In order to find and retain great employees, the Great Reevaluation has brought about a renewed focus on hiring practices. Staffing and recruiting agencies must now embrace new methods, techniques, and technologies to remain successful and avoid losing candidates to competitors. With more than 10 million open job positions to be filled in the United States, internal hiring managers, and staffing and recruiting agencies have significant challenges to overcome to meet these new demands.
Staffing and recruiting agencies are intensely working to exceed new and rising candidate expectations, including an increased commitment to work-life balance, remote work opportunities, employer transparency, and a work environment that utilizes current technologies. The table has turned, and employers are now being interviewed as meticulously as the candidates themselves.
To add to the strain, many recruiting and staffing professionals are battling heavier workloads while utilizing outdated and clunky technology stacks themselves. Their tech infrastructures, even under a single brand name, are often patched together, requiring them to juggle between dozens of browser windows, significantly slowing down their recruitment processes and delaying their communication with potential candidates.
There is only one way for recruiters to level the playing field. The clear answer is for them to invest in software whose core application tracking system (ATS) serves as a purpose-built toolset and simultaneously provides deep, native integrations. This type of talent platform still enables best-of-breed point solutions through a robust open application programming interface (API) creating seamless transitions and data flow from one process or step to the next.
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A recruiting CRM can act as an Iron Man suit for recruiters in high-touch, high-volume sourcing and recruiting. Of course, automation of sourcing and initial candidate engagement is not a complete substitute for the human touch of a recruiter. But it gives them tools to scale themselves, manage expectations from shoulder-tap to placement and keep candidates engaged throughout.
However, in today’s hyper-competitive environment, tech efficiency needs to go beyond recruiting and extend to the onboarding process. When a candidate accepts a position, numerous forms must be completed. Paperwork such as I9s, background checks, drug screenings, and more can slow the onboarding process to a snail’s pace — at the risk of losing quality talent. On the flip side, flexible onboarding automation and streamlined compliance management can help directly simplify and deliver easy-to-complete forms to candidates the moment they’re required, saving recruiters from busy work.
Another challenge facing recruiters and staffing agencies is how to retain the talent they have already secured. For staffing, in particular, the fastest way to lose talent is not to not have the next opportunity ready for a contract employee when their current assignment ends. The solution is to keep the job opportunity pipeline full and not lag between assignments. Technology can be a massive assist to recruiters and account managers, from setting reminders for assignment expiration to scheduling and deployment, so workers stay gainfully employed and your talent pipeline remains full.
These solutions will foster a more efficient and productive process for both the candidate and the recruiter. Companies can automate away tasks and processes that don’t replace the human touch but instead increase a recruiter’s ability to focus more intentionally to find and secure exceptional talent and match them with the perfect role.