What do employers want 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 COVID inspired 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. 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.

Priorities are changing. We find that many more employers have and are realising that spending more upfront on a highquality recruiter will save more in the long run.

The empty chair time associated with an average recruiter’s drawn-out search ends up costing the organisation more in time, potential earnings, and resources covering the vacant position.

Other data also supports this. Over the last two years, the average exclusive recruiter fee on TalentVine has increased by 21%.

While exclusive rates have also grown, they’ve done so at a lower rate (15%).

More and more employers are have been willing to pay a higher fee to one specialist recruiter that they know can do the job right. Something else we’ve noticed happening on TalentVine, and in general, is the rise of the specialist recruiter. Many organisations would rather work with an expert on the niche role that they are hiring for, rather than a generalist.

We see our duty to the recruitment industry as the catalyst that makes it as simple as possible for employers to find and engage with the right specialist recruiter, at fees and terms that inspire exceptional work.

Overall, the recruitment market is not like it was three years ago. With good talent being so hard to find, organisations are needing to rely on external recruiters, and many are willing to pay more for a specialist. In an environment like this, having a large portion of your business development handled by a platform like TalentVine can be a great benefit so you can focus on the candidates.

Having the roles sent directly to you, having complete autonomy over the roles you’d like to work on, and having access to employers where there were previous procurement roadblocks are just some of the benefits our platform offers for recruiters.

The role of the specialist recruiter is not disappearing anytime soon. We are very proud to serve the recruitment industry, and many APSCo members, as a catalyst for employers to connect with and experience the fantastic value provided by Australia’s recruitment industry.