📊 The pulse of the market
Labour market data from sources you can trust
Wave’s recruitment trends April snapshot sees cooling activity
Jobs and applications saw little movement in April, with jobs flatlining at 0% above March’s figures. Applications take a dip of 2%, following a 3% drop in March but they remain high compared to the 2023 monthly average. This all points to cooling across the jobs market. Health & Nursing, hit by a decades-long skills shortage, continues to lead when it comes to jobs posted but received a low percentage of applications. Manufacturing received the greatest share of applications but is struggling to supply the jobs to match demand, only just making it onto the board.
As candidate availability rises, growth in pay declines
Pay growth in March was the coolest for over 3 years according to the KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs. Starting salaries are being directly affected by falling vacancies (the survey pegs the downturn currently at 18 months), rising redundancies, and overall candidate supply increasing at the steepest rate for four months. Alongside salary growth stalling, temporary wage inflation has eased to a four-month low. The general feeling is that the “the economy [is] in a holding pattern waiting for inflation and interest rates to ease, so that firms can get to investing.”
Want to see further figures? Head here.
UK GDP grows, suggesting a possible early exit from a technical recession
Cautious optimism seems to be a phrase used regularly by economists right now, as UK GDP grew for the second straight month in February, largely driven by an expansion in manufacturing. Whilst it looks likely that we will have exited a technical recession in Q1, the numbers are low, with growth of 0.3% in January and 0.1% in February. It’s also a 0.2% fall when compared year-on-year. And, as McKinsey’s Director of Research & Economics,Tera Allas, noted, some of the UK’s most important sectors for growth – Technology, Professional Services, and Financial Services – recorded significant year-on-year negative growth.
For further details on UK GDP, read more here. For Tera Allas’ take on the findings, head here.
📰 The pulse of the industry
A curation of the best content from the world of recruitment
Recruitment marketing is the ‘dad jeans’ of marketing
In this first episode of the The Lonely Marketers’ new series, Paiger’s Keiron Mayers talks to guest Michael John Oliver, Global Marketing Director at MBK Search, about the strategic shift in recruitment, the critical role of ROI and KPIs for recruitment marketing, and the importance of social media and personal branding. It’s a refreshing take on the rapidly evolving intersection of marketing and recruitment. Here are our top 4 takeaways from their conversation:
- Recruitment consultants are marketers – every time they talk to candidates and to clients they are advocates for their agency’s brand and reputation.
- Marketing should be seen as an investment and should be one of the KPIs for every recruitment agency.
- If there is one recruitment marketing activity you take away it should be the company Instagram – it’s cheap, easy content that doesn’t effectively demonstrate why clients, candidates and consultants should choose you.
- Job adverts need to be better across the industry. They aren’t telling candidates what they need to know for them to be compelled to apply. Job adverts are the single most effective marketing tool recruiters have and far more time should be invested in them.
Learn from this recruitment agency founder’s mistakes
Setting up any business comes with a host of challenges but recruitment agencies have their own set of unique challenges. Avoid the mistakes the founder of The Growth Recruitment Agency, Gareth Cartman, has made in this brilliantly honest LinkedIn post, including gems such as:
- Don’t over-invest in tech. Stick to what you really need at the beginning and grow from there.
- Think carefully about your model so that you don’t end up essentially working for free if roles get frozen or the client decides to hire internally.
- Patience really is a virtue. Build your differentiation point through doing (that takes time), wait to add to your tech stack, hire slowly as you scale upwards.
- Find someone to hold you accountable.
The increased importance of quality-of-hire as a metric of success
Quality-of-hire has always been a tricky data point to pin down but it is the holy grail of recruiting metrics. Getting a handle on what quality means to each individual client and understanding how you can track and enhance it can hugely improve hiring success. Part of this will naturally fall to the end employer but there is a lot that recruiters can do both during the recruitment process and to advise clients to ensure the candidates you place are successful hires. This article looks at the challenges and opportunities in the current market, as well as 2 key areas – how to track quality-of-hire and how to improve it:
Tracking quality-of-hire
- Define clear performance benchmarks
- Measure retention rates
- Evaluate time-to-productivity
- Gather 360-degree feedback
- Utilise advanced analytics
Strategies to enhance quality-of-hire
- Foster a strong employer brand
- Prioritise the candidate experience
- Implement structured interviews
- Embrace DEI practices
- Focus on onboarding and continuous development
📣 The pulse of the people
What industry figures are saying right now
If there’s one thing that’s been talked about in the recruitment media space more than any other in the past few weeks it’s the changes that Indeed is making to organic traffic. In essence, from today (Thursday May 2nd), jobs sent to Indeed from staffing agencies & recruitment-based companies will no longer be eligible for organic visibility, i.e. if you want to continue to receive traffic from Indeed, you need to sponsor your jobs.
As soon as this was announced, LinkedIn went crazy. We’ve collated 3 views from 3 sources we trust to give you the lowdown on what Indeed’s changes really mean:
- Jim Durbin, a former recruiter and current recruitment marketer, is a self-proclaimed ‘Indeed Whisperer’ and has posted quite a bit about what is happening and what it means. This post in particular details what the changes mean for different recruitment organisations and different modes of using Indeed, summed up in an easy-to-understand way. What’s important to remember is this: “Indeed de-prioritizing organic traffic will only impact people who got organic traffic. That bucket will now be smaller, and the sponsored bucket will be larger. This means more candidates for the Sponsored bucket, but more possible competition.” In an Inside Job boards and Recruitment Marketplaces podcast episode on the matter, his views echo Wave’s own, that organic traffic isn’t necessarily quality traffic, especially in a market where candidate numbers are growing and some jobseekers are “click, click, clicking.”
- I recently read a really interesting take on Indeed’s decisions from a source from ERE. They also felt that this was the right decision for Indeed to make, giving those that sponsor ads greater clarity on expenditure as you’d no longer have organic traffic mixed in with sponsored traffic, creating a “nebulous cloud around CPC.” They also point to Indeed’s competition: “One reason for the end of organic traffic is Google’s unparalleled dominance in job indexing. While Indeed has established APIs and scrapes with career site pages, Google crawls them, too, including Indeed. As a former recruitment marketer, I’ve seen Google surpass LinkedIn and Indeed in non-paid traffic overnight, usurping them as the largest non-paid traffic source. Therefore, Indeed’s decision to withdraw from organic traffic appears strategic and logical.”
- It may seem inward-looking to include the views of Wave Founder and CEO, Dave Jenkins, but he has worked in the industry for 25 years and there’s not much he doesn’t know about recruitment advertising. He has a pragmatic view on the changes, recommending that you do a health check on your contracts to pinpoint which channels are performing the best for you. If you’re not already sponsoring jobs on Indeed (and even if you are) it’s worth reviewing the performance of all your contracts before making any paid decisions. And always remember to post to your website!
