There is more than lockdown to contend with in recruitment. But what are the big, near-term disruptors for our sector?

The world feels like it is in a state of flux right now. Pandemics, social and political change, and day-to-day disruptions to our jobs and lifestyles. With few certainties to attach our hopes and aspirations to, it would be easy to slip into despondency and lose focus. And yet…

For recruiters, at least, there is a sense of some enormous opportunities already manifesting on the horizons. Hundreds of thousands of people are moving or changing jobs. The values and priorities within hiring are adapting to suit a world that is perhaps a little fairer for all. And the endless march of technological progress is waiting for no-one – we either keep pace or fall behind.

In this article, we will see how firms are positioning themselves to handle the extraordinary changes of our times. How are recruiters adapting and diversifying to ensure they add value to the skills supply chain? Which UK industries are hiring in 2021? How can firms harness some disruption of their own to score bigger wins against established competitors?

Improve your targeting

An essential part of futureproofing, success in the future will be determined by how well you are targeting your sales efforts.

For simplicity’s sake, we can split this further into macro- and micro-targeting. Macro-targeting would be the use of Big Data to inform your broad industry targeting choices. Has a lucrative sector entered recession or reached workforce saturation? Maybe it will no longer offer the returns it once did. Is increased demands for services or goods forcing a new industry to recruit? First mover advantage means that fast detection and quick reactions to meeting new demand almost always pays dividends. In the wake of lockdowns, logistics, e-commerce, and healthcare are all emerging as vital employers. Hospitality, perhaps less so. Which UK industries are hiring in 2021? This article summarises it fairly well.

A skills drought has allowed recruiters to somewhat dictate the pace of hiring and the jobs market in recent years. This period has come to an end with lockdowns. Now, recruiters need to branch out from their comfort zones to ensure their continued survival. Acquiring job market data and following hiring trends is an invaluable part of this.

And micro-targeting? This would be how well you meet the requirements of individual clients – both new and recurring. What appeals to your existing clients? What would attract a new customer in a different field of expertise? From removing bias and improving transparency, to offering market insights, there are many ways to micro-target new sales opportunities. Here are a few of those ideas.

Use recruitment disruption to acquire new skills and revenue

But recruitment firms rarely have the flexibility to pivot into new sectors overnight. What if your niche is drying up, and job creation has begun to stall?

Innovation is the key to retaining income in periods of stagnant trade. If the quantity of job orders has decreased, it provides the perfect time to improve the quality of every placement instead. HR departments have a new set of priorities and meeting these will put your brand in a healthy position once recovery kicks in. Are you assisting clients with making fairer hires? Recruitment software solutions now automate or use machine intelligence to make selection choices. With this, you can sell a new kind of service: one that ensures fairness and removes bias from the recruitment equation. Few HR departments have invested in these specialist tools at present. This is where you can step in and re-sell your software capabilities to clients as an additional value proposition.

Can you offer consultancy services to clients who are not actively hiring? It is an additional revenue stream and – again – it adds value to your brand’s offering. Your clients will rarely have the resources to research the jobs market outside of their own narrow set of personal interests. Whereas you have significant volumes of job market data at your fingertips. Efficiency in today’s recruitment marketplace means making use of all available assets. If you turn the information on your recruitment database into statistics, you can resell that to clients as consultancy sessions.

Harness disruptive tech

Finally, not every disruption is a destructive one. We often hear about “disruptive tech”. It’s usually a new software, network, or platform which enables innovators to break through the established names which have a stranglehold on an industry. There is disruptive tech in recruitment right now, and it may prove to be the best lifeline that smaller firms have in difficult times.

Just before the pandemic hit in 2020, we launched our suite of next generation recruitment software tools. This included the AI assistants Match and Jobfeed. The Jobfeed gives every recruiter a live and real-time newsfeed of active jobs as they are created in the UK. You can narrow searches to fit your field of knowledge. But when you are ready to expand, you can access the full, nationwide feed at any time. Every open job order is available with full description and points of contact. The software innovation is being used by startups to acquire a healthy collection of new and returning clients in the early days of their enterprise.

This is technology which global recruitment firms have had access to for years – and which has helped them to capture markets. For the first time, eBoss has offered the same AI tech at an entry level price point, to level the competition.

With cost no longer a barrier to entry, smaller firms have an advantage in this respect. It takes far more resources to re-focus your targets, or to adopt new technology and practices when you are a big organisation. Disruptive tech is, by its very nature, always favouring the side of the market which seeks to change the status quo.

Does that sound like you, but you’re not sure where to start? book a consultation with eBoss to go over your options.