Mid-year review: reading your first-half Vietnam numbers honestly

Half-way through a recruitment year, someone asks whether Vietnam is working. The honest answer usually requires better questions than the ones on the dashboard.

Four questions worth asking instead

• Is the pipeline shaped differently from last period, or just larger? Growth in enquiries with unchanged conversion is a marketing result, not a recruitment one.
• Where is the biggest stage loss, and has it moved? If the loss shifted from enquiry-to-application to offer-to-enrolment, the problem changed and so should the response.
• Which activity produced the applications we actually want? Volume and fit are different, and the channel that produces one rarely produces the other.
• What did we learn that we did not know in January? A market entry that produces no learning is not being run, it is being funded.

The trap at mid-year

Judging a market with a multi-year build against a six-month target. Recognition compounds; the second year usually outperforms the first by a margin that makes a six-month verdict misleading.

What a good review produces

One decision. Continue, adjust one thing, or stop. A review that produces a longer report and no decision has cost more than it returned.

Planning the second half: Services for institutions →