Disrupting Your Competitors
Being treated as a commodity service is one of the biggest challenges recruiters face.
Paradoxically, despite there being more internal recruiters than ever before, the number of recruitment firms in the market keeps increasing. The impact of internal recruiters is clear: fewer jobs are being released to agents, and as recruitment firms proliferate the result is greater competition for every job. Against that backdrop, recruiters can easily become commoditised, where their product is providing CVs and their variable is
Firstly, given that recruiters are always competing for candidates, and advertising is the primary way of attracting those, how can you compete against a competitor which is spending significantly more than you? One guerrilla marketing technique involves creating Google AdWords based on the name of your competitor and your area of speciality. The best example of this I have seen in recent times involves TransferWise and CurrencyFair. Both offer the same service, for almost identical fees. Given that TransferWise is a tech unicorn, it has a significantly larger marketing budget; however, when you enter TransferWise into the Google search box, the top result is a sponsored post for CurrencyFair. You could be doing the same with your business, piggybacking on the spend of your competitors and building your brand in the process.
In the same way, if you see
Finally, be nimble. Big businesses may be better capitalised, but decisions there take longer to be implemented. Make your size your strength, and look to identify the new niches emerging as they emerge. For example, in IT five years ago, although Python was a recognised language, you wouldn’t see Python specialists: now Python is one of the fastest growing areas of demand. A recruiter who was close to the ground then would have been able to identify the emergence of that specialism and build their candidate pool sufficiently, meaning that they became the go-to person. Having accurate market intelligence on hiring trends can give you the confidence to specialise in such a way that you are able to disrupt your competitors and move ahead from a position of strength.
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