As the owner of a recruiting company, your recruiting staff is easily your biggest investment. What if there were operational changes you could make that increased their productivity — and that increase could, in turn, double your profits?
Yes, double. Sounds good, right?
That's what this guide is about. We're highlighting seven productivity changes you can make at your recruitment firm that boost productivity by up to 20 percent and have a dramatic effect on profits.
1. Invest in onboarding
One of the best things you can do to improve productivity is provide proper onboarding when sales and recruiting staff joins your company. Consider these stats on the importance of proper onboarding:
● A study conducted by the Academy of Management found that providing proper onboarding and support to new employees (those within their first 90 days with a company) helped them feel better about their job and want to work harder. When this onboarding support was not available, employees were more apt to be unhappy and unproductive, and many didn’t stay with the company past four months.
● A study conducted by the Wynhurst Group found that new hires who go through a qualified onboarding process are 58 percent more likely to stay with the company for longer than three years.
● A survey by BambooHR found that among people who left their jobs within the first three months of employment, 23 percent said getting clear guidelines on their responsibilities would have helped them remain at the company, while 21 percent said they wanted better onboarding.
When you use a comprehensive candidate management system such as TrackerRMS, you get a high-touch, service-oriented platform with a dedicated customer success team.
Providing this level of onboarding support empowers your team by getting them up to speed on the tools and software they'll use in their daily work. That boosts productivity — and your bottom line.
2. Apply just enough pressure
Let's face it: Recruiters get complacent.
Even your top recruiter can grow bored and rest on his laurels (and fat commission checks). Kick up the motivation level with a minimum requirement for new business development.
Requiring a minimum number of new clients per quarter sends the message that everyone needs to do enough business development to actually stay in business. But don't just lower the boom and leave your people to "figure it out;" support them with the coaching, software and tools they need to be successful.
So what's fair? Is one new client per quarter reasonable?
Make sure you structure compensation to include this minimum requirement, too.
3. Automate routine tasks as much as possible
The automation of routine tasks frees up your recruiters to focus on bigger, more complex and more profitable business matters. Productivity gets a boost when your staff has the time to focus on more valuable aspects of the job and find new and better ways of working.
TrackerRMS automates a number of such tasks, including:
● Resume screening
● Responding to applications
● Aggregating and segmenting applicant information from lead capture forms
● Posting vacancies to all job boards
● Searching across all job boards
● Maintaining a centralized inbox of applicant responses
● Making reference requests
● Creating a candidate record and updating skills
TrackerRMS also functions as a complete online CRM solution, which brings the benefits of automation to your sales force. With TrackerRMS, you can automate the tracking of your customers' jobs and candidate history and share information across your sales and recruitment team.
Hours saved on routine tasks can be redistributed to time spent with clients, candidates and prospects.
4. Empower front-line decision making
Here's that "empower" word again. Why is it so important? According to "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" author Stephen Covey:
"An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success."
When you authorize your recruiters to make front-line decisions themselves, a number of productivity-boosting effects manifest. You help to create stronger and more confident recruiters, increase their job satisfaction and improve their experience at your firm.
It all boils down to relinquishing the urge to micromanage and creating happier, more productive employees. Happy employees give their best. That's good for business.
What does this look like in the recruiting world?
There are a hundred different touch points in this area, but the main one we'll focus on here is qualifying prospects. Empower them to make their decisions regarding prospects, such as who's a good cultural fit for a company, what the right industry is, etc.
In addition to the prospect qualification tools found in TrackerRMS, teach your recruiters how to apply the ranking acronym MANDACT. They can use it to manage leads and opportunities. MANDACT stands for:
● Money: Do they have the money to spend with you?
● Authority: Do they have the authority to make decisions?
● Need: Do they really need your service?
● Decision criteria: What are they looking at to reach a decision?
● Ability to deliver: Do we have the ability to deliver?
● Competition: Are they looking at our competitors?
● Timing: When are they looking to evaluate their preferred provider agreements?
Applying the MANDACT questions enables them to quickly and consistently assess if the potential client they're talking to is a good fit for your firm.
Combining the MANDACT questions with the authority to make front-line decisions without your involvement kills the slog found in environments where staff has to check with the boss before they can do anything.
5. Develop a support team with complete access to information
When you create a resource team that supports the recruitment process, and you provide across-the-board access and transparency with regard to information, you reduce organizational and informational friction between recruiters, account managers and other stakeholders.
It puts everyone is on the same team, as opposed to delegating them to their own bullpens based on job title. The mood changes.
This is especially important in the 180 business model of recruiting, where the recruiter doesn't have his hands in the process from start to finish.
Complete access to data via a relationship management system such as TrackerRMS unites recruiters and account managers, giving each insight into how everyone can provide the best service to all parties.
With TrackerRMS, job and pipeline management can be tracked throughout the sales process, and everyone has the data and insights they need to give the best possible service to clients and candidates.
6. Optimize for mobile access of tools and information
It's a mobile-first world. Case in point:
● In 2016, more people accessed the internet via their mobile devices than their desktop computers , StatCounter reported
● In 2018, 79 percent of the worldwide internet use will happen via mobile device, according to Zenith’s Mobile Advertising Forecasts report
In today's mobile environment, this one is non-negotiable — you simply must provide your employees mobile access to the tools and information they need to do their jobs.
Without the ability to access sales and recruitment activities, leads, job postings, etc., on their mobile devices, you lose an untold amount of productivity.
Work-life balance has evolved to work-life integration, and the mobile revolution is directly responsible for this. Whether you agree with it or not doesn't matter; it's a "go mobile or go home" world, and firms that don't partake get left behind.
Period.
The complete suite of TrackerRMS tools is accessible via mobile.
Your employees can do everything they can do at the office, from wherever they are. They simply log in to the software via their mobile device and begin working. This productivity booster is a no-brainer.
7. Deliver reports that clarify and motivate
Sales is about performance, and performance is measured in numbers. It's up to you to provide the reports that offer clarity on their performance — which, in turn, motivates them to kick things up a notch and do better.
Reports should give them visibility into:
● How they're doing relative to where they're supposed to be in the month to achieve their quota
● How they're doing relative to the others in the firm
● How they're doing relative to their best month ever
This type of insight is invaluable to increasing their drive and productivity.
Bonus tip: Invest in a demand generation process to drive opportunities to your recruiters
Most recruiting firms don't do anything to generate leads for their recruiters. Change that. Devote resources to the outbound prospecting/demand generation process; doing so supplements your inbound efforts, driving opportunities to your recruiters without them having to sacrifice their time nurturing accounts.
What do these demand generation strategies look like? You could:
● Invest in content marketing
● Invest in SEO
● Offer a free tool or resource
● Do a giveaway
● Produce a webinar
● Launch an email marketing campaign
● Partner with an industry influencer
These strategies will drive leads to your recruiters, which of course, is great for business.
Conclusion
By implementing these strategies, you're giving your sales and recruiting teams the power and the tools they need to do their jobs better. That motivates everyone in the whole company, because after all, excellence begets excellence.
When productivity is up, profitability is up.
Everyone's happy!
