiter is incontinent

- How to stop falling in love during an interview

… and why niggles are good!

Recruitment Marketing: Smart Recruiters Know Great Marketing Is Critical: with Simon Lewis from Edge Global Media and Barclay Jones

Simon Lewis, co-founder of Edge Global Media Group, speaks to Lisa Jones as part of her Recruitment Leaders Series. They discuss the Marketing and Digital Recruitment Awards, the future of recruitment and why smart recruitment agencies know that their marketing function is critical to taking their business to the next level.

Recruitment Technology: Getting ROI: Wendy McDougall, Firefish and Barclay Jones

Wendy is CEO and Founder of Firefish Software - A CRM and ATS Recruitment Software for recruitment agencies. She has some fantastic ideas about how recruitment leaders can actually make money from their Recruitment CRM. Every leader wants to do this.

We chatted about:

- How Wendy is keen to help recruiters to predict what their revenues are going to be.

- If you know what you have, then you can put a price on it so how can you put a value on your recruiting data?

- Recruiters are working too many jobs, and this affects their ability to place, and overall allow recruiting leaders to predict their pipeline / profitability

- Are people the most precious asset in your recruiting business, or is it data?

- How can you use your Recruitment CRM to predict your revenue?

- How can marketers and finance teams in recruitment using predictive recruiting?

- The biggest barrier to predictive recruiting is that too many recruiters see data as admin

- We should start to measure the time we spend resourcing a vacancy – how can we do this?

- Which metrics are crucial to a recruitment leader and how can recruitment CRM support?

Recruitment Businesses Improving their Value: Alex Moyle and Barclay Jones

As part of my Recruitment Leaders series on SoundCloud I spoke with Alex Moyle from Elevated Recruiting. He works with recruitment leaders and their teams to make them more productive and their businesses more profitable.

We had a really interesting chat about:

• How to build a high value recruitment business

•

• Recruiters are now not the only game in town – recruitment tech and the flat fee model has disrupted the client/recruiter conversation

• Recruiters need to behave more like accountants and lawyers and add value by consulting and not simply recruiting.

• Lidl and burgers

• Why most recruitment firms never get above 10 people

• Why do recruitment leaders ask their staff to do something that they would not do themselves or are not equipped to deliver?

• How to run a recruitment firm with a dispersed management team

• And he also gave his view into what he thinks that every recruitment leader should do before Christmas.

Sensible Recruiters Turn Candidates Into Clients: James Nathan and Barclay Jones

As part of our Recruitment Leaders SoundCloud series, James Nathan from the James Nathan Experience talked to me about building relationships with talent so well that they become a friend / advocate / referee, and ultimately a client.

James is a business development and coaching professional who works with businesses to make them more profitable. I was interested to hear about his approach to and thoughts on smart sales within recruitment. I wanted to pick his brains about the lack of case studies that the average recruiter has about converting candidates into clients.

So we had a quick call to chat about:

• How recruiters often treat their candidates like one night stands (I feel a blog coming on!)

• You need to seduce your talent (interpret as you wish... although some recruiters I know may need some practical pointers! Wink!)

• How great sales people often make poor marketers of their own product (and this is something I really want to fix!)

• Is the placement process often abdicated to the finance team, and hence the relationship that the recruiter may have begins to wane once the candidate accepts the role?

• Keeping your team secret is not the route to approachability, and approachability is the route to advocacy

• Are any recruiters out there KPId on the quality of relationships, or simply the volume of their jobs, send outs, placements?

The candidate experience should be good enough to sustain the entire recruitment lifecycle, not simply the initial, first placement. This is smart recruiting and is totally achievable and self-sustaining – but all too often not achieved.

James talks a lot of about "sensible activity" of recruiters to help them understand that the bar does not need to be set massively high (or unachievable) to be appropriate and to achieve return ROI – it’s all about process! (You’ve heard me say that before!)

