6 Tips to Maximize Recruitment Productivity

Recruitment productivity is the state or quality of producing recruiting or staffing outcomes.

Productivity outcomes at staffing and recruiting firms usually follow the funnel.

• Placements per month
• Calls per day
• Time-to-fill
• Margins
• Source of Starts

You know the drill.

The thing is, anyone can be “productive,” but that doesn’t always mean their productivity is beneficial or driving results. Employees may have a different definition of productivity than the leadership team of their company.

When it comes to recruiting, what does true recruitment productivity look like in your company? Is it a specific number of candidates sourced? A certain number of jobs filled each month? Is it a percentage of time spent on nurturing relationships with candidates and clients? Revenue?

It’s likely not just one thing, but a series of activities and initiatives that lead you to your individual and company goals.

Now ask yourself, if you already know what productivity looks like from your recruitment team, how productive is your company when it comes to your top level business goals? Is all that effort adding up?

One of the biggest productivity-inhibitors in the recruitment industry is manual task management. We recently discussed in a post that the average recruiter can spend up to 8 hours per week on manual candidate tracking tasks.

Are these tasks necessary? Of course! But do they need to be completed manually by a recruiter every day? Absolutely not.

Recruiters are there to recruit and hire, not spend their time at a desk on administrative duties.

What are some of the biggest manual #timetaking tasks?

• Resume screening
• Responding to applications
• Aggregating and segmenting candidate information from applicant forms and resumes
• Posting vacancies to (so many) job boards
• Searching across all of your job boards
• Maintaining a centralized inbox of applicant responses
• Making reference requests
• Creating candidate records and updating skills
• And a bunch more

Investing in an automated candidate tracking system can save hours of time per recruiter so that they can invest their time building relationships with candidates and clients, and closing deals.

Using Tracker, all of the above functions (and a bunch more) can be automated in a few simple clicks. Give back time to your recruitment team while ensuring you have the most accurate and up-to-date information for successful placements.

While candidate tracking automation will save your team hours of time each week, it’s not the end-all-be-all for increased productivity within your team. There are other factors that can contribute to productivity.

Here are 6 tips on how to maximize productivity of recruiting efforts:

1. Onboard & Build Recruiters

Similar to what we mentioned above, if expectations and responsibilities aren’t clearly defined upfront, it’s difficult for employees to feel they are a valued team member and contributing to the company. Invest in comprehensive onboarding of all new staff within their first 90 days and you’ll see a boost in productivity and morale.

This also ties into training, creating a company culture for retention, and establishing effective (and followable) processes.

Tracker also helps you streamline these recruitment processes to help recruiters take the guess work out of what-to-do-next.

2. Incentivize Effectively

Avoid recruiters spending time on meaningless tasks by making sure you are incentivizing the right activities.

Placements or starts are an obvious commission opportunity, but some new recruiters will be lost on how to get there.

Be sure your recruitment management team is focusing on the metrics that matter. 100 calls a day can work, but could that time be spent being more strategic?

The Times They Are a Changin’, and that means your business model may have to as well.

What is the ultimate goal? And, how do you really get there?

3. Empower Your Recruiters

There’s nothing more satisfying to an employee than knowing they are trusted to make the right decisions on their own. Empowering your recruiters to make front-line decisions not only increases their job satisfaction, but also their productivity by avoiding the middle-man conversation for approvals and the constant pressure from feeling like they are micromanaged.

But, how can you empower while still ensuring they are making good decisions for the company?

In addition to proper training and support, see #1 ☝️  above, we also recommend using the MANDACT approach.

Money: Do they have the money to spend with you?
Authority: Do they have the authority to make decisions?
Need: Do they really need your service?
Decision criteria: What are they looking at to reach a decision?
Ability to deliver: Do we have the ability to deliver?
Competition: Are they looking at your competitors?
Timing: When are they looking to evaluate their preferred provider agreements?

We also highly recommend including these rankings in your ATS/CRM in candidate and client lead records to enable better future sourcing and sales efforts. ????

4. Create Unity

One company, one team.

This is likely what we are all striving for, but what if your recruiters are feeling isolated and in a silo because of lack of information and resources to fulfill their responsibilities? A strong company culture of win-win is important for morale and productivity.

To create that, transparency also needs to occur. Using a candidate tracking system like Tracker can support a whole-team approach to resources, data, reports, and more to create streamlined and accurate information quickly.

Working as a team, in one system, promotes morale and increases productivity.

While it may take time, investing in your employees will result in direct investment in your culture. Putting your employees’ strengths and goals at the forefront of culture-development will ultimately allow you to build an organization that truly exemplifies a purpose-driven mission.

5. Mobile is a Must

We live in an out-of-pocket world these days.

How often do you check email and news on your phone versus logging onto your desktop? Having instant access to vital candidate and job information is a must to compete in the recruitment industry.

Mobile integration for on-the-go business has become required and if your recruiters don’t have access to what they need when they need it, they can’t do their job. Using Tracker, recruiters have quick and easy access to everything they would on their laptop or desktop, avoiding missed opportunities and increasing profitable productivity.

6. Create Simple Visual Reports

How are you currently tracking recruiter performance? How are your recruiters receiving that information? Verbally, spreadsheet, other?

Most people are visual learners and thrive being able to see results in an easy-to-read format, like charts and graphs.

Visual reporting enhances productivity and can become a key motivator for recruiters as data can be quickly and easily analyzed.

Analytics are vital to knowing where you’ve been, where you currently are, and where you want to go. A study found that high-performing sales teams heavily rely (57%) on analytics.

Our candidate and applicant tracking system quickly creates visual performance and analytic reports based on any data within your Tracker platform. Reports provide you with information on how to support your staff and shorten meetings all while giving your team clarity on where they get to focus.

How Tracker Enables Recruiters, Leadership, and Productivity

Tracker helps recruiting and staffing firms build better processes, workflows, and revenue. Over the last 15+ years, we have developed Tracker into a leading cloud-based Recruitment, Applicant Tracking and CRM Software provider serving staffing and recruiting firms across the globe.

Contact us today to receive a free demo of our productivity-boosting features.