With the market being so uncertain and predictions of slower growth (or lack of thereof) are flooding the market, it’s crucial that you improve all your processes and make sure they’re air-tight. Creating a solid plan for the year is key, now more than ever, to staying afloat. And the only way to create a strategy that works is by basing it on your individual data – after all, keeping track of what’s going on in your agency and adjusting your goals accordingly is how you grow.

Data is at the heart of everything we do in recruitment. It helps us to understand what’s happening in our niche, get a feel for the wider industry, identify trends, and optimise our candidate and client journeys. It allows us to make calculated, informed decisions – enabling us to mitigate risk and accelerate growth. However, it also helps us improve and automate our processes, which not only increases your team’s productivity, but also drives better (and quicker) results!

And so, we’ve put together the 5 most crucial areas of reporting that you should be aware of in order to increase your team’s productivity and ensure your agency’s survival.

Spec CVs

Your Spec CVs are the heart of every single placement you make. Especially in 2023, where you might need to dive into your database more than ever to find candidates for roles. Formatting the CV quickly and being able to send these to clients in a matter of minutes will help you make more placements. Added bonus? Seeing at a glance if a recruiter is up or down on the previous month/quarter/year in regards to the number of CVs sent on spec will also help you monitor their progress and highlight their KPIs!

Candidate calls

Keeping track of candidate calls is another key factor in increasing your recruiters’ productivity. Not only does it show you who is hitting their KPIs, but it also provides you with the ability to train and develop other recruiters – if you look at any recruitment business, the top billers are also the ones that are always on the phone building relationships and sourcing out other opportunities!

Number of open jobs – perm and temp

Make sure you’re on top of all the open jobs – so you don’t end up drowning in an unorganised mess. We all know salespeople don’t like admin, so staying on top of the number of actual live jobs you have within your business will allow you to make better decisions about where to allocate your budget. Besides, leaving jobs open when you are no longer working them means that great candidates can sometimes be overlooked, sitting in your database for a role that shouldn’t exist anymore!

New contacts created

With the number of new contacts your recruiters create every day, it might be hard to keep track. Good business development is a key component in any successful sales team. How easily can you see how many new contacts your recruiters are creating? Can you view year-to-year or month-to-month comparisons of those jobs? Having the ability to not only see how many contacts they are creating but also go straight in and view who these contacts are, what companies they work for, and what position they have, will all help you drive more new business and manage existing one more efficiently.

Booked interviews

The last thing that you need to look at are all your booked interviews – at the end of the day, making sure they’re all correctly labelled and have needed notes and attachments is crucial to progressing with the placement quickly. We all know how critical interview feedback is, but having the ability to view the number of arranged client interviews you have across your team or business will allow you to speed this process up. It’s also key that you can also see how your business is doing compared to the same time the previous year - this will allow you to analyse key business trends, making it easy to plan ahead and improve performance!