Tom Cooksey
Posted: July 2023
If you run a recruitment business, you probably have a CRM. And if you have a CRM, you probably have access to a fair amount of data relating to active roles, deal size, speed to fill a role and so on.
Much of that is really useful in a front of house sense, or in other words, checking the health of your sales team. What we often see, however, is that candidates then drop into the black hole of ‘compliance and onboarding’. Eventually they pop out the other end in the form of a revenue generating active placement.
Does your onboarding strategy simply generate a positive or negative outcome at the end, or can you ask questions dynamically of it at will?
The challenge with this is that it can make predicting cashflow and by relation, revenue really rather challenging. For example, in the contracting or temp world, how do you know where an individual candidate is in that process? And how can you review whether the onboarding process is efficient, compliant, and cost effective?
What we fundamentally care about is when a candidate is going to start generating revenue. Do you know what stage of the process they’re currently stuck on? Is there an issue with a Visa we hadn’t foreseen? Perhaps a DBS has got some criminal content we weren’t expecting. Or is it simply that the candidate hasn’t started the process yet?
Does your onboarding strategy simply generate a positive or negative outcome at the end, or can you ask questions dynamically of it at will?
With an ever-competitive recruitment landscape, end hirers frequently appoint more than one agency to a given role. This means the ability to quickly spot issues with the onboarding process early and react accordingly is becoming more and more important.
Use onboarding data to improve business performance
Whilst this data can be really useful on an individual basis, its true power in unlocking more business performance lies in the ability to spot trends and identify weak spots. For example, if you calculate that the average time from placement to revenue is four working days, this can help you predict revenue more accurately.
What’s more, the wonderful thing about data is the questions you can ask of it. Let’s take our scenario above. Why is it four days? What does that four days mean to us as a business?
Firstly, any unnecessary delays to onboarding is an opportunity for the candidate to continue with other potential placements, meaning that you could miss out on completing to placement.
Secondly, it’s an opportunity for another agency to place someone else in the role. And thirdly, contract and temp positions often have tight turn arounds and clients will want to see demonstrable experience in delivering fast placements.
Using a data driven and trackable system will help understand where the process typically gets stuck, for how long, and why. This will allow you to unclog the pipe and get those candidates faster into
their roles.
Demonstrating your onboarding performance
Being able to demonstrate performance and report on previous placements, as well as offering a live stream of data to your end clients on their hiring process, is going to be a really powerful in securing future business.
As the recruitment sector becomes more and more regulated, being able to show that you
can be both fully compliant and fast will make you the recruiter of choice.
Wondering how to improve your operational data?
About The Author:
Tom Cooksey
Tom started work as a software engineer for brands such as EA Games, The National Lottery and Sky. He went on to build a successful software consultancy with clients including British Horse Racing Authority and Nationwide Building Society. After exiting he went on to found IR35.io which was acquired by The Kingsbridge Group – Tom now heads up Elements, building on this previous success.
