INNERGISE!

As with any sales industry, it is key to ensure that we comprehensively understand the buyer profiles of our target client base and develop a proposition that addresses our customers’ pain points and meets their needs.

From your sales and marketing strategy through to your delivery processes, everything should be aligned to these buyer profiles to increase your likelihood of achieving engagement and therefore a sale.

In this month’s poll, we wanted to understand what the most important factors for customers were when choosing a recruitment agency?

As ever with our polls, we were inundated with responses which gave us a good insight into the current state of the markets and how, therefore, we should be focusing our strategies accordingly.

For many years, the recruitment sector has been significantly challenged by pricing pressures from clients and as many government tenders would attest to “the most economically beneficial proposals” were often the no.1 criteria when choosing an agency. 

This led to the upsurge of micro, independent agencies starting up (people working from their spare rooms at home) who, with low overheads, could enter a market and undercut those more established agencies who had higher cost infrastructures. 

When the markets were very candidate rich, customer buying decisions, in essence, leant heavily towards the cheapest version of the same / similar product. Quality of product or service became secondary criteria based on the fact that customers could access the same active talent population from a number of different agencies / sources which in turn devalued the work that professional recruiters were doing.

However, with the global talent pool diminishing every day in comparison to the growth of new job opportunities (as many of the markets are experiencing), price has been replaced with other key criteria as the major deciding factors for organisations looking to grow their employee base. Our poll reiterated this with just 9% of voters suggesting that price was really a key buying criteria.

Interestingly enough, speed of delivery was also deemed as unimportant as price. This I believe paints a very interesting picture of the markets as they are at the moment where, following a fairly deep and dark recession we have experienced, every decision made by an organisation is now far more heavily scrutinised for its ROI than has ever been before.

Hiring managers, heads of procurement, MDs are now far more hesitant to make the wrong hiring decision than ever before and whilst the immediate need for talent is significantly important, the quality of that talent is forefront on their minds. Our poll suggests, in fact, that 45% deemed this as by far the key criteria for a client’s buying decision process.

This, aligned with the fact that the second most voted for criteria in our poll was Delivery Capability at 27% and the Reputation of agencies, whilst important, only gets 13% of votes shows to me that organisations now just want recruitment agencies to deliver a quality service and when they get that are willing to pay for it. 

The markets are not about getting the cheapest and quickest any more, but about paying a premium price for a premium product that delivers a premium ROI, and this is how recruitment agencies should be aligning their sales, marketing and delivery propositions.