Double down on your data or get left behind.

If you haven’t already, this is the year to absolutely double down on your own data and IP.

For a long time, access was the edge in recruitment. If you had LinkedIn Recruiter, decent search strings, and the discipline to work harder than most people, you could build a strong desk. That advantage has quietly disappeared.

LinkedIn Recruiter AI, sourcing tools, automation and sequencing platforms are now table stakes. Everyone has access to similar tech, and everyone can surface “good” candidates faster than ever before.

Speed and access have been levelled out.

What hasn’t been levelled out is context, and that’s where the real gap is starting to open up.

Here’s the analogy I always come back to.

A company instructs two specialist recruitment agencies on the same role. On paper, they look almost identical. Similar experience, similar market expertise, similar tech stack, both use LinkedIn.

From this, both build a longlist of 20 people who look excellent on paper.

From the outside, there’s nothing obvious to separate them.

Recruiter A looks at that list and sees what LinkedIn shows everyone. Job titles, employment history, where someone has worked and how long they’ve been there. It’s useful information, but it’s generic. Any half-decent recruiter in the market can get to the same place.

Recruiter B is looking at the same list through a very different lens. They’ve already met or spoken to around 40% of those people, sometimes months or years before the role even existed.

So alongside the CV data, they know what that person wants their career to look like in five years. They know the companies they admire, the ones they’d actively avoid, and why. They understand personal situations, family commitments, commute tolerance, and what would genuinely motivate someone to move rather than just take a call.

That difference isn’t cosmetic, it completely changes how the recruiter operates.

Recruiter A is reacting to responses.

Recruiter B is making decisions.

This is the bit clients feel, even if they never say it out loud.

Recruiter A is essentially testing the market. They’re sending messages, waiting for replies, and adjusting as they go. Their confidence grows or shrinks based on what comes back.

Recruiter B already knows where the dead ends are.

They know who won’t move for this client, no matter how good the brief sounds. They know who is quietly open but won’t respond to a generic message. They know how to position the opportunity differently depending on the person they’re speaking to.

That changes everything:

One recruiter is hoping the process works, the other is controlling it.

This advantage doesn’t come from clever tech or better automation.

It comes from doing two fairly unglamorous things consistently over time.

The first is having real conversations with people in the market, even when there’s no immediate job to fill. Not surface-level chats, but conversations that uncover motivations, deal-breakers and decision-making patterns.

The second is treating data capture as part of the job, not an admin task.

Recruiter B doesn’t rely on memory. They don’t rely on personal phones, WhatsApp threads, or scraps of notes. What they learn goes into the CRM, properly structured, while it’s still fresh.

That’s the difference between insight that disappears and insight that compounds.

Most recruiters will read this and think, "We already do this," and to an extent, that’s true.

Most recruiters have good conversations and most recruiters build relationships but the gap tends to appear after the call ends.

If insight lives in someone’s head, it doesn’t scale.

If it lives on a personal device, the business doesn’t own it.

If it isn’t structured, it can’t be reused.

This is where average desks quietly fall behind strong ones. Not because they don’t talk to people, but because they don’t turn those conversations into a usable asset.

Every recruiter will have access to LinkedIn data.

As LinkedIn continues to push its AI tools, more teams will be able to surface, rank, and contact candidates faster than ever before. The gap between “good” and “great” sourcing will continue to narrow.

Access to LinkedIn is no longer a competitive advantage. It’s just the baseline.

What sits on top of that shared data is where separation happens. Your own context. Your own history. Your own understanding of people in the market.

That’s the layer AI can’t replicate quickly, and it’s the layer most teams are still neglecting.

If you recognised yourself in Recruiter A, this isn’t something to “fix” overnight. You don’t undo years of surface-level data in a week.

But you can change the direction of your desk in the next 30 days.

The goal this month isn’t perfection. It’s momentum.

1. Narrow your focus to a “core 30”

Trying to capture everything usually means capturing nothing.

This month, pick 30 people in your market who actually matter:

Your job isn’t to vaguely know hundreds of people. It’s to deeply understand a small, high-value group.

2. Upgrade your conversations, not their length

You don’t need longer calls. You need better questions.

Move beyond CV updates and salary checks and start uncovering intent:

That context is the IP.

3. Capture insight immediately, not “later”

The habit that changes everything is simple.

Update the CRM straight after meaningful conversations.

Not just role and salary, but motivations, red lines, and context that another recruiter could pick up and use. If someone else can’t sound informed within 30 seconds, the data isn’t doing its job yet.

4. Build one habit that compounds

Don’t overhaul your desk. Pick one behaviour you’ll actually stick to:

This isn’t admin. It’s asset building.

What success looks like after 30 days

You won’t become Recruiter B overnight.

But conversations get easier, shortlists become more intentional and client confidence improves.

Most importantly, you stop starting from zero every time a role lands, and that’s how the gap begins to close.

P.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

#1: Do you listen to my podcast? I release a weekly episode with either a top-performing recruiter or recruitment entrepreneur to find out how they achieved their success so you can learn directly from their journey Check out my latest episode and subscribe to the show.

#2 Take the recruitment High-Performance Team Scorecard
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#3: Want to win more business, book more meetings, and level up your billings? Our Hector-certified courses are built by top billers who’ve been where you are and cracked it. No fluff. Just real, proven strategies you can use immediately >>>> Browse Courses – Start Closing More Deals Today (Use code Limitless_Learning at checkout for 15% off: exclusive to newsletter readers)