How integrated solutions are the key to success in recruitment and beyond

One of the biggest transformations in business over the last few years has been the rapid advance in technology platforms being able to “talk to one another”. As business owners, we used to be on the lookout for the very best solutions to help address the top challenges – and exploit the biggest opportunities – in our respective businesses.

The problem, just a few years ago, was that none of these solutions were able to interact with one another. So you might have invested in the very best CRM system in the market, but it would then nonetheless be a manual job to export data from that system into the programs that other departments in the business had come to rely upon.

Fast forward to today and things have totally changed and APIs are more commonplace. Let’s think of just a couple of examples to illustrate the point.

Finance has been transformed

Within Finance departments, the millstone of processing expenses claims has always been a massive time drain – and indeed a morale drain too! During the last years, apps emerged to help individual team members scan and log their expenses claims, reducing the burden significantly. But to extract the full benefit of these productivity gains, what’s needed is for that technology to integrate seamlessly with the other tools used within the business – most notably the company’s accounting package.

Today that nirvana has been achieved. Companies such as Receipt Bank have fulfilled every Finance Manager’s dreams, integrating with all the mainstream accounting packages on the market. What that means is that Finance departments have far more up-to-date data, achieved in spite of a greatly reduced workload – and a business whose staff morale isn’t endlessly being sapped by the monotony of filling out expenses forms. Sounds almost too good to be true doesn’t it?!

Sales has been transformed too

Yet these advances aren’t limited to Finance, far from it. If we look at sales tools, we see the same kind of integrations transforming the workflows of sales teams. Take Spiro for example, an artificial-intelligence powered CRM system that natively integrates with Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, and Gmail for Business. It simultaneously pulls in email logs, calendar data and a contact’s social media profile information so that the salesperson has at their fingertips all the information they need to talk to a prospect. It also supports one-click dialing from within Spiro and allows salespeople to send, receive and log SMS messages all from one dashboard. Where previously salespeople would have had multiple disjointed tools to cross-reference, today they all talk to one another and dramatically increase the salesperson’s productivity and effectiveness as a result.

Take a closer look and you’ll see that with tools like Spiro, the possibilities are ramped up further through Zapier integrations. This is a close parallel to what idibu does with Zapier in the Recruitment sector. By utilising the latest webhook technology and Zapier integrations, you can push your data into over 1000 applications – from Google Sheets to machine learning analytics, and any other applications that form a part of your business.

Recruitment is ready to be transformed too

Of course, integrated solutions like this are of greatest benefit in the parts of a business where administrative costs are high and where numerous tools have to be used to do the job well. It’s hard to think of a function where that holds true more than it does in Recruitment. Just think of all the different tools teams have historically used – and how bad they’ve historically been at talking to one another! Which is why good integrations are so important to achieve seamless, frictionless processes across a recruitment team and unlock these productivity gains and cost savings.

Now whilst recruitment is sometimes derided for being slow to adapt, what we are likely to see over the coming years is quite the opposite.

The scope to reduce the administrative burden, achieve faster time to hire, reduce costs and improve ROI will mean that early adopters gain a major competitive advantage – and that will be the catalyst for others in the industry to get on board. Our own integration with Bullhorn, together with our Zapier integrations, mean we are able to post job listings on job-boards, across social media and onto company websites and job aggregators (like Indeed and Google For Jobs) – whilst then pushing custom, searchable applicant data back into your recruitment CRM to progress candidates through your recruitment workflow.

Perhaps the only thing holding the recruitment sector back is the speed at which the existing technology incumbents rise to the challenge of building these integrations into their offering. But then recruitment businesses are built on databases – and that data is portable. So if your current supplier can’t provide the solutions you need to thrive, just look around. More innovative companies are out there!

idibu provides intelligent candidate acquisition to hundreds of recruitment businesses of all sizes as well as analysis of activity and hiring funnels to greatly improve ROI and performance. Click here to arrange a FREE demo or get in touch now on 0800 311 2750.