So far we have interviewed the following recruiting / marketing / tech leaders:

Brandon Metcalf, Talent Rover: Talent Communities and Recruiter Contol

Tracey Barrett, BlueSky PR: Recruitment Marketing and PR in 2015

Stephen Barnhurst, Broadbean: Jobs and Marketing for Recruiters

Stephen O’Donnell, PC Evaluate: Psychometrics and Recruitment Process

Alan Hiddleston, Firefish: Recruitment CRM, Recruitment Marketing

Nick Ellis, Hirabl: Back door placements and how to catch them

Listen to or SoundCloud account (while running, driving, cooking, working. multi-tasking)

“Have the leaders in the recruitment tech and marketing space in your ears”

Coming soon:

Wendy McDougall, Firefish: talks predictive analytics

Alex Moyle, Selzig Consulting Talks Recruiter Sales and Process

Anthony Sutton, Cream HR: talks recruitment and HR for recruiters

Talent Communities, Recruitment CRM And Recruiter Control: Brandon Metcalf, Talent Rover and Barclay Jones

As part of our Recruitment Leaders series, Founder and COO of Talent Rover, Brandon Metcalf spent a little time with me having a chat about his passion for smart recruitment process in an industry dominated by tech and data.

He recently penned a great blog:

The Dawn of Communities: Why Social Hubs are the New Competitive Edge

So we had a quick call to chat about:

• Creating talent communities could mean recruiters giving up control

• Do recruitment websites actually have a function, or are they just all recruiter features?

• Recruiters are control freaks

• Why recruiters should setup AND foster clients/candidate collaboration

• Does the recruitment process actually allow for talent communities? Nor it is too transactional?

• How can we engaged with engaged talent?

It’s really refreshing to talk to tech leaders in the recruiting space. They don’t just sell Recruitment CRM. They live and breathe great process and innovation (in an industry that is crying out for it!)

Listen to Brandon’s interview here.

So far we have interviewed the following recruiting / marketing / tech leaders:

Tracey Barrett, BlueSky PR: Recruitment Marketing and PR in 2015

Stephen Barnhurst, Broadbean: Jobs and Marketing for Recruiters

Stephen O’Donnell, PC Evaluate: Psychometrics and Recruitment Process

Alan Hiddleston, Firefish: Recruitment CRM, Recruitment Marketing

Nick Ellis, Hirabl: Back door placements and how to catch them

Listen to or SoundCloud account (while running, driving, cooking, working. multi-tasking)

“Have the leaders in the recruitment tech and marketing space in your ears”

Coming soon:

James Nathan, The James Nathan Experience: Recruiter Sales Strategies

Wendy McDougall, Firefish: talks predictive analytics

Alex Moyle, Selzig Consulting Talks Recruiter Sales and Process

Anthony Sutton, Cream HR: talks recruitment and HR for recruiters

Recruitment CRM, Recruitment Marketing: Alan Hiddleston, Firefish: and Barclay Jones

Thanks Alan Hiddleston from Firefish Recruitment CRM for joining me on my SoundCloud. I’m going through the recruiting industry speaking with recruitment and tech leaders asking them about recruitment, recruiting process, software, growing a recruitment businesses, recruitment marketing – basically, key issues and challenges for every recruiter and recruitment leader.

You need to listen to this interview if you are a recruitment leader / techie / recruitment marketer.

CRM is a big deal for recruiters this year and we are writing about it and speaking at events about how recruitment leaders need to make their CRM a USP.

We talk about:

• Is recruitment process complex or sophisticated? And has tech made it more complicated?

• What is the ultimate cool tool?

• Are smaller brands run any better than bigger brands?

• Is tech used any differently by smaller or bigger brands?

• When is the best time to get best practice into a recruitment agency?

• Investors, and often clients and talent, look for something unique about your recruitment business - how do you prove that you are a unique recruitment business?

• How do you create an asset out of your Recruitment CRM?

• What are the pros and cons of “bespoking” a recruitment CRM?

• What is the future of recruitment software?

• Will recruiters ever be like Tom Cruise?

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