How Using Labor Market Insights Enhances Your Recruitment Process

Working as a Customer Success Manager at Horsefly, I've had the pleasure of working with many strategic talent acquisition teams to help them become more proactive and data driven in their approach to sourcing talent..

Most of you in TA will kick off the recruiting process with a discovery session to understand your hiring manager’s requirements, and then activate the most appropriate sourcing strategy.

It’s essential you get the initial discovery session right; otherwise, the rest of the process could take a significant hit, and this is where I believe tools such as Horsefly are essential.

Ask yourself how often you’ve dealt with some of the challenges below:

Hiring managers make up job titles that don’t resonate with the external talent you want to attract.
Countless rejected CVs because a candidate does not have the 20+ must-have skill elements.
When you magically find that needle in the haystack candidate, but your salary is £20K below the market rate.
You have to find top talent in the middle of nowhere who must be office based.
You’re asked for a 50/50 shortlist of males and females for positions such as Cloud Architects, a market dominated by males.
You've spent weeks manually mapping out talent hotspots globally to support your company's strategic objectives.

What if, during the discovery phase, you had live robust external labor market data that instantly helps you to craft the perfect go-to-market strategy, positioning yourself as the expert voice on the target market?

Let me take a couple of the above challenges and explain how Horsefly can help in a matter of minutes:

One of our UK-based financial services clients struggled to fill a position they titled as Quality Engineer. Simply entering this job title in Horsefly, and looking at the results, it took less than 15 seconds to identify the problem:

It wasn’t that there was a lack of candidates; in fact, there were plenty of Quality Engineers across the UK:

Image showing the amount of Quality Engineers across the UK

The problem was that quality engineers work at the following companies; therefore, the job title chosen was not relevant for the audience that they wanted to attract

Image looking at which sectors quality engineers come from

As you can see, most candidates are based in the automotive/aerospace sector, not within the financial services/tech sectors as they were expecting to see. After finding out the problem, the Horsefly user and I began mapping out the skills required to help them choose a more appropriate job title:

Image showing how the skills required to help choose a more appropriate job title were mapped out

Let’s see how the results changed:

Image showing the effect on the results after using Horsefly data

The number of candidates was reduced; however, there was a significant increase in the average salary and the number of jobs listed. The importance of this is enormous, as you can benchmark against the critical skills required, as opposed to a job title that was incorrect in the first place.

With only 22% of this talent pool being female, we were able to help our client to manage expectations on what to expect in a shortlist. They would be doing a great job if two or three out of ten candidates shortlisted were female.

Image showing the potential talent pool by gender

Also, due to 52% of these professionals having 8+ years of experience, our client could confidently say that the majority will be closer to the average high salary range of £80K.

The companies where these professionals work was now a lot more relevant, which enabled our client to carry out a more targeted search using sourcing tools such as LinkedIn:

Image shows a look at more relevant companies following the insights from the Horsefly data

At the beginning, we established that quality engineer was the wrong title; we then helped them identify the most appropriate job titles used by the professionals they wanted to target to ensure they had the right go-to-market strategy moving forward. They changed the job title to QA Engineer, which produced far better results.

Image shows the effects on the search results following the job title change

Lastly, as this was an area of growth for our client, we helped them to see the universities producing their target graduates, so they could build partnerships with these schools to ensure they have a strong pipeline of talent for the future:

Images shows the universities producing the appropriate target graduates for the job title

Initially, our client was using Horsefly for some business critical strategic projects, and at times it was used operationally, but only on roles that were proving difficult to fill, after they had been live listings for a number of months. They realized that if Horsefly was used from the very beginning of the process, they would have originally chosen the most effective targeting, saving a considerable amount of time and money.

The good news is that after this quality engineer search example was presented to their leadership team, our client saw even more value in Horsefly and invested in the whole Talent Acquisition team getting access. This enabled a more proactive and data-driven approach to candidate sourcing, positioning their team as the internal experts on the external market.

Look into the future of hiring with the most accurate labor market data and analytics available. Click here to get a free labor market assessment today! Supercharge your talent acquisition strategy with Horsefly Analytics.

If you'd like to find out more about how Horsefly can help your candidate sourcing, please get in touch and book some time in my diary using the link below: https://meetings.hubspot.com/matthew586