Come on, let’s be honest. What we really want to know is what are our competitors up to? How are they doing it and very importantly how good are they?Come on, let’s be honest. What we really want to know is what are our competitors up to? How are they doing it and very importantly how good are they? Even if you are not thinking this, which I doubt, your competitors certainly want to know this about you! Now I’m not advocating industrial espionage but I am certainly a true believer in benchmarking your recruitment business against the market.
More and more as an industry we are understanding the value of collaboration, peer to peer networking and knowledge sharing. It’s a basic human trait to want to learn more, gain from others experiences, grow and understand what is out there. Be it from reading a book or blog, viewing a vlog or documentary or being part of a club or network; any window on performance has got to be positive.
We all have reports and technology that internally collates and analyses what activity our consultants, our clients and our candidates are getting up to. We need this information to steer the ship, make decisions and provide guidance for the changes any business needs to make to be competitive. We then judge ourselves, not exclusively but fairly rigorously on our financial performance, studying those profit and loss accounts with vigour. We often use turnover or EBITDA as a measure when speaking about how we are performing. We may also get subjective or anecdotal advice to measure whether we are performing well, whether we are profitable enough or spending enough or even too much. But wouldn’t it be easier just to compare?
The benefits of external peer-group benchmarking are well accepted and utilised in many mature industry sectors and it’s now available to the recruitment sector!
Consider these benefits and think about the difference it might make to your mind set or business because it will allow you to:
- Gain an independent perspective about how well you perform compared to other companies.
- Drill down into performance gaps to identify areas for improvement.
- Develop a standardised set of processes and metrics.
- Enable a mindset and culture of continuous improvement.
- Set performance expectations based on current industry performance
The holy grail is obviously to compare one recruitment business against another, those that are the same size, with the same type of clients or working in the same specialist sectors. But it is not very often that you come across someone willing to show you theirs if you show them yours! Larger recruitment groups, particularly ones that have acquired numerous successful entrepreneurial businesses often have this privilege and have exploited it. I have seen the benefits of this type of internal collaboration first hand and trust me, it works!
So why not get a group together (The Recruitment Network), clever technology that offers you a window on your performance, spend some time collating that data and dare to compare! If you haven’t got that type of data to hand, you should have it in order to run a successful recruitment business but that is another rant for another day. Currently I’ll settle for knowing how good you really are, so how good are you?
About
Daniel Griggs is UK partner for the highly acclaimed Staffing Industry Metrics global recruitment benchmarking dashboard, they proudly support the rapidly growing global peer to peer organisation The Recruitment Network. He is also founder of Delta Genesis Consulting sharing recruitment knowledge by offering mentoring, managerial, training and executive support on an advisory, interim or non-executive basis. He has over thirty years professional business-to-business experience having been in the Recruitment world since his first role in 1989. He has worked for small, medium and global staffing businesses developing an in-depth knowledge of the industry. Holding roles that have seen him progress from consultant to board level whilst recruiting, training, managing, directing and developing businesses both domestically and internationally in several sectors. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Recruitment Professionals and a Business Mentor for the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC). You can also follow him on twitter @DeltaGenesisCon or Instagram
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