20 Fascinating Recruiting Facts of 2013
Jan Brady may have been obsessively resentful of “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” but at Bullhorn, we’re all about “Data, Data, Data” – and unlike Jan, we don’t get upset when Data gets all the attention (sorry Jan).
At Bullhorn, we take research seriously. One of the advantages of having such a large and technologically-savvy recruiting software customer base is getting to speak with our users often and identify the types of information they can use to grow their businesses. Our customers regularly ask us for data – both anonymous broad-based trends from the 300,000 people who use our various products, and survey insight that we gather on a regular basis for our major annual recruiting reports.
We’ve gathered twenty specific findings from the research we’ve conducted in 2013 to give you some end-of-year data-driven insights. Take a look below and let us know which of our findings surprised you the most, or which ones were most relevant to you this year.
Stay tuned for the first few months of 2014, during which we’ll release our 2014 Staffing and Recruiting Trends Report for North America and the United Kingdom, filled with even more interesting competitive benchmarks and predictions for the coming year. We’ve also grouped the data by source, so you can download any of the reports here that attract your interest.
1. Time is of the essence: the average recruiter deals with up to 50 interruptions a day.
2. 71%-75% of revenue is generated by repeat business for the majority of professional recruiting firms.
3. 57% of candidates who are successfully placed are submitted by recruiters within the first 24 hours.
4. Firms can gain 25% more revenue with optimized recruiting software processes.
5. An intuitive, automated workflow can reduce the unproductive time recruiters spend dealing with interruptions by as much as 75%.
6. A solution with a resume parsing engine can reduce time needed to enter resumes into the databases by 70%.
7. Investing in a fully automated system with one consistent, streamlined workflow can eliminate 80% of duplicate efforts, saving recruiters, salespeople, and managers time and frustration.
8. A single system that provides a comprehensive, up-to-date view of activities can increase how quickly firms respond to clients by 30%.
9. A single, easy-to-use recruiting software system can decrease recruiter on-boarding time by 50% and reduce time to first placement by 25%.
North American Staffing and Recruiting Trends Report
10. 73% of recruiting firms met or exceeded their revenue goals in 2012; 92% anticipated an increase in their revenue performance in 2013.
11. 82% of staffing agency executives planned to add staff to their business in 2013, an increase of almost 3% over 2012.
12. When asked for 2013 predictions, 40.6% of staffing agency owners, managers, directors, C-level executives, board members, and VPs predict that revenue would increase between 11% and 25% over 2012, while 33.7% were more ambitious – anticipating a revenue increase of greater than 25%.
13. 98.2% of staffing professionals polled for Bullhorn’s 2013 North American Staffing and Recruiting Trends Report used social media for recruiting in 2012, up from 84% in 2009.
14. 97.3% of staffers polled used LinkedIn for recruiting in 2012.
15. LinkedIn, followed by Facebook and then Twitter, were the top three social media channels recruiters utilized in successfully placing a candidate in 2012. These rankings were expected to remain the same for 2013.
16. 84% of staffing professionals consider mobile access to their ATS/CRM to be important to the success of their business.
17. Notably, 100% of the staffing salespeople polled who spent more than half their time outside in meetings considered mobile access important, with 85.7% considering it “extremely important.”
18. The single most important metric used by staffing firms to measure their own success in 2013, as ranked by owners, managers, directors, presidents, and executives, was “total number of placements.”
19. “Number of placements” was also ranked number one in 2013 by these same owners, managers, directors, presidents and executives, when asked for the top metric used to track their most effective salespeople.
Mobile-Powered Selling: How Leading Recruiting Firms Win More Business Using Mobile Technology
20. Bullhorn anonymous usage data indicates that mobile recruiting software usage peaks at three different times throughout the day, between 6-11am, 1-5pm, and 7-11pm.
