If you’re in the Staffing and Recruiting business, there’s a lot of reasons to be excited.
All signs point to the next few years being especially fruitful for this industry. Rising demand and growing candidate pools, coupled with the expected slowdown in recession means there’s potentially a lot of scope for your business in the coming days.
But here’s the thing: This is all true for your competitors as well.
So, if you want to take full advantage of the opportunities the market will inevitably provide, you’ll need to set yourself up to do so.
And your tech stack is where you start.
A great tech stack will play a key role in making your staffing agency more efficient and competitive. But what do we mean by a “tech stack” in the first place?
Your tech stack is the set of software platforms that you use to manage and scale your business.
When you’re trying to build a great tech stack, it can be tempting to just go for the best platforms for each problem you’re trying to solve. But the ideal tech stack is more than that. You’ll need to pick tools that work well with each other. Some tools have great integrations with each other, and taking advantage of this can be a huge boost for your business. On top of this, you.
But this doesn’t have to be all that difficult. Drawing from a lot of insightful conversations with experts in this field, we have all the answers for you! But first, let's take a closer look at exactly what a great tech stack can do for you.
Why you need a great tech stack
We mentioned in passing that a great tech stack can be a huge difference maker for your agency, but we just wanted to take a moment to talk about exactly how it can help. Here are some key benefits:
- Across all industries, early adopters of technology have been proven to have significant advantages over companies that are considered “followers”. There are some reports that state that the growth rate of these companies can be more than twice that of others.
- Better technology almost always means more efficiency, and this has other intangible benefits as well. By simply being quicker and efficient with fulfilling the needs of your clients and your candidates, your reputation as an agency improves. This makes it easier for you to get more clients, and candidates are more likely to trust your agency as well.
- A consequence of the two benefits stated above is that your agency is likely to scale much faster. While this is great news, you’ll have to keep this in mind while choosing your tech stack, as you’ll need platforms that are capable of serving needs of organisations that are larger than what you are currently. Platforms like Everstage are great for this.
Before you build your Tech Stack…
It’s important to identify what your needs are. Knowing exactly what you need and what features are negotiable is key to finding platforms that work for YOU. Here are some common needs of hiring and staffing agencies that can be solved through investing in tech.
- Managing time between core activities and administrative work
- Getting high-quality candidates
- Maintaining open communication with candidates
- Scheduling meetings with clients and prospects
The platforms you can consider
1.Commissions Management
Your recruiters are the core of your business, and they are typically paid in commissions. Commission payments can often be one of the biggest expenses for agencies, and they can also be extremely complicated. Manual management of commissions can lead to lack of transparency, calculation errors, and scalability issues as well. When these issues (inevitably) start affecting recruiter morale, your entire business suffers.
This is why you should look at platforms like Everstage. You can automate everything, right from setting up the plans, managing contracts, calculating commissions, and communicating payout data, everything becomes instant, on-demand, and error free.
What’s more, with predictive intelligence, transparency is taken to the next level, and your recruiters are sure to stay happy, motivated, and focussed at all times.
The biggest advantage of this is that administrative work is taken off your hands, and your teams have a lot more time to focus on strategy and big-picture stuff.
2.Referral Management
A great source of candidates is referrals, and it only makes sense for agencies to have systems in place to manage them. Doing this on spreadsheets can quickly become too difficult for recruiters to handle. Following up with candidates, keeping track of who referred whom can become cumbersome before you know it.
Your recruiters are busy enough as it is, and having an automated referral management system in place can go a long way in making their tasks easier. These platforms can help track referrals, schedule follow-ups, and help you grow your pool of candidates without much additional effort.
Examples of this would be Hireology and Sense. These platforms do everything you’d want from a Referral Management System, making this seem like an easy, simple task. The added transparency in referral tracking is also a great bonus.
3.Automated Messaging Platforms
In the modern world, texting is how people communicate. It’s faster, and less formal than emails, and if you use a platform to manage them, it can be much faster than phone calls too.
Software like Podium and SimpleTexting are leaders in this space, and your agency can consider either of them. Be sure to check if the platform you choose integrates with your choice of Referral Management platform, as the added integration can be a huge bonus.
4.Scheduling Platforms
Scheduling meetings and booking appointments is a key function for staffing and recruiting agencies. With business getting busier than ever, it becomes significantly more difficult to keep track of every meeting and every call with every client or prospect at all times.
Investing in a platform that can automate all of this can free up a lot of your time, and make everything easier. Acuity is a great platform for this. It can handle all of your scheduling needs, and you can even set up custom, rule-based scheduling too with integration with Google Calendar, among others. This, coupled with custom reminders and SMS alerts make this a top contender for the scheduling needs of your agency.
5.Candidate Sourcing Platforms
A core function of hiring and staffing agencies is to have a large list of candidates in their pool. These candidates also have to be mapped to relevant jobs for them. Manually parsing through resumes and reaching out to prospects can be extremely time consuming.
With the help of AI, HireEZ makes this a lot easier. Agencies are now able to scour through 800 million plus profiles across the internet, and identify the right people for them. HireEZ can also be used to keep diversity and inclusion in mind while identifying the candidates.
With such a large number of prospective candidates, a sourcing platform for agencies is pretty much a no-brainer.
Final Thoughts
We all know the benefits of technology. Simply having more tech can make your business run faster and more efficiently, but to truly set yourself apart, you’ll need to ensure that all your tech works together in cohesion.
Doing that can be a huge differentiator. Asking yourself the questions about what problems you need to solve, and what platforms can solve them is the first step. Then, you can identify platforms that work best for you, and voila! You have a recipe for staggering growth.
Hopefully, this blog has given you insights into how you can go about all of this the right way. Implement this in you business, and all you’ll need to do is keep up with the pace of your business!
