With the number of jobs being created decreasing by a staggering 23% year-on-year in Q1 of 2024, it’s no surprise that the recruitment agencies are trying to find a way to keep thriving – and as Firefish users have noticed an increase in quality applications per job, it seems that the market becomes, once again, candidate-rich. With lots of talent available and not that many jobs to place them at, you need to adapt your strategy and qualify your candidates better and faster than ever, so you can keep making placements and thrive regardless of the market situation.

Candidate Data Enrichment

An abundance of candidates in the market is forcing agency owners to keep their candidate data active and rich, so they can have the right candidate ready at the right time. There will be a lot more people looking at every single job that appears, so you need to have candidates ready to be placed at all times. This means that when a new job comes along, you will have the perfect candidate already in your database, which gives you a better chance of success against your competitors who start looking for candidates only after getting a new role.

What’s more, knowing exactly what candidates you’ve got in your database and how ready they are to be placed gives you an advantage when doing your business development. Instead of empty promises, you can show your prospective clients that you’ve already got warm candidates waiting for them.

How to Enrich Your Candidate Data

Knowing how vital data enrichment is is one thing, but how do you actually do it – and have your recruiters be on top of it?

Step 1: Determine the makeup of your current database

You can’t have an engaged database if you don’t know what data is in it – and how engaged your candidates are. You need to focus on the data that brings value to your agency and fits the profile of the jobs you’re currently recruiting for. Make sure you look at:

• Last active date à Your CRM should show you the last date a contact has been active within the system. You don’t need to carry dead data in your database.
• Engagement score à The right CRM will rank your candidates by their engagement in their candidate portal.
• Last placement date à It’s vital to know when was the last time you placed the candidate, the role you placed them in, and their reason for leaving.

Step 2: Divide your candidates into relevant talent pools

Once you have your rich candidate data it's time to put it to work: Divide them into relevant talent pools based on your chosen criteria, such as experience, industry, salary expectations, or location. With these, you will have active pools of candidates ready to be placed for different types of roles – and communicating with them will be a piece of cake. Instead of spending hours drafting personalised emails to each candidate (or worse – sending a generic one to all of them!), you’ll be able to send communications to similar types of candidates alerting them of new roles or updates for their industry without losing the personal touch.

Step 3: Diversify your communication

The next step in enriching your candidate data is to make sure you’re using different channels of communication and touchpoints to ensure maximum engagement. Agencies using multi-channel communication to contact candidates place 4 times as many perm roles and 3 times as many contract roles as those who only focus on one channel for everyone. Whether it’s via text messages, targeted mailshots, job alerts, or content updates, make sure you’re keeping your candidates engaged with your agency whilst maintaining clear ICP profiles in all of your communications. Consider channels like:

• LinkedIn Chrome Extension
• Candidate Portal
• SMS Messages
• Web Forms

If you want to learn how to create a candidate data enrichment plan from start to finish, explore the interactive article here…

Step 4: Embrace thought leadership

One of the best ways to engage your candidates is to provide them with advice and support without expecting anything in return (at least not immediately…). If you paint your agency as the expert in your field via engaging thought leadership content that benefits your candidates, they will not only be more inclined to trust you, but also more likely to engage back when you actually do have a great role for them. Make sure you’re sending them nurturing content, such as:

• CV writing tips
• Interview advice
• Job market insights

When they see you care about them at any time, they won’t ignore your message when you actually send them information about a great new role you’ve got that’s perfect for them!

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