Return on investment (RoI) is a key objective for every recruitment leader, yet it can often be a challenge to achieve. Costs are rising, recruiting is getting tougher, and getting a solid return on effort (RoE) is becoming more difficult.
Recruitment leaders are facing increasing costs across multiple areas:
Bullhorn and Automation investments.
LinkedIn and job board costs.
Staffing and training investments.
Many of my clients express a desire to "do more with what they have," or even better, to "do more with less." They need both RoI and RoE to drive success. But how can they achieve true RoI and RoE in recruitment? Let's explore.
RoI vs. RoE: What’s the Difference?
Both RoI (return on investment) and RoE (return on effort) are crucial for recruitment success. As a team, we focus on maximising both for the recruiters and leaders we support. We understand that a significant amount of effort goes into running a recruitment business—managing teams, desks, and ensuring recruitment operations run smoothly.
However, RoI and RoE are often not immediately clear or realised. Time, effort, and money can be wasted on technology and people, which leads to stress, increased risk, and missed opportunities for growth.
Rising Costs: Is Your Effort Keeping Up?
Through conversations with clients, polling, and research, I’ve discovered several key insights:
New recruiters take around 3-6 months to become billers, costing approximately £10k per head during this training period.
Tech costs are rising, with new tools emerging constantly. However, many agencies still struggle to optimise or fully trust their core CRM systems.
LinkedIn and job board fees continue to climb.
Recruitment training is often inconsistent—many agencies provide "induction and go!" training, which lacks ongoing support.
Staff attrition is a major issue. Studies show that 2/3 of people quit their jobs due to a lack of training and direction.
While RoI seems elusive, the real challenge is in maximising RoE. High turnover, combined with insufficient training and ineffective technology use, often leads to inefficiencies and missed potential.
Why Do 2/3 of Employees Quit? The Training Deficit
A significant number (2/3) of people leave their jobs due to inadequate training. This directly impacts RoE, suggesting that the "effort" part is either insufficient or poorly executed.
This brings me to a critical question for recruitment leaders:
What training are you providing your teams?
Is it comprehensive, covering sales, recruitment, systems, and marketing?
Are you actively measuring the return on effort (RoE) from this training?
Does your training go beyond "induction and off you go" or is it blended, continuous, and tailored to meet your team's needs?
Have you connected the "why" or WIIFM (What's In It For Me?) to your training approach?
Is there a training plan that records their learning and that you can hold staff accountable for learning and delivering results? Or do they just need to show up?
Are you tracking whether the training is truly working?
The Truth Behind Why Recruitment Training Often Falls Short
Many agencies invest heavily in tech, but then under-invest in training. This often results in:
Systems being underutilised or ignored,
Recruiters not placing deals quickly enough, leading to lost opportunities,
Dirty data that isn't properly cleaned or monetised,
Continued overspending on job boards and LinkedIn licences / ads.
Recruiters disengaged with your processes and not delivering results. 10 recruiters = 10 "ways".
The key to improving RoI and RoE isn’t just investing in training—it’s ensuring the training is effective, ongoing, and tied to the needs of the business.
Are Your People Really Your Most Valuable Asset?
We're frequently told that people are our most important asset—but is that entirely true?
While people are crucial, processes, brand, and data are just as vital. These elements depend on each other. When integrated effectively, data + people + process + systems create the foundation for a robust and sustainable recruitment pipeline.
When these assets aren’t linked together, it can result in candidates, clients, and colleagues—and even cash flow—suffering.
"Train to Retain": The Key to Success
To retain top talent and improve overall performance, you need to train to retain. That means ensuring that your people, data, systems, and processes are connected and aligned. You need a RoE plan that maximises the efforts of your team. Without this connection, you're wasting your hard-earned fees and effort.
Are You Wasting £100,000 Per Year?
If you haven’t prioritised continuous and blended training, the average 10 person recruiter might be blowing £20,000 a year, by:
Recruiting and rehiring new staff
Reinvesting in training on replacements
Waiting for new hires to "get up to speed"
Losing deals and missing targets due to disruptions
If you have 20 staff, that's £40k / year! And so on... The true cost of inadequate training is far greater than the cost of investing in it.
Focus on RoI and RoE Through Blended Recruitment Training
Recruitment leaders - it’s time to take a hard look at these questions. We estimate that many recruitment businesses are losing significant revenue each year due to ineffective training and high turnover. By focusing on blended and continuous WIIFM training, you can improve both RoI and RoE and create a more efficient, sustainable business.
Recruitment Training = ROI!
We deliver the best Recruitment and Bullhorn training through a blend of live webinars and our online training platform, Recruitment HIIT.
