Getting Smarter About Labor Market Intelligence

We speak to hundreds of recruiting leaders as part of our research process, and one of the trends we continue to notice is the importance of acquiring more effective intelligence on labor market conditions.  Our work on Smart Sourcing revealed the pivotal role that sourcers play in extracting valuable intelligence from candidates, whilst this year’s research on Global Recruiting Effectiveness confirmed the impact that effective labor market data has on influencing strategic business decisions.

The payoff for getting smarter about the labor markets that serve your business is clear:  recruiters who possess knowledge of the labor markets in which they recruit can perform 16% better than those who do not, whilst labor market knowledge can also increase recruiters’ business influence by 42%.  In short, becoming a labor market expert will make you a better, more credible recruiter, and your line partners expect you to possess this expertise.

We heard from one organization, for example, that became aware that a well-known technology company would be opening a site locally; as a result that organization is revisiting its Employment Value Proposition (EVP) to make sure it doesn’t lose its best programmers to this incoming company.  Another company was able to avoid making the potentially disastrous decision of building a new hub in the Middle East once it became aware that local universities would not be able to supply a long-term pipeline of viable talent.

However, you told us time and again that gathering and analyzing labor market intelligence can be a tricky task.  It’s hard for recruiters to find the time to conduct this kind of research, to locate reliable, up-to-date data on the markets that interest them, and to interpret this information once they have found it.  If your teams struggle to understand where to begin, or need some tools to help demystify the process, then CLC Recruiting’s Labor Market Data Portal might be a helpful place to bookmark.

Get smarter about labor market intelligence by adopting tips such as the following:

Don’t rely on purely workforce-related information; identify a broader range of macroeconomic indicators to give the full picture about a market’s ability to yield long-term, high-quality talent.

• Don’t collect useless information; stress-test the intelligence you gather to make sure it is relevant and actionable.
• Don’t keep the best intelligence to yourself; share labor market intelligence amongst recruiting teams (to scale the intelligence and avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’), and also more broadly within the organization (to influence wider decision making).

Visit the portal for more examples of what the best organizations do to collect labor market information more effectively.