How to evaluate the software for staffing agencies

Recruiting is a constantly evolving art. In the 1990s the most important tools for running a recruitment business were fax machines and newspapers. In the early 2000s, job boards and landlines became a necessity to run a recruitment desk. From 2010 onwards, Social media, Cloud-based CRMs and apps like WhatsApp, Skype, became fairly popular tools for recruiting. With new tools emerging and becoming mainstream in every decade, the art of recruiting has constantly matured.

However, the basics of recruitment remain the same, a recruiter would continue to be successful if they follow the 4 classic principles of recruiting:

• Ask intelligent questions from your candidates and clients
• Continue to expand your network by reaching out to as many potential candidates and clients. Nurture as many relationships as possible in your market
• Have the ability to track data and reuse it later
• Continue to have an approachable demeanour and be a good listener

While the basics haven’t changed, new tools of the trade have emerged. Recruiting Technology as an industry has been growing at more than 11% YoY and is on the course of becoming a USD 3 bn industry by 2025. With 100s of technology products now being at the disposal and billions of dollars of investment going in. It’s now very important to look at the ROI of every dollar invested. ROI doesn’t have to be a financial return all the time. It encompasses all of the time, energy, labour, sunk cost, and yes, financial contributions that go into finding great talent.

Below are the ways to track and maximise your ROI from Recruiting Technology:

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Invest in tools that don’t require selling to your top performers:

Any technology that you invest in, by and large, should have approval from your top-performing recruiters. In this competitive environment, recruiters that continue to deliver each quarter are doing something right. They should see themselves as an evangelist for any technology that you bring into your business. Empower them to ask you the right questions on how this new technology will make them more efficient or not. Such internal buy-in from your top performers would not only create less friction at the time of usage but also motivate other team members to embrace the new technology.

Products like Longlist.io, SourceBreaker and Hiretual are focused on increasing the top of the funnel for recruiters and gives them the opportunity to speak to more potential candidates and clients. It doesn’t increase any burden of admin work, tracking and recording on the recruiters. Such products show high adoption numbers from top performers than other products where the impact on deals is not very direct.

Adoption from top performers would make others curious about the new products and would make adoption easier for everyone
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Evaluate each tool on the basis of tangible outcomes:

As a business owner, we should try to find a way to quantify the ROI of every product that we are utilising. You could use a similar table worksheet to measure the impact of each investment:

Besides the ROI in terms of ease of use, time saved, increasing input metrics, we could calculate the financial ROI by using the formula: Value of total deals from a particular source/ Investment made in that particular source. For Example: In the case of the Job Board, it can be measured by looking at the source of placements made from candidates added via Monster/ Investment made in the Monster subscription

Such calculations also suggest whether candidates that were uploaded in the CRM sometime ago are easily findable, reachable or not.

The above can be tracked every quarter and compared with other options that you have tried. It is important to be fluid in your approach and not have purchase debts in dragging products that don’t deliver.

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Try to get a trial for as many users as possible before committing to long term:

This sounds very obvious but often gets missed out. When you are investing in efficiency based products it is imperative that you take buy-in from every user in your team. Enable every individual to sign up for free trials and commit for a short term before you invest in any product. CEO of KnownFour (a fast-growing UK based recruitment business), Annil explained how even with products like Lusha that have a straightforward value add for recruiters has seen huge contrast in the adoption rate by their users. While some users in their team would finish their monthly credit in 7 days, while others would leave them unused. The reason behind that could be that every recruiter might not feel comfortable writing email every day despite having the availability of the data.

According to Harvard Business Review, 9/10 products that are bought by the companies never get used because the potential users didn’t vouch for it. Every user should go through the phase of discovering, testing and finally buying the product that works best for them.

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