Gone are the days of shying away from the newest technology in favor of the beat-up Rolodex on the corner of your desk. Staffing firms simply can’t afford to ignore the role of technology in being a staffing partner with their clients.
But what technology should you be using to prioritize those partnerships with your clients?
The Power of Partnerships
We’ve long believed that staffing teams should be seen as hiring experts rather than just order-takers. It’s why we started talking about Talent Advisors years ago. It’s even why we began referring to ourselves as partners to our clients.
Partnerships allow you to be open and honest about goals and values while bringing in people to support those goals. Being a staffing partner lets you be a sounding board for your clients to learn and grow from your expertise and gives you the power to carve out space to assert yourself as an expert.
The Role of Technology in Staffing Partnerships
When we created the newest version of HiringSolved, we built it with staffing firms in mind. HiringSolved ensures you can be the best staffing partner for your clients. In the 2022 State of Staffing report, nearly 60% of respondents agreed that technology provides a competitive advantage. When used correctly, technology complements your already competitive team, allowing you to use your resources better.
How a staffing firm uses technology and which tools they use are heavily dependent on its goals and industry. But there are a few common platforms that will likely play a role.
Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
The ATS is designed to be the cornerstone of a staffing firm. In general, an ATS houses all of a firm’s candidate data. This data often makes its way into the system through external sources like job boards, social networks, and more. The ATS saves that data, allowing recruiters to return to the information when needed.
The ATS is the most common technology found across staffing firms of all sizes. Most staffing recruiters are skilled in gathering candidate information. Still, roadblocks abound when rediscovering and utilizing that data in the staffing process to support your client and candidate partnerships with valuable data. (That’s where we come in, but we’ll get to that later.)
While an ATS is a valuable and often necessary investment, it’s not the be-all, end-all when it comes to being a staffing partner.
Job Advertising and Job Boards
Job boards and networks like Indeed, LinkedIn, and Monster, have long been stalwarts for bringing new candidates into your ATS. Many staffing agencies turn to programmatic job advertising tools to support those efforts. Others handle their posting manually. Regardless of where your team falls, job advertising and job boards aren’t going away any time soon and, when used effectively, can be an excellent source for new leads.
Regarding supporting partnerships, job advertising and job boards allow you to supplement your existing data if the candidate your client is looking for isn’t readily available. While your ATS should always be the first place to look, having external options for growth can be invaluable.
Messaging and Engagement Platform
Whether reaching out via email, text, or something else, you need to be able to contact your candidates. Tools like HereFish and Sense can automate aspects of the communication process to make sure that your staffing recruiters are constantly engaging their pipeline effectively.
As more and more candidates want a personalized hiring process and have higher expectations of companies, making your outreach the best it can be will be critical. It will help increase the quality of your slates and decrease the time to submit.
User Insights and Analytics
You and your team can’t grow unless you know where you’re currently at. Tools like Cube 19 track staffing teams’ activities to ensure that recruiters use their time effectively.
Platforms like this are compelling for larger staffing teams so that team leaders can keep an eye on the whole picture and make plans to ensure the organization’s success as a whole and with individual clients.
Referral Management
You only need to scroll LinkedIn for 30 seconds to stumble upon people leaning on their network to find a new job or candidate. Referrals are continually listed as one of the most effective lead sources. Naturally, referral management systems can be a gold mine for staffing firms.
While not everyone is using a referral tool at the moment, it would be no surprise for this technology segment to grow as more and more candidates look to friends and family that they trust to recommend quality companies and recruiters.
Automation Tools
Automation often covers a wide range of technologies. Most of the tools listed above include some element of automation. The most complex challenge when adopting automation is building trust between your team and the tool. We’ve gathered resources about that here:
Automation and Staffing: Is the Investment Worth It?
Recruiting Automation Myths and The Truth Behind Them
5 Ways To Get Your Team On Board with New Staffing Technology
All in all, using technologies like the ones listed above can help you stand out among your competitors. You can enhance your client partnerships with direct data about the candidates you have access to, the work your team is doing, and how candidates are engaged. On the candidate partnership side, you can find the right people quickly and get them into the right role for them.
Where HiringSolved Fits
According to the 2022 State of Staffing report, for the sixth year in a row finding qualified candidates is one of the most significant challenges for staffing firms. That’s where HiringSolved shines.
We’ve discussed the importance of using clean data to find candidates, and that’s what we always bring the conversation back around to. Without good data, even the best technology won’t serve its purpose. HiringSolved makes the data you already have access to, your earned data, the best it can be.
The HiringSolved software sits on top of your ATS, CRM, or HRIS and cleans up, normalizes, and optimizes your candidate data with visibility and searchability. Our integration process begins with a Data Quality Assessment where our Engineering team uses API access to understand the state of your current data. At the end of the process, we provide you with a Data Quality Overview like the one below.
We deduplicate and clean up your data to make it easy to search when HiringSolved is fully integrated. We also have job and candidate matching, automated Talent Redeployment, and Diversity Boost. Our goal is to ensure that your team saves time and money by relying less on job advertising and job boards and making the data you already have accessible and usable.
By increasing that data visibility and searchability, HiringSolved allows you to immediately tell a client what number of candidates you already have in your database so you can instantly stand out as a partner who will provide data to back up your decisions and get slates built quickly.
What’s Next?
Ultimately, technology can and should play a significant role in your staffing firm’s process. Still, knowing what you actually need and how you should implement it can feel overwhelming. We’ve been in the industry for over a decade and are happy to chat about your goals and roadblocks. We’d also love to speak with you more about what being a staffing partner means to you.
You can view a quick demo here to see HiringSolved in action.
You can also reach out to us directly using this page. We’ll be happy to set up a more personalized demo experience just for you.