We have neared the end of 2021 and oh what a year it has been!

Agency recruiters have already wrapped up recruiting and it’s time to look back at all that the industry has attained so far. Starting from rooting for their clients and candidate pool to delivering the best candidate experience, recruiters have done it all.

It has certainly been a year full of ups and downs but we have built resilience and sailed through it smoothly. While you were still reeling from the challenging events of 2020, 2021 looked better in terms of getting back to normalcy.

Mostly driven by data and analytics and recruitment automation, this year was a blockbuster when it came to you making informed decisions on placing candidates with the right clients.

Now that we’ve made it our annual tradition to look back at all what we have gained and achieved these past few months, let’s recollect everything that we can take away from this year.

2021: The year of recruitment automation

As per Gartner’s report on Artificial Intelligence and its traction in recruiting, 17% of organisations are already using AI to hire candidates and another 30% will start doing so by 2022.

And it’s rightly so!

This year we have seen a major rise in recruitment agencies across the world adopting recruitment technology to automate most of their hiring process in order to save time for value-added tasks.

This has led to increased productivity, reduced cost-per-hire and time-to-fill.

Starting from resume screening to using automation to schedule interviews, recruiters have also majorly used chatbots to attend to candidate and client queries.

75% of recruiters have been using Applicant Tracking Systems and Recruitment CRMs to automate their recruiting process and take care of candidates and clients.

This includes sourcing candidates directly from major social media sites such as LinkedIn, giving the best customer experience to clients, invoice management, advanced radius and boolean search and more.

The 2021 talent shortage in the IT industry has led to recruiters in this vertical make use of automation more. Similar to the previous year, 2022 will also see major investments in this sector.

What has worked for recruiters this year?

While recruitment automation was a hot topic, these are some of the things that had worked wonders for recruiters in 2021—

  • Nearly 4 in 5 candidates mention how candidate experience is significant to them as it determines how your client would treat them as employees. Agency recruiters have focused more on providing the best candidate experience. This has improved their recruitment brand image and their ability to lose out or gain great talent.
  • Diversity in the workplace is something that recruiters have worked on religiously. We are not unaware of the benefits that diversity brings. While efforts have been made to diminish unconsious bias, establishing a rich diverse workforce has led to increased cultural awareness, a positive reputation, better quality applicants and increased marketing opportunities.
  • Social recruiting efforts didn’t go to waste either. 62% of professionals used social media to evaluate the employer brand of a company. Therefore, agency recruiters were very much invested in making sure that they stand out from the rest. Starting from creating a social media presence to writing inclusive job descriptions for open roles, they have done it all.
  • Employee referrals have worked wonders! 46% of applicants that come in via an employee referral programme remain for at least a year in the company. Establishing a successful employee referral program for clients have not just given extensive benefits to recruiters but also made way for some quality candidates. It was cost-effective and one of the fastest ways to acquire external talent.
  • Virtual interviews were a rave this season along with major investment in various video interviewing software. Video interviews have always been known to influence better hiring decisions for recruiters. Most of the recruitment agencies worked remotely this 2021 and had to either conduct interviews via phone call or online.

Top 3 insights from recruitment leaders

We have shortlisted 3 best tips from recruitment leaders this year for you to take a look—

1. Greg Savage on recruiter equity

“I believe that all the training you have had as a recruiter, is a total waste of time, unless the skills and techniques you learnt are built on a platform of self-belief.”

Greg Savage mentioned on his Savage Truth blog how a handful of recruiters survive, even thrive, during a downturn, and generate bigger returns in the good times. Read more about recruiter equity here.

2. Hung Lee on Labour Market Paradox

“Following the massive lockdown induced job losses of 2020, there was an estimated 144 million people who should have constituted ‘excess labour’ coming into 2021. Hard to imagine it now but recruiting was meant to be easy this year with this volume of surplus candidates clamouring to apply for jobs. The ‘Labour Market Paradox’ (LMP) is the question of how demand for labour could possibly exceed supply, when millions of people are out of work.

This is still being studied, debated and contested and likely we will not being able to conclusively determine the forcing factors until the labour market is rebalanced.” Read more about the LMP here.

3. Lou Adler on a 10-point checklist for hiring leaders

“Everyone wants to hire leaders. But hiring these great people – especially those who have multiple opportunities or are truly passive – requires not only a great job but a different hiring process entirely.” Access the full checklist here.

Apart from these, recruitment influencers have also spoken a lot about the need for recruiters expanding their skill sets, internal and virtual hiring.

8 biggest wins for Recruit CRM this 2021

For us, it was a fantastic year so far! We tell this with pride because of all that we have achieved only and only because of the support we received from our customers and our beloved team.

  • We are elated to inform you that we have been the most trusted and top-rated ATS + CRM software across all major review sites. With a 4.9 rating on Capterra, Recruit CRM is the highest-rated software for recruitment agencies.
  • We were ranked the number 1 recruitment agency software by GetApp, a Gartner company. We were placed on their Category Leaders Report for Recruiting Agency Software, a free online service that helps organisations find the right software. With a perfect score of 100, we ruled the charts in terms of ease of use, customer support, value for money, likelihood to recommend and functionality.
  • Some of the top features extensively loved by our customers this year included—

a. Kanban boards

b. Built-in calling

c. CV formatting

d. Access control

  • We addressed 93% of the queries in less than 2 minutes!
  • We have had a 200% growth in user base this 2021 and added 15+ countries to our list including Mozambique, Uruguay and Mauritius.
  • We are a growing team of 50+ members knitted tightly.
Recruit CRM: Year in Review [2021]

This year we also put a halt to one of our beloved podcast shows, Recruitment Entrepreneurs only to bring in better podcasts, audiobooks, webinars and resources for you in 2022.

We dearly hope this year has been as exciting for you as it has been for us. We are grateful to our users for letting us be a small part of their recruitment journey.

If you think we’ve missed out on any important trends, please write to us in the comments below.

Happy New Year from everyone at Recruit CRM!