Clients want swift access to the best candidates, compliant employment contracts, with a Hays consultant at the core
The feedback from a recent global survey of our clients is clear – they universally desire access to the highest quality candidates. This reinforces our view that Hays is best positioned to win when we deliver curated candidates through a swift and precise search & match process.
- In Permanent recruitment, clients tell us they value recruitment agencies whose consultants provide strong specialism expertise and access to high-quality candidates. These two factors rank significantly above all others, including price.
- In Temporary & Contracting, clients also value candidate quality closely followed by speed of process, from initial request to candidate start date. Price and specialism expertise lag some way behind in joint third.
- In MSP, clients again value candidate quality but, in this instance, price and regulatory compliance are the next largest motivational factors.
When we ask our clients which factors they consider to be important when measuring ‘quality’ they tell us that, once baseline technical skills requirements have been achieved, then values and behavioural alignment are the key differentiators. In more than half of responses our clients rank interpersonal skills such as agility, resilience, communication and leadership as their most important hiring factors for senior roles. We believe this presents Hays with an opportunity to differentiate: by leveraging our 10+ million candidate database and c.40,000 weekly interactions between our consultants and their clients and candidates, and applying proprietary search & match algorithms to assess hard and interpersonal skills, we can swiftly and precisely identify the highest quality candidates.
Although technology can assist, many of our clients also tell us that our human-led approach is an important element they wish to retain. Hays’ consultants have deep domain knowledge – of their clients, candidates and specialisms – which they use to provide essential human insight when assessing values and behavioural alignment. Over time, we will improve our search & match capability to support the best post-hire success rates in the industry.
Candidates value successful placement outcomes and regular feedback
According to recent surveys by our operations in Germany, the UK and Australia, our candidates understandably rank achieving a successful placement as the most important factor when assessing a recruitment agency. They rapidly become frustrated by poor communication and the absence of constructive feedback.
Rapid deployment of high-ROI use cases
We are rolling out AI agents to provide our consultants with best-in-class tools, reduce administrative burden, improve automation and efficiency in our back-office and middle-office functional areas, and provide powerful and personalised data and insights to our customers.
Initial examples include:
- Our ‘Smarter Meetings’ AI agent analyses client and candidate conversations, capturing structured actions, key CRM data, and actionable insights in real time, reducing manual administration and consistently recording critical information and data. We are already seeing a material improvement in the volume of structured data captured per conversation, materially improving the quality and depth of our candidate records, which in turn supports better matching, stronger pipeline visibility, and more sophisticated analytics.
- Our AI-curated ‘Market Intelligence’ agents provide bespoke market analysis at scale to support business development activity. This enables consultants to engage clients with more informed and timely insights into market conditions, demand trends, and opportunities. We are already seeing improved business development focus and returns. We have a further pipeline of enterprise-level initiatives and are focused on generating returns at an enterprise scale.
