Deconstructing client activity

For recruiters looking to win new clients, getting an understanding of their business priorities and needs before you even talk to them, will enable more effective targeting and pitching.

In the first instance, there are excellent open source databases which can tell you about what your clients are doing. For example, every single company registered in the UK with revenues of over £10m is legally required to file audited accounts including income, expenditure and profitability. What that means is that within your top clients you can see which are the most profitable, which are growing the fastest, also which may be struggling causing pressure on cashflow and payments to suppliers as a result. What is also useful within this document is that every business also outlines its business strategy for the coming year.

For a recruiter looking for an insight into what the priorities are and how important recruitment is likely to be, this is an essential read. Take this case study, a financial services company. In their companies house accounts, it shows that turnover is up by 27% and profit is up 33% year on year. In the directors statement it is then said:

“The primary focus will be continued expansion within the existing cross-border relationships across European countries.”

What this then means is that any recruiter pitching to this company wanting to win their business is now armed with a key insight into what their strategic priorities are and what kind of personnel they need to achieve this. Approaching the client armed with this information is more likely to translate into a positive outcome.

Where Vacancysoft can then take this one step further is by deconstructing their vacancy activity, so identifying by professional area where they are hiring for, how their hiring activity has changed year on year and which are the fastest growing areas. So for example, if in the strategic report, the priority is growth within existing cross-border relationships, this indicates the focus of hiring will be boosting operational capacity to better service existing clients. Indeed, when we deconstructed their vacancy activity what we found is a threefold increase in vacancies for banking operations personnel, meaning that any recruiter wanting to approach this client knows what their number one hiring priority is before they contact them.

If you need to do an audit of your key clients and business development targets start with analysing their companies house statements to build a table of profitability over the past three years. Sometimes the relative direction of movement is just as important as the absolute position, and for a recruitment firm aligning yourself to a fast-growing company where you become a key supplier, is a cost-effective way to grow your own business.

Once you have built the table of your clients with revenues of over £10m, we can help analyse the ones that are top of your hit list. Should you want to find out more, contact me.

Over the last ten years Vacancysoft has worked with recruitment firms of all sizes to help them map out market activity in order to identify changes in demand. For more information about how we can help, please contact us.