How Many Candidates (and Clients) Do Recruiters Really Need? by

Blog Content

Recruitment leaders and their resourcers / recruiters need to read this blog for insights on how much data they really need, and how much data they can realistically manage, to run a successful desk and recruitment business.

We’re all human (even recruiters) and we all have limits. In recruiting world, our limits can be how many jobs we can work, how many calls we can make, how many temps we can manage. One significant human limit is our ability to nurture relationships.

Data = Relationships = Sales

Recruitment is a relationship business. A recruiter’s job is to build and maintain relationships. Candidates need managing, clients need managing, colleagues need managing.

Dunbar tells us that humans have relationship limits – we have “a number” we can manage. Robin Dunbar is a Professor Emeritus of Evolutionary Psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at Oxford Uni he knows a few things about human behaviour.

Think of your relationships a bit like a layered onion with you in the middle.

5 loved ones
15 good friends
50 friends
150 meaningful relationships
500 acquaintances
1500 people you can recognise

People can move in and out of these layers.

What is Dunbar’s Number? And What’s It Got to Do with Recruitment?

Where does a “typical” recruiter sit in their ideal candidate / contact’s layer? And where do their candidates and contacts sit?

Recruitment Leaders! What should you be considering if you want to maximise the value of your database, and the relationships you want to maximise, optimise, monetise?

How should you focus on and nurture the right relationships?

What’s the Number of Candidates and Contacts a Recruiter Can Actively Manage?

Dunbar suggests that humans are capable of building, nurturing and maintaining 150 good meaningful and trusted relationships.

Of course, there are variations to this, such as extroverts vs introverts and social networks – for example women tend to have more contacts in the closest layers.

Dunbar v Recruitment

Dunbar’s study isn’t focused on recruitment or recruiters, but it’s definitely food for thought.

150 meaningful relations is not that many people when you consider the average recruiter has a database in the 1000s. But could you really market your recruitment business on a database of “acquaintances” or “people you recognise”?

Where do your candidates and clients fall within these categories? Have you got any in the magic 150 “meaningful contacts”? Is your database segmented in such a way, or do you have a “data dump” which needs a good clean?[link to clean webinar].

Recruitment in the Good Old Days

Before tech and data began paralysing recruitment (too much / never enough), recruitment was much more of a relationship business. You knew your candidates, their dog’s names, their kid’s ages.

Relationships were easier to sustain, they were more valuable, and we charged more for our services. It’s likely that Dunbar would say a recruiter pre-social media had 150 meaningful relationships with candidate and clients, and perhaps even some friends?

Now with infinite data and technology allowing for massively increased reach and volume, relationships, ironically, are a harder to start and sustain.

Are you / your recruitment teams engaging with the right people, or just lots of candidates? (Too many applicants, not enough candidates?)

Are you working the right opportunities, or just a list of one-off jobs? (Too many jobs, not enough sales?)

Is Your CRM Simply a Datadump of Strangers?

Recruiters who try to maintain too many relationships actually limit their own success. They dilute the relationships they’re trying to build, resulting in weaker, less meaningful, and less valuable relationships.

Could Dunbar help you run your recruitment business?

For example:

Recruiters who run a busy temp desk and managing 100+ temps might not have the capacity to take on more or even do other activities such as Business Development or Sourcing.
360-degree recruiters will have more relationships to manage than a 180-degree recruiter, so this could mean a less focused strategy and outcome.
Is it always necessary to hire another recruiter to manage more relationships, or could tech do some heavy lifting?

4 Ways to Be Smart with Recruitment Contacts

Social Networks can help. Publishing content to your “connections” can help keep you in and around the Acquaintances and People You Recognise category. Your goal, though, should be to get your ideal contacts on to your CRM so you can more actively work them. Ideally you should be aiming to nurture them in the 150 “meaningful contact” space!

Your Recruitment CRM/ATS (ideally powered by automation) also has ways to identify and categorise your relationships. Status fields, rating and grading fields are great places to start and will enable smart ways to manage and work the data. Automation (and recruiters) can keep these vital fields current.

Automation is helping Recruiters identify, engage, nurture (and monetise) Acquaintances and People You Recognise and capitalising on these relationships. In the automation projects we deliver we are creating functional data so recruiters can focus on segments of contacts and candidates. They can then “work” their data, rather than just collect it.

Your recruiters (ideally powered by automation/CRM) need to keep this data updated to ensure you can track, manage and support where necessary. This should also protect your relationships when recruiters move on.

Final Thoughts

Engaging and nurturing your candidates and clients is an important part of the recruitment lifecycle. Recruiters often struggle with “too much data, too many systems, not enough process”.

Any help and support you can provide to your recruiters to create focus, so relationships are stronger and profitable, is crucial. How could you use Dunbar’s theory to help you create focus, function, and sustainability?

(Big thanks to Louise at UK Recruiter for initially posting this blog.)

Bullhorn ROI + Trained Happy Recruiters = More Sales

We pride ourselves on helping recruitment leaders achieve Bullhorn ROI. We create a Bullhorn1st vision, reduce the need for other tech, optimise Bullhorn, automate their sales-prevention processes and data, and train recruiters to trust it and use it.