The Top Recruiting Challenges of 2015: Webinar Recap
On Wednesday, April 29, Bullhorn presented a webinar: “Are You Getting Enough Out of Your Day – Everyday?” hosted by Cindy Elliott (VP, Product & Industry Marketing) and Jeff Neumann (Senior Product Manager, Bullhorn CRM and Bullhorn for Mobile). This post will walk you through key learnings from the webinar, filling you in on important trends in the recruiting industry and the recruiting solutions you’ll need to help your company keep up in a competitive marketplace.
These days, recruiting firms have to deal with a variety of challenges in order to stay competitive in a changing market, including:
Customer and Candidate Engagement
It has recently become clear that “next generation expectations” will no longer allow firms to get by merely having the best or the cheapest services, or by coming through for your client once in a big way. Instead, your customer and candidate engagement depends on the lifetime journey of your relationship with each customer – your company must strive for quick, yet personal interaction with customers, all while maintaining full information accuracy.
There are many companies that do an excellent job of this, companies like American Express, Amazon, LinkedIn, and Delta. Amex’s system in particular goes beyond expectations, proactively preparing for a given customer’s loss of a credit card to the point of seeming clairvoyant, as well as allowing their customers to do all of their recovery process communication with the company through a smartphone.
Bullhorn, also constantly striving to help its users with their customer engagement, recently introduced Pulse, a tool that helps you analyze your relationships with key customers and candidates so that you can engage with them on a whole new level. Pulse accomplishes this by mining inbound and outbound email data, allowing Bullhorn to understand the relationships between people and analyze the relevant data. Pulse translates that data into consumable information, and then presents it through all of the myriad ways you can access Bullhorn – desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Recruiting Operations
Recruiting firms also currently face volume and complexity pressures – with changing work models and a growing workforce, suppliers are being asked to expand their productivity. The pressure is on for firms to provide faster placements for their clients while also maintaining the best possible talent pool with low costs.
Contingent workers are expected to make up 26% of the workforce by 2016 (in 2005, they only made up 10%), but that upward trend intersects with a Millennial struggle. This year, Millennials will make up the majority of the workforce for the first time, but 53% of suppliers say that they find it difficult to find and place Millennial workers. Indeed, 56% of suppliers are concerned that the talent gap (a problem that involves Millennials directly) is going to have a high impact on their ability to meet their clients’ needs.
In a recruiting landscape with a variety of challenges such as these, agencies need to make sure that their recruiters are focused on high-value tasks, not bogged down in manual waste, to stay ahead of the game. Bullhorn’s mobile-first strategy includes an excellent new mobile platform, Bullhorn Mobile, to which every Bullhorn customer has access. Bullhorn Mobile gives recruiters anywhere, anytime access to all the critical capabilities of an applicant tracking system and CRM system. However, Bullhorn doesn’t only accommodate the shift to mobility, but also shifts in responsibility – there can’t be a line in the sand drawn between recruiters and salespeople. The flow of information through the company must be smooth and seamless. As such, the intersection Bullhorn provides between an applicant tracking system and a traditional CRM is imperative for today’s staffing operations, allowing staffing information to flow within the same system and database as customer relationship information.
Sustainable Business Growth
Recruiting firms want their business volume to grow, but they want their profits to increase as well – they don’t want to have to grow their costs at the same rate as their business. So in such a transaction-heavy marketplace, firms need to be able to see where their best business is coming from in order to make sure they’re getting the most productivity out of their salespeople and account managers. For this, recruiters need overwhelming access to data, so that real-time pipeline visibility can lead to higher sales productivity and better retention – there’s no more expensive customer than the one that just left.
An overwhelming amount of data, on its own, is not enough. A lack of business visibility (caused by isolated information silos) is potentially very harmful, blocking leadership from most effectively assigning resources and revenue goals to fit a complete business strategy. Fortunately, Bullhorn has analytics that can help you see inside your business. Over the last 6 months, Bullhorn has had a laser-focused view on analytics, developing dashboard cards and traditional CRM capabilities within the ATS platform. The Bullhorn platform has extensive filtering capabilities, letting you find information on whatever you need – a contact, a lead, an opportunity – filtered by a wide variety of other data, including owner, date, status, reference, source, weighted deal value, and more.