Tech isn’t everything.
That may sound strange coming from a recruiting tech company, but it’s true.
You can have the best technology in the world, but if you don’t make systemic and structural changes to your organization, it won’t help you.
To maximize the ROI from your recruiting tech stack, you need:
- People who know how to operate it and maximize its value
- Processes that leverage it to drive value and align various team members and stakeholders
- Buy-in from the top—otherwise it’ll just be seen as a “nice to have”
So while it’s important to understand and adopt emerging recruiting technologies, there are other key industry trends that you need to be up to speed on.
Here are five non-tech hot topics in recruiting that you should understand and address to maximize your agency’s success.
1. Core values
There are plenty of recruiting agencies out there. So what makes you stand out from the crowd?
It’s an important question, especially when you consider the increasing importance of recruiter reputation in the marketplace. Who you are at your core, both in terms of your organization and the individual people on your team, matters.
What’s more, professionals want to work for organizations that’s not just about making money, but have a positive mission and purpose behind it. This is especially true if you want to attract a younger workforce.
That’s why the core values are becoming increasingly important in terms of agency strategy and brand reputation. Some of the top agencies we’ve talked to have provided the following tips:
- Define your core values in specific and actionable terms
- Hire for core values to ensure team alignment from Day One
- Make core values a regular part of conversations
- When making major business decisions, ask: does this align with our core values?
By prioritizing core values at every level of your business, you become a place that’s known not only for what you do, but who you are.
READ MORE: Why core values are critical to your success as a recruiting agency
2. Agency culture
Do you want to go to work at a place you hate?
It sounds like a stupid question, but obviously there are many recruiting agencies that aren’t getting the message.
If you don’t invest in creating a culture that values your team and encourages them to be their best selves—professionally, mentally, emotionally, even physically—you’re going to have a hard time attracting new team members.
Now, culture isn’t always explicit. In fact, it rarely is. The unspoken expectations and traditions within your agency are more powerful than some vague words on a PowerPoint or your website.
For too long, recruiters have excused long hours, poor work-life balance, and bad behavior as “just the way it is.” Not only is this bad for your team, it trickles down to the candidate and client experience.
But the times, they are a-changin’. More agencies are prioritizing company culture, which makes them an outstanding place to work.
READ MORE: 5 elements of agency culture to retain and recruit recruiters.
3. Business processes
As recruiting agencies are learning to do more with less, there’s a growing need to increase organizational efficiency.
But efficiency doesn’t always mean rushing to the newest, shiniest piece of technology. In fact, if you adopt technology without changing your underlying processes, you’re just going to do the wrong thing faster.
When considering how to modernize your agency, think about your various business processes and how to improve them:
- Quality assurance (QA) of the candidate experience
- Recruiter reviews & feedback
- Training & coaching
- Candidate follow-up and engagement
Work to shore up your processes, align your teams around those processes, and provide them with the tools and resources to put them into action. When you do this, you can realize the following benefits:
- Increased organizational efficiency
- Greater predictability in results
- Better alignment with your core values & business objectives
- Ease of troubleshooting—because you can identify where in the chain things went wrong
- Clarity around each person’s role & expectations, which improves morale
At the end of the day, process helps your agency move faster and further together because you have an established way to maximize your resources.
READ MORE: Why you should treat change like a mindset, not just a process.
4. Brand elevation
As labor shortages have increased candidate expectations & self-service job boards have made finding open positions much easier, many candidates are bypassing the recruiter and going straight to the source.
So if you want to get a candidate to work with you, it’s not enough to say you have access to the jobs. You’ve got to demonstrate that you offer value to the relationship.
This is one reason why brand—both on the individual recruiter and agency level—is more important than ever before.
Too often, marketing experts over-complicate brand and brand reputation. But at its core, your brand is simply this: What are people saying about you in the marketplace, both publicly and, more importantly, privately?
An active recruiter brand strategy seeks to proactively tackle this issue by:
- Collecting feedback
- Listening to the good, bad, and the ugly
- Sharing success stories—let other people talk about you
- Address the “elephants in the room” and reassure your audience that you are, in fact, a trustworthy recruiter and agency
It’s also important to remember that growing your brand is not a one-off event. You can’t expect to just publish a press release and be done with it.
Brand elevation requires proactive and, yes, aggressive efforts to market yourself, share your differentiators, and enable your candidates and clients to be your best marketers.
READ MORE: Return on awareness: a better way to measure brand marketing efforts.
5. Real-time feedback
Speaking of reputation, one of the biggest tools in managing reputation—and an increasingly important topic of conversation in the recruiting sector—is real-time feedback.
By collecting feedback in real time, you can check recruiter performance at the most critical moments, not at year-end when the problem has already grown out of hand.
In order for you to act on your reviews, they must meet the following criteria:
- Real-time, otherwise you get the feedback too late
- Detailed, giving you insight into the underlying root cause
- Actionable, so you can fix issues before they become problems
What’s more, by actively capturing and acting on reviews—both good and bad—you’ll demonstrate your willingness to listen to candidates and clients, and make changes accordingly. This will only serve to elevate your reputation and improve your success in the market.
READ MORE: Why you need real-time reviews to fix issues before they become problems.
If you want to leverage real-time feedback to improve your recruiter performance, elevate your brand, and enhance the candidate experience, get started with a free Great Recruiters account.
