Using business analytics to run your staffing firm more efficiently
Business analytics refers to the use of technologies and applications to investigate data and predict business and employee performance.
Commonly referred to as "metrics", this collection of data holds valuable nuggets of information that, when analyzed and used in a disciplined way, increases an organization's operational efficiency.
Most recruiting and staffing firms have powerful reasons to execute business strategies shaped by analytics. Firms that employ even a basic level of analytic competency outpace competitors in key comparable metrics, and attribute success to an efficient understanding and use of data.
Metrics drive critical business decisions. At your staffing firm, you're very familiar with the role that business analytics plays in strategic decisions regarding employee efficiency, sales pipeline and forecast, candidate placement activity, and profitability. Whether measuring team performance across disparate offices or conducting quarterly forecasts, your job depends on making solid decisions with accurate, timely metrics.
No two recruiting businesses are alike. However, best-in-class staffing firms share common approaches to analytics:
Staffing is a numbers game. You can't measure business performance without first building a predictable, repeatable way to collect data. Identify data requirements critical to metric-building and determine your top ten pieces of baseline data for analysis.
Most firms already capture baseline data from front and back office SaaS and cloud-hosted applications. Systems such as Bullhorn's applicant tracking/customer relationship management software collect great data for free. In addition, collect general industry data such as geographic influences and competitor performance from industry publications, analysts and other sources.
Data requirements will drive the analytics process. Consider ways to slice and dice the data to deliver insight in a way that makes sense for your business. Today's landscape of disparate job candidate sourcing tools and social recruiting sites highlights the need for simple ways to capture daily and weekly organizational data. This goes beyond common staffing/recruiting data such as 'total number of placements'. Deeper data collection includes financial performance, monthly bookings, rookie performance, and regional statistics.
Data quality is crucial to the analytics process. It's imperative to establish a set of best practices to ensure data accuracy, completeness, reliability and relevance.
Maintaining data quality requires an investment in processes and, in some cases, software tools to simplify data import/export. But, despite high automation, people still manually type data in to applicant tracking systems. People periodically mistype, choose incorrect drop-downs, and enter invalid data. Therefore, place importance on software with a clean user interface, clearly labeled choices, and industry-specific features. Conduct quarterly data review to ensure quality.
Once you have the data foundation in place, determine what set of metrics your firm requires. Understand role-specific needs and create an internal checklist to confirm that you can deliver closed-loop metrics in a way that makes sense to your firm's "consumers" of the metrics. Run sample reports to test viability, usefulness and accuracy. First, deliver easy-to-understand metrics, including:
Learn what metrics mean the most to your daily and quarterly leadership of the organization. Collect initial feedback and take action by tweaking the actual metrics and/or the delivery of those metrics. Familiarize yourself with core metrics, use them daily, and expand your knowledge over time. Include your executive staff during this phase of report distribution to encourage acceptance and usage from the top down.
At your staffing firm, your responsibilities naturally extend to executive teams with their own revenue and placement goals. Your reports should show you executive-level snapshots of revenue by division and performance by geography.
Be your firm's metrics advocate. The more you use your metrics, the more your organization will follow. Here are a few suggestions.
First, request a dashboard that calls out the best activities from the prior day/week. This could include a sales win, or a quarterly revenue achievement. When you see a win, email a congratulatory note to the employee and send a note to the company.
One of the best ways to ensure long-term success with metrics is to create a corporate culture that values the use of data to drive critical decisions.
Determine what software tools you use today. Employees are apt to use tools with which they are familiar. Most staffing/recruiting firm employees use an applicant tracking system on a daily basis. Make sure your firm maximizes data collection capabilities from your applicant tracking system.
Understand what type of investment you will make to support data collection and analytics. You may already have internal staff who can execute data collection and analysis. If not, partner with an industry leader such as Bullhorn who can offer an expert Professional Services team to provide guidance, advice, and specific action items.
Conduct a comprehensive one-week assessment of your current recruiting processes, procedures and methodologies. Organize your assessments into the following buckets:
Maintain maximum continuity of operations during the assessment period with as little downtime as possible. Create a basic tool in Microsoft Excel (or similar) that pairs your firm's most important ratios with expected revenue. Discuss analytics with your executive team to understand how minor changes in ratios can increase revenues and company performance.
Bullhorn is the global leader in online staffing and recruiting agency software, providing the only fully integrated applicant tracking and customer relationship management system paired with social recruiting and business development tools. Delivered through Software as a Service (SaaS), Bullhorn is backed by the most compressive roster of cloud-based partner solutions and continues to meet the evolving business and recruitment needs of thousands of firms worldwide, including some of the largest global recruitment agencies.
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