Automation for Recruitment Managers: WIIFM? by Barclay Jones

Blog Content

Automation can be about data health, email marketing, candidate and client care, and "de-administration" of recruitment. But often, the focus is on individual processes, or people (candidates, clients, colleagues), and not on the recruitment business itself.

Hence, I want to explore things from a recruitment leaders "selfish" perspective - the "WIIFM" - what's in it for me?

Or rather, what's in it for managers?

Automation ROI

As part of the over 400 automation projects we've delivered, where we train, coach, and do hands-on automation building, we're often asked about ROI - return on investment.

There's focus on leads, sales, re-generating candidates, increasing website visits, reduced costs elsewhere (eg. LinkedIn / Job boards). We're also asked about how automation can "do more" and give our clients the edge over their competition and help them get ready for AI, and how it can help them run their businesses.

3 Ways Automation Can Help Recruitment Leaders

1. Create Focus on Revenue-Generative Tasks

With so much data, and countless systems and processes, you'll often need to rely on the organisational capabilities, will, and skill, of your recruiters and resourcers. On a crazy-busy day, or a tough market, and with perhaps inexperienced recruiters, that may be too much to ask.

Hence leaders - use automation to focus your recruiters and resourcers on the things that matter. For example:

Who to call and when.
Proactively managing accounts before they become "at risk".
Lead conversion.
Driving the job management process and not leaving it to the candidate and client to "mess it up".
Generating referrals from newly placed candidates, and newly invoiced clients.

2. Tracking / Managing / Escalating Poor Performance / Activity

Sometimes, recruiters can focus on the wrong activities, drown in "admin", or waste time on external systems, and recruitment process becomes too busy to be effective. Or perhaps they just lack experience to proactively manage their pipelines.

Also, with WFH and hybrid, activity can be difficult to see / measure.

Hence, leaders ask us to help build automations to track activity, drive performance. For example:

Ensuring jobs are being proactively managed and notify management of the ones that are being forgotten.
Tracking who is engaging with your brand, visiting your website and opening your emails.
Understanding loyalty of your candidates and sales contacts.
Removing irrelevant data that you no longer work with, which can slow your recruiters sourcing process.

3. Navigating / Mitigating Leavers

Recruiters leaving can often be distracting, time consuming, and risky - and it can often be a sucker punch!

Hence leaders can use automation to "shift" data, clients, candidates, relationships, and pipeline to other recruiters. Data and pipelines are managed and current relationships are secured. For example:

Reassigning placements to another recruiter or desk to continue nurturing.
Identifying and re-assigning high value, active and engaged sales contacts to a new or existing team member.
Closing old and inactive jobs to ensure you have an accurate view of your current pipeline.

Automation - What's in it for Managers?

For those of you with automation - how are you using it to drive your business?

For those of you without automation, take a moment to consider how the 3 use cases above could help you navigate the next 30/60/90 days and beyond, and help you strengthen your data, people, pipelines, and business.