Five highlights from the Recruitment Expo

Spoiler alert: I was impressed!

Here are my five highlights from talking to recruitment leaders and industry experts at the Recruitment Agency Expo in Birmingham last week:

1. Looking to evolve

I spoke to recruitment leaders who are all looking to expand their services. If they’re successful at RPO and volume business, they were looking to build a 360 team; if they’re strong on contractors, they were looking to increase their perm revenue.

2. Committing to change  

These leaders weren’t telling me they were going to ‘give it a try’. They’re bringing in experts to lead the change, or giving a current director responsibility for making the new approach a success.

3. Hungry to learn

I was impressed by how much people were pushing themselves to learn, from recruitment experts, from other industries, and from recruitment leaders in other sectors. The best innovation is taking an idea that already works and applying it to your sector.

4. Cursed by ‘should’

Several leaders told me they knew they should be doing certain things, but weren’t sure exactly how. In pricing terms, subscription models and retainers were talked about a lot… but not everyone was confident in how it would work for them.

5. We bring the value!

In my session I talked about the value recruiters bring to their clients, and it was clear from every session and conversation in the hall that we bring a lot of it! There are some amazing recruiters in our industry, and some fantastic specialists and technologies to help us create amazing value for our clients.

I’ll be sharing some of the pricing concepts from my Expo presentation in future emails, so keep an eye out for those.

And if you see yourself in any of my points above and want help in reaching your goal faster and better, simply email me and I’ll explain how I can help you.

Jon

P.S. There was a great presentation from a recruitment leader which surprised me. Although his ideas and actions were impressive, he said that our industry as a whole is stagnating and providing a poor service to clients.

While there are certainly bad recruiters out there, I think we should be focused on celebrating how good our industry can be. By doing this, we can learn from each other, inspire each other, and push each other on to greater heights.

Perhaps recruiters who go to the Expo - and sign up for emails on pricing strategy - are naturally going to be on a different level from ordinary recruiters. But I’m lucky to work with great recruiters all the time, and I think we should make the most of that.

So if you see yourself in any of my points above and want help in reaching your goal faster and better, simply email me and I’ll explain how I can help you.