When looking for ways to grow their company, business leaders will look for ways to expand without over stretching resources. Increasing headcount of a company’s workforce is rarely the solution that is sought after as labor costs can be responsible for up to 70% of a company’s expenses. Most will prioritise finding clever, strategic tech solutions to increase growth rate.
Sales have more than doubled within the staffing and recruiting industry since 2009. If you haven’t seen this upward trend in your business, read on to find out how you can achieve this growth.
Achieving business growth
BusinessDictionary.com defines business growth as “The process of improving some measure of an enterprise’s success. Business growth is achieved by improving the top line or revenue of the business through product sales or service income, or by increasing the bottom line or profitability of the operation through cost reductions.”
In other words, you must do one or all of the following:
- Increase revenue
- Improve market share
- Reduce costs
In short, to achieve significant growth you need to increase your sales with the same resources or perhaps even less. This can be achieved with technology, or more specifically, automation.
Imagine if you could double or even triple the output of each recruiter on your team while keeping a manageable workload and increasing workplace satisfaction?
How can technology increase revenue?
In Bullhorn’s 2019 Recruitment Trends, which surveyed over 900 staffing & recruitment professionals, 57% claimed that they would be spending more on technology to achieve growth. Artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, data analytics are some of the technological solutions that are bringing improvements to the recruitment process in many firms. So, how can these types of technology increase the bottomline and generate growth?
Process Automation
The HR and recruiting industries are lagging behind when it comes to digital transformation compared to other industries. This is unfortunate as recruiting firms deal with many manual administrative tasks that take up significant time across all verticals. Automating these processes allows recruiters to spend more time on tasks that will directly impact targets.
Optimising data for analytics
A wealth of data passes through recruiting firms and HR departments. However, often this is failed to be used in any actionable way. Investing in solutions to clean, extract, and store useful data can help business leaders to recognise important trends, predict future scenarios and identify successful revenue opportunities. For example, transforming static CV data and interrogating a library of this data can allow firms to identify and predict skill and talent trends to inform pipeline growth.
AI-assisted decision making
Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to help recruiters make decisions where sometimes human error may get in the way. When selecting candidates for shortlisting, recruiters must be hyper-aware of not choosing based on subconscious biases. Unfortunately, the ‘subconscious’ nature of such biases make this difficult to avoid, particularly under time-pressure. AI solutions can be used to help remove bias from the selection process and ensure that recruiters don’t overlook any key skills hidden in the body of a CV. For example, AI can be used to reformat candidates’ CVs into a standardised format, removing any gender-related words, and highlighting key skills and competencies in a prominent position. This will ensure a better result for both the candidate and client, increasing the chances of positive referrals.
Which technology is best?
Deciding to purchase a tech solution for your business can be stressful. One way to alleviate any fears is to make sure your solution can fit easily into your business. Have an open and honest conversation with your stakeholders and consider a few key points:
- Can the solution fit easily in with your current process?
- Is there significant training or integration costs involved?
- Is it easy to use?
- Will you have access to customer support?
- Will it save you time?
Most of all, if you can find a tech partner who is supportive and understands the needs of the recruitment industry, you’re onto a winner. Ultimately, automation technology is helping recruitment agencies to ramp up sales, eliminate heavy manual workloads, and speed up and improve the recruitment process.