How Unlocking the Data in Your Recruitment CRM Increases Sales

With the market shifting and businesses trying to increase their profits whilst cutting their spending, it’s not surprising that the recruitment industry had to adjust to that shift, too. The UK unemployment rate stood at 4.2% between December 2023 and February 2024, which is above what was estimated at that time last year – and the estimated vacancies fell by 13,000 on the quarter.

In this climate, if you want to make consistent profits and get ahead of your competitors, you need to incorporate strategies that allow you to increase your revenue per recruiter and maximise the return you get from each of your team members. The key to achieving more with your team lies in understanding and utilising the data within your CRM and automating processes that are currently manual. 

In this interactive article, you’ll learn: 

🔹Why data is vital to maximising return

🔹Steps to increasing your recruitment sales

🔹How to retarget your new roles to relevant candidates

The Value of Good Data

Good candidate data is what lets you make fast and accurate placements - and in turn, grow your agency. Without an enriched and engaged database, you will be swimming in a sea of candidate information without any indication of which ones are suitable for your current roles. It wastes not only time, but also makes you invest a lot more resources to find the right candidate. 

Your CRM should be your single source of truth that not only holds your most vital candidate data needed to make successful placements; such as their location, sector, discipline, and salary expectations; but also automates the processes of matching candidates with jobs.

When you embed a CRM-first approach,  you'll be able to reap the benefits of faster and more accurate recruitment. Read on to explore how an enriched CRM will drive profitable growth for your agency.

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Data-driven agencies see a 30%increase in revenue per recruiter.

“The key is keeping the data relevant. We’re always adding information, notes, and new candidates to the database, and Firefish makes it easy to keep them sorted and engaged.

Sam Wild, Operations Director
Axion Recruitment

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Valuable Data Creates Value

1.       Unlock Automated Talent Pools &Potential Matches

When you have good quality data in your CRM this unlocks the capabilities of automation and can result in a 15% reduction in operational overheads. Good data allows you to do more with less, because you can automate candidate filtering to bring your best matches to the fore. 

Creating specific talent pools of candidates for different types of roles means you always have a live list of candidates for any new job.Divide the candidates by criteria like discipline, sector, salary expectations,location, postcode, experience, or skillset. With all your data categorised, you will be able to target the right candidates with the jobs they want, personalising all communication and increasing conversions. 

As well as unlocking the capabilities of talent pools,adding good quality data to your CRM enables you to fully benefit from potential matches, which automatically suggests hot candidates for any new job you add to the system.   

2.       Retarget Candidates with New Jobs 

In addition to highlighting likely candidates, when you have good quality data in your system you will immediately be able to segment different groups to created personalised candidate journeys. Instead of showing all of your roles to all candidates, you can instead create job alerts and campaigns that only expose candidates to relevant roles. By streamlining your communications by sector and suitability you will immediately see increased candidate engagement and improved conversion rates. 

Engagement indicators within the talent pools also make it easy to see which candidates are most active within your system, and which ones might need some more relationship-building. This data is invaluable when it comes to contacting candidates to fill a role. 

3.       Leverage Talent Pools For BD 

Talent pools and categorisation of your data is not just to make reaching relevant candidates easier and faster - they also help you streamline your BD processes, allowing you to bring your clients the talent they need faster than any of your competitors. 

If one of your clients has a role they'd like you to fill,you can easily demonstrate a rich list of appropriate candidates within your system, you will have an immediate advantage. Good data enables you to unlock the value of talent pools and generate Spec CVs at the click of a button. 

4.       Understand Which Activities Are Profitable

The most powerful benefit of a CRM-first approach that focuses on good-quality data is that it creates a single source of truth at the heart of your agency. By driving every funnel into your CRM you will eliminate data gaps and be able to gain true oversight of performance across your agency.Understanding exactly where your agency is now - and why - is vital if you can hope to achieve profitable agency growth.

Analyse current sales reports

When you analyse your sales reports, you are able to learn what sales your agency is generating, where they come from, and what actions impact them directly - which gives you a clear insight to creating a data-driven strategy guaranteed to bring results. Make sure you look at:

• Placements made, tracked by sector, contract type, and client, so you know what type of clients, niches, and job types are the most profitable to your business.
• Client contribution, which will show you how much each client actually contributes to your revenue compared to time spent on that client.
• Job-to-fill ratio, divided by sector, job type, and salary banding, will tell you what job types bring you the most profits.

Understand where your placements come from

Understanding where the majority of your placements come from will tell you where to focus your recruitment efforts. Make sure you look at the sector, job type, and client type that brings you the most revenue.

This will allow you to spend most of your time on job types that generate the best return.

Look at your recruiters' KPIs

It's vital that you monitor your recruiters' KPIs to understand what parts of the recruitment process might need more work, and which ones bring your agency results and profits. 

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