TRY HIIT FREE HERE
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Automation RoI Webinar Series: Unlock Bullhorn Part 2 ~ Create a Virtuous Circle of Candidates
Recruiters and leaders — ready to do less admin and make more placements?Do you need to be less reliant on LinkedIn and Job Boards, and have a more engaged, valuable database of candidates?Then Part 2 of our "Unlock Bullhorn with Automation" webinar series is for you. We'll fixate on candidate management and engagement.REGISTER NOW💡 Why Candidate Management and Engagement MattersIn our recent Bullhorn Tips Webinar, we asked recruiters about their candidate management strategies.The results?🙈Most recruiters said their CRM was out of date.🙉Even more admitted their candidate engagement was reactive at best.🙊And LinkedIn and job boards still dominate, draining time and budget.AKA vicious cycle. You source externally, internal data gets colder and becomes irrelevant, sourcing becomes slower and costlier. And the cycle repeats.📊 Candidate Management by the Numbers:70%+ of placed candidates already exist in your CRM.It costs 6x more to source a new candidate than to re-engage.Recruiters spend up to 1/3 of their time on admin.Re-engaged candidates are 2x more likely to be placed.Now ask yourself: What if that cycle could be flipped?💥 From Vicious to Virtuous: Using Automation to Flip the Recruitment ScriptInstead, imagine a virtuous circle where:✅ Your CRM is rich with warm, engaged talent.✅ Your pipeline is always ready, without needing a new job ad.✅ Candidates actually reply to your emails.✅ Admin drops, and placements rise.That’s the power of Bullhorn Automation.Join us for this free webinar and learn how to use Bullhorn Automation and smart workflows to build—and sustain—a thriving talent pipeline.This is part of our "Unlock Bullhorn" Automation webinar series.📅 Webinar Highlights🛠️ Real-Life Automation Tips to Drive Recruitment Workflows:Automate outreach to dormant candidates (without sounding robotic).Keep silver medalists engaged for future roles.Trigger real-time updates when candidates change jobs or locations.Build loyalty with consistent communication at every stage of the journey.Drastically reduce sourcing times and costs.💸 Turn Data Health into Data WealthThis Webinar is for you if:You’re tired of LinkedIn / Job Board over-reliance.You want to scale your placements—not your sourcing costs.You want a Bullhorn CRM to be a database and not simply be a data dump.📍 Save Your Spot!When? 21 May 2025: 16:00 BSTREGISTER NOWPS. Want to go even further? Check out our"Unlock Bullhorn with Automation"series.🔍 24 April 2025: Automate sourcing to find qualified candidates faster and with less effort.Watch the recording💬 21 May 2025: Engage with candidates on autopilot and nurture relationships effectively.Register Now📈 Date TBC: Boost lead generation using automation to improve conversion rates.💡 Date TBC: Streamline your recruitment processes for maximum efficiency and profitability.Automation Buddy / Bullhorn RoIWe are Automation Buddies set on helping ambitious recruitment businesses who want to increase speed and sales.We coach to inspire, and build your automations so you can recruit and sell!Plus, through our Bullhorn Vision service we help generate serious ROI from your Bullhorn, data, and people.READ ABOUT OUR AUTOMATION BUDDY SERVICECONTACT US ABOUT BULLHORN ROI
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Recruiters! 10 Reasons Why Candidate Engagement is Critical
Recruiters and their leaders who want to spend less time and money sourcing, and more time placing, need to read this blog and think about why they need to create a virtuous circle of talent.On our recent Bullhorn Tips webinar, where we focused on candidate management tips, we asked the attendees about their current candidate management strategy.The results were unsurprising, but also disappointing.They told us that their candidate database was...And that their candidate management strategy was...In other words, not future proof or focussed on creating a robust, easy to deliver pipeline. It's mainly focussed on live, active candidates who are imminently placeable... and Linkedin / Job Boards continue to win at the expense of the recruiter and their profits.Recruitment Data Wealth💵💶💷If we've learned anything (at least since 2008) we need a clean, warm databases to see us through easy and tough times.We need engaged, loyal, happy candidates who are easy to find, happy to recommend, refer, and show up!Some recruiters call this "Data Health" - I call it "Data Wealth".I've seen a lot of tech and data hitting the recruitment market, but still do not see enough process improvements to capitalise on it. We just keep buying more, rather than exploring how we actually need less, but need to work it better.It's Time to Move from Vicious to Virtuous!Recruiters still waste crazy amounts of time sourcing and advertising, but not enough time engaging and managing.And ironically, by not engaging, and letting hot data cool off, the industry creates silos of "cold" data. Hence sourcing is key and reliance on external systems is high, costs increase, placements take longer... Vicious cycle!What if, though, we take a moment? Let the stats below sink in, and engage with our systems and data in a proactive way. Could recruiters create a virtuous circle of engaged candidates staying loyal and placeable, meaning less need for job adverts, Linkedin, sourcing, and insanity?Yes!🔢Candidate Management Stats Every Recruiter Should Know78% of placed candidates are already in your CRM. – Yet many recruiters go straight to LinkedIn or job boards before checking their own database.Only 30% of CRM records are typically up to date. – That means 70% of your candidate data might be incomplete, inaccurate, or out of date.60% of recruiters admit to rarely revisiting past candidates. – This leads to missed opportunities and duplicated effort.It costs 6x more to source a new candidate than to re-engage an existing one. – Save budget and time by starting with your CRM.43% of recruiters say poor data quality negatively impacts their ability to place quickly. – Dirty data slows down sourcing, shortlisting, and matching.48% of candidates who apply to a role never hear back. – Proper candidate management helps ensure consistent communication and better candidate experience.80% of candidates say they’d reapply to a company with a good hiring experience. – Engagement doesn’t stop at “not selected”—it builds your future pipeline.Recruiters spend up to 1/3 of their time on admin. – Automation and smart candidate management free up time for relationship-building and placements.Re-engaged candidates are 2x more likely to be placed than cold-sourced ones. – Prior placements and silver medalists are often your hottest leads.Companies that nurture candidates improve quality of hire by 20%. – Keeping in touch with passive talent builds a stronger, more prepared pipeline.The stats above are from a variety of sources, including IBM, TalentBoard, Bullhorn, and LinkedIn.Even just one of the stats above should be enough to make you stop and think "how can I create a virtuous circle of happy, engaged, and placed candidates?"💻Watch our Bullhorn Tips Webinar and use Bullhorn to manage and engage your candidates.Click to WatchRecruitment and Bullhorn TrainingWe deliver the best live Bullhorn ROI webinar training, and you'll find other tips and tricks in Recruitment HIIT, our online recruitment training platform.Plus, through our Bullhorn Vision service we help generate serious ROI from your Bullhorn, data, and people.TRY HIIT FREE HERECONTACT US ABOUT BULLHORN ROI
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