Our Process | Xist4 - A Data and Technology Recruitment Agency | Bristol | London

Recruitment Insight Audit

The Problem

Most organisations launch recruitment campaigns without the insight they need to succeed.

Common challenges include:

  • Salaries misaligned with the market, resulting in uncompetitive offers.

  • Job descriptions that read like wish lists instead of compelling opportunities.

  • Adverts posted once and left to fade, with no testing or optimisation.

  • Over-reliance on job boards, missing the 70% of candidates who aren’t actively looking.

The outcome?

Empty seats. Wasted spend. Declined offers. And hiring managers asking:

“Why is it so hard to find the right people?”

The Solution

Xist4’s Recruitment Insight Audit

The Recruitment Insight Audit (RIA) is a structured, evidence-based review of your current recruitment approach.

It gives you:

  • Clarity on how competitive your offer really is.

  • Insight on where your best candidates are — and where they aren’t.

  • Strategy to improve results, reduce wasted effort, and secure better hires.

Delivered in a concise, branded report, the Recruitment Insight Audit highlights strengths, pinpoints gaps, and provides practical recommendations you can act on immediately.

 

What You’ll Get

Every Recruitment Insight Audit provides a detailed, evidence-based review of your hiring activity — turning guesswork into actionable strategy.

Your report includes:

1. Executive Summary
A concise overview of your recruitment health, highlighting key strengths, gaps, and priority actions.

2. Narrative Overview
An at-a-glance explanation of what’s working, what’s slowing you down, and the quick wins that will improve results.

3. Readiness Scorecard
A visual Red-Amber-Green assessment showing how your current hiring performance compares to best practice.

4. Nine-Pillar Analysis
A deep dive into the areas that most influence your hiring success, including:

  • Role, salary, and benefits alignment

  • Job description and advert quality

  • Channel effectiveness and sourcing mix

  • Talent mapping and market reach

  • Candidate journey and interview process

  • EVP and employer brand clarity

  • Time-to-hire metrics and funnel data

5. 4-Week Posting & Optimisation Plan
A practical roadmap showing where, when, and how to advertise — complete with A/B testing guidance, posting cadence, and channel prioritisation.

6. Strategic Recommendations
Specific, measurable actions designed to improve speed, cost-per-hire, and candidate engagement within four weeks.

 

What This Means for You

You’ll walk away with a bespoke report, not a template — designed to give you:

  • Clarity on your current recruitment performance

  • Data to benchmark against market best practice

  • Clear steps to shorten time-to-hire and improve conversion

  • Tools you can use straight away to build stronger pipelines

Recruiting for a Key Role? Start with Insight.

Before you launch a campaign, know the market. Our Recruitment Insight Audit (RIA) gives you clarity on salaries, job descriptions, sourcing channels, and candidate engagement — so you can recruit with confidence.

Book My Recruitment Insight Audit

How It Works

A proven 5-step process

 

1. Discover

You complete our structured discovery questionnaire and a short consultation call. This helps us understand your current recruitment goals, challenges, and success metrics.

2. Map

We benchmark your current activity against live market data — analysing salary ranges, sourcing channels, and talent availability in your sector.

3. Assess

Using our Nine-Pillar Framework, we evaluate your recruitment performance across critical areas including job adverts, candidate experience, employer brand, and sourcing mix.

4. Advise

We translate findings into clear, evidence-based recommendations — backed by over 25 years of specialist recruitment insight — giving you practical actions to improve reach, engagement, and conversion.

5. Deliver

You receive your fully branded Recruitment Insight Audit Report, complete with a visual scorecard, market data, and a follow-up playback call to discuss the results, answer questions, and agree next steps.

What our clients say

Testimonials

As a FinTech start-up without a dedicated HR team, we needed a specialist who truly “gets it”. Xist4 matched both the technical and cultural brief, quickly placing two outstanding Quant Developers; we’ll be partnering with them again and highly recommend their work.

In a short time, Xist4 delivered high-calibre engineering hires who are already growing with us, thanks to a process that truly understood our needs. Gozie’s team is responsive, reliable, and easy to work with, and we look forward to building on the partnership.

Xist4’s Executive Search solved our lack of time and market reach, truly understood our brief, and delivered strong candidates from near and far while keeping us updated each week. We made the hire within seven weeks and would not go back to our old approach.

Launching our Bristol office from the US, we needed fast, safe hires; Xist4 delivered pre-interviewed, screened CVs within 24 hours and kept the quality high throughout. Within two weeks we were spoilt for choice and confidently made our selections, and we highly recommend them for complex remote hiring.

View all testimonials