2021 Recruitment Technology Survey

The invaluable technology software powering recruitment businesses worldwide

Foreword

The year 2020 was defined by the global COVID-19 pandemic. This created a very uncertain outlook for the labour market, although it accelerated the arrival of the future workplace, with remote working and its reliance on technology (RecTech) being at the forefront of business decision-making.

During the pandemic and the varying lockdown measures, RecTech became indispensable for many recruitment businesses, giving them a means to work and develop new business, while still sourcing candidates.

This survey, conducted primarily across the UK, Australian and New Zealand markets during 2020 and early 2021, provides some key industry insights from Directors, Managers and Recruiters on the potential impact of RecTech for the recruitment industry through 2021 and beyond.

Table of contents

The 3 key components

Which aspects of your business you would like technology to improve efficiencies

Which business challenges you would like technology to alleviate

Which technologies you currently considered to be invaluable in your business.

Improve efficiencies

For the first two questions, we have represented the consolidated outcomes in graphical format, while the final question is answered as a comprehensive list of categories and specific technologies /services.

Respondents were asked to select as many answers as were applicable for the question “Which parts of your business would you like to improve efficiency through technology?” (Graph A)

Not surprisingly, New Business Development and Candidate Sourcing were the leading business areas with 56.8% and 53.4% of respondents respectively. Marketing was third on the list with 44.5% of respondents. As previously mentioned, management was, surprisingly, the area of business that was selected least (13%) by respondents.

Considering these results, the issues of employee engagement and the leadership perception gap appear to be issues that may have regressed in many businesses as a result of the various levels of ‘work-from-home’ (WFH) options that were utilised and appear to have become the norm going forward.

Graph A - Areas of your recruitment business where technology could improve efficiency

Business strategy
18%
New business development
56.8%
Candidate sourcing
53.4%
Training
21.2%
Management
44.5%
Operations
22.6%
Interviewing
20%

Alleviate challenges

On the question of “which business challenges you would like technology to alleviate?” respondents were again requested to select as many answers as were applicable (Graph B).

Much like the previous question, new business development was seen as the biggest business challenge that technology could alleviate along with beating competitors (both at 43.15% of respondents).

Contrary to the previous question, areas such as performance management and morale ranked 3rd and 4th with 33.5% and 32.8% of respondents. The only explanation for the conflicting focus, could be the fact that the first question was seen as a current scenario and this question was perceived to be a future focus.

With many employees working from home and accessing business systems remotely, it was surprising to see that aspects such as cyber security and CRM data theft ranked so low with data theft being the lowest priority business challenge (10.2%).

Marketing again ranked highly with many respondents (28%) and here the focus was more on gauging whether LinkedIn was the primary marketing channel and judging from the response, it appears not to be the case.

Graph B - Business challenges that technology could alleviate

Performance management
33.5%
Identifying live vacancies
25%
Beating competitors
43.15%
Morale
32.8%
Monitoring call quality
11.15%
New business development
43.15%
Skill improvement
27.5%
Candidate screening
17%
Linkedin marketing
28%
CV formatting
19.5%
CV formatting
Cyber security 18%
CRM data theft
10.2%

The invaluable technologies

Finally and most critically, the question of “which technologies do you consider to be currently invaluable in your business?” The list became long and as a result, we have divided the various technologies into collective categories, which can be toggled below.

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