When a company enters a new market, one of the first questions is usually how many candidates are available.
After years of working on new locations and large-scale recruitment projects, that is no longer the question I would start with. I would rather understand how many candidates we can attract for the job we have defined, under the conditions we offer and within the timeframe we have.
The difference is not just semantic. It determines how realistic the hiring plan actually is.
There may be a large number of people in the market who technically match the profile, while only a fraction of them are realistically available for our particular offer. The opposite can also be true: an initial estimate may suggest limited potential that turns out to be considerably greater in practice.
That is why I do not look for a number alone when assessing a market. I want to understand what is behind it and which assumptions it is based on.
Are we narrowing the market ourselves?
On one project, we were looking for people who, in addition to a particular foreign language, also needed to speak English. That combination significantly reduced the number of potential candidates.
Rather than immediately looking for new candidate sources or concluding that the market was too small, we looked at why English was required in the first place. It turned out that it was not needed for the job itself, but for the training.
By adapting the training, we could remove a requirement that was not essential to doing the job successfully and open up a considerably larger part of the market. This was not about lowering the bar. It was about understanding which criteria were genuinely necessary and how each of them affected the feasibility of the plan.
The same question is worth asking about work location, working hours, type of contract, previous experience and other conditions that can significantly affect the number of candidates realistically available to us.
“Before concluding that there are not enough candidates, it is worth asking how much we have narrowed the available pool ourselves.”
Some requirements cannot and should not be changed. But at least then we know which constraints we are working with and can account for them in the plan.
How reliable is the initial estimate?
An initial estimate can differ from what we later see in practice. Sometimes the potential turns out to be greater than we expected.
When opening a new location, we needed a large number of people with a specific language profile, while external estimates suggested that the potential was very limited. In practice, relevant communities, referrals and direct outreach helped us reach people who had not been captured in the initial analysis.
The market was not unlimited, but it was considerably larger than it had appeared on paper.
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Send enquiryThat experience did not make me trust data less. It made me pay more attention to how it was produced.
External analyses, data from job platforms, information from institutions and our own databases are all valuable sources, but none provides a definitive answer on its own. When an estimate matters to a business decision, I want to understand what it is based on and, where possible, test it against what we actually see in the market.
The aim is not to prove the initial estimate wrong. It is to avoid basing an important business decision on an assumption we have the opportunity to test.
What do the actual results tell us?
Once recruitment begins, we get something more valuable than an estimate: real data on how the market is responding to our offer.
At that point, the number of applications alone tells us very little. We need to see which sources bring relevant candidates, how many progress through each stage, where we lose them and how many ultimately accept an offer. That data helps us understand whether we really have a candidate availability problem or whether the constraint lies somewhere else.
If enough strong candidates are entering the process but we are losing them along the way, more advertising will not necessarily solve the problem. If candidates reach the end of the selection process but turn down the offer, the size of the market is again unlikely to be the issue. And a channel that generates hundreds of applications but almost no hires may be less valuable than it first appears.
The initial estimate gives us direction. Actual results tell us what is happening and where we need to respond.
What is actually holding us back?
This brings us to the question that, on large projects, has always mattered more to me than simply concluding that the plan is falling behind.
If we need to hire 200 people and the first results show that we will not get there at the current pace, we need to understand why. The constraint may be the offer, the geographic area we are targeting, the criteria, the channels, the hiring schedule or the capacity of the recruitment team.
Only once we understand the constraint can we have a useful conversation about the solution.
On one project, for example, we did not need to change the salary, expand the search area or significantly increase investment. We needed to move one of the planned groups by a week or two. The additional time for attracting candidates, selection and offers was enough to make the plan considerably more achievable.
There is no single solution that works across projects. What makes a difference in one situation may make very little difference in another.
That is why simply concluding that something was unrealistic was never enough for me. The more useful question was: under what conditions could it become realistic?
This is where the relationship between recruitment and the business becomes particularly important. Recruitment can show where the market or the process is constraining the plan and what effect a particular change could have. The business knows which of those changes are possible and acceptable. Bringing those two perspectives together allows decisions to be based on what is actually happening rather than only on the assumptions made at the start.
That is why it makes sense to involve recruitment professionals in conversations about a new market while there is still time for information about candidates to influence the plan. Not because recruitment should decide where a company opens an office or what its business model should look like, but because a growth plan that depends on people also needs to be tested against the market for those people.
If the question is:
“Can we hire 200 people in this new market?”
the most useful answer is not simply yes or no. It is:
“Here are the conditions under which we can – and what we need to do to create them.”
That is where the plan really begins.