What are employers looking for from their recruiters? Justin Falk is the Co-Founder and CEO of TalentVine, Australia’s largest recruitment marketplace. The platform enables specialist recruiters to pick and choose roles that are posted by employers, who then select recruiters based on factors such as reviews, ratings, fees, replacement guarantees and recent placement history.
In the five years since I founded TalentVine, we’ve seen some drastic changes to the recruitment landscape. This past two years alone, we’ve seen both sides of the spectrum where recruiters struggled to engage employers during Covid, to now where employers are desperate for the amazing recruiters that Australia has on offer. Add to that a COVIDinspired talent shortage, the great resignation, the rise of hybrid working and the emergence of a candidatedriven market. Throughout all of this, we have seen some evolving ways in which the employers have been engaging with recruiters, and what top recruiters are doing to win the most work through marketplaces like ourselves.
In this piece, I’m going to highlight some of the key trends and insights that we’ve been noticing in regards to what employers look for, the value they place on certain metrics, the fees they are willing to pay. When employers select which recruiters to work with on TalentVine, we prompt them to let us know why they made their decision. This gives us some great insight into what employers most value when selecting their recruiter of choice. For example, we found that in the IT sector, the proposed fee is cited as a contributing factor 38% of the time. Keep in mind, however, that this isn’t simply a case of employers selecting the bid with the lowest fee.
Justin Falk Co-founder and CEO, TalentVine
On average, the recruiter that gets selected on TalentVine has bid at a fee that is 20% higher than the lowest fee on offer. The second most common reason for choosing a recruiter was their performance rating (35%) followed by the custom information that the recruiter included in their bid (31%). Interestingly, the agency that a recruiter is attached to was not a significant consideration for many employers, with only 20% choosing their consultant because they recognised the agency. This shows the power of building a personal brand as a specialist consultant. Price being the highest consideration may not surprise many readers, but what is surprising is how closely this is followed by performance rating.
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