How many recruitment vacancies should I advertise

Most recruitment agencies looking to fill recruitment vacancies really don’t care where the candidates come from and therefore who they pay a fee to. This means that a recruitment consultant should be able to generate additional recruitment vacancies for their list simply through making a few extra calls.

Consequently, this introduces an interesting dilemma for the recruitment consultant. There are a number of pros and cons in advertising, and of course trying to manage larger numbers of recruitment vacancies. Here’s the ‘perceived’ advantages for the recruitment consultant who generates a large number of recruitment vacancies. I say ‘perceived’ because in fact some of these are highly debatable.

When a recruitment consultant finds a new candidate, they are more likely to have a vacancy to match.

The more recruitment vacancies they have, from a statistical point of view, there’s a higher probability of making placements.

The more recruitment vacancies you advertise, the more candidates you will attract, and therefore the greater your chances of making placements.

Looking at these points it all seems a fairly compelling case to gain as many recruitment vacancies as you can, but it really isn’t that simple. For the first point, I would agree entirely, you are more likely to find job matches for candidates if you have more vacancies. However, points two and three I would dispute. There is a large quality element to a recruitment consultant's process, including factors such as how much time you spend preparing candidates for interviews, presentations or doing their research, how much time you spend building and maintaining rapport with your recruiting managing. These factors can have a strong bearing upon whether you make a placement. Without them, you maybe wasting effort generating half hearted processes which will come to nothing.

Similarly, point three also isn’t straight forward. It is true that many recruitment jobs boards have created systems where the more recruitment vacancies you advertise, the greater share of the traffic you will receive. However, on such boards there is a tendency for most of the adverts to look the same. The recruitment consultant who spends extra time making their advert look different, individual and generally more attractive, may not only gain a greater response, but also capture a better quality response from those who will discriminate against bland adverts, in comparison to poor candidates who will ‘spam’ every vacancy on the board.

Here are some of the advantages of managing a smaller number of recruitment vacancies.

Recruitment consultants spend less time hunting recruitment vacancies and more time looking for high quality candidates, they are more likely to make you a fee.

Less recruitment vacancies to advertise, means less time posting jobs and more time to make these jobs more interesting to gain a better quality response.

More proportionate time for recruitment consultants to build and maintain rapport with recruiting managers.

Less overall recruitment processes means more time to invest in each one increasing your success rate on process making a fee.

Concentrating on fewer clients should mean your strike rate with them is comparatively strong, leading to a better and more productive relationship with them.

In summary, many recruitment consultants make the mistake of simply assuming that more recruitment vacancies means more placements. However, I would contend that this isn’t necessarily the case. Indeed, I have seen consultants collect baskets of vacancies and simply sit back and expect the placements to happen. If you have good skills to manage candidates to increase their chances of success, manage the number of recruitment vacancies you have to a number which leaves you time to use these skills. On the same token, if you let you recruitment vacancies slip too low, you may not have the critical mass of activity required to make your fees. Experiment over time and monitor your results to find the right recruitment vacancies for you personally to manage.

Good luck