Remember the heyday of job boards, email newsletters and banner advertising? Remember when you used to sign up for a whole year’s contract for your recruitment agency or recruitment team? The run-up to signing that annual deal would be one of the few times you’d speak to your Account Manager, right?! They’d then disappear into a hole and expect that come the next renewal, you’d be dependent enough on them that you’d happily come back for more.
Things have moved on since then and today any provider wishing to retain your business will probably be trying to engage with you on a much more frequent basis. They know it’s in their interests to try and help you get the best possible results from their service each month, otherwise come renewal time they’re going to be in a really weak position.
Our experience of the recruitment technology marketplace is that account managers can be equally evasive. When trying to make the sale, they’re all over you like a rash. But once you’re signed up and are committed, all of a sudden things go quiet! In our view that shouldn’t be the case – and here we share four reasons you’ll benefit from having more regular contact with your account manager:
Want to know what the latest trends are in the recruitment marketplace? Keen to understand the areas of greatest talent shortages? Or perhaps you’d like to understand whether posting to social media is something you should be embracing to bring in additional candidate flow?
The wonderful thing about being partnered with a recruitment technology platform is that you should have an open door to speak with people who are interacting with dozens of recruiters at other organisations day in, day out.
Want to get the inside scoop on what’s really happening in the jobs marketplace? Then your account manager is a very good place to start. At some companies you may find a reluctance to invest time with you discussing these kinds of things, but if you’ve got yourself a great technology partner then it should be second nature that they want to help you and add additional value to the relationship wherever they can. Why not test your account manager today to see how they react?
Your knowledge of using your recruitment technology platform is constrained by the fact that you only have your own highly limited experience and results to call upon. But by regularly speaking to your account manager, you can tap into their wealth of knowledge about how best to use their platform. They may well have the data, or at the very least the qualitative insights, to steer you as to best practices when trying to recruit with their platform.
Without this regular dialogue, you are simply flying blind. Worse still, your results are likely to be weaker than those of competitors who are more proactively engaging and seeking to learn. So reach out to your account manager for these best practice insights today!
Another good reason to be speaking with your account manager is that you always want to know what’s coming next. Recruitment technology is no different to any other technology – it’s always evolving. So it stands to reason that your account manager will potentially have the inside scoop on the types of product enhancements and new functionality that are due to be rolled out to customers over the coming months and years.
Given that many of these changes could have a material impact on i) your recruitment processes, ii) your required resourcing levels and iii) the other technologies you may or may not need to continue investing in, having early sight of such developments can be highly beneficial. But if you’re not talking to your account manager on a regular basis, you miss out on getting the inside scoop about what’s coming next.
Last but not least, you want to be talking to your account manager on a regular basis so that you can pick up on all their tips and tricks for using their technology more efficiently. You may find that there is functionality hidden away that you’d never fully explored, but that could help your team to be far more productive. Or it may be that there are just simple shortcuts you could take to get the job done faster, if only you’d had those pointed out to you.
Linked to this, you will sometimes find that technology providers roll out new features to a set of beta testers: clients who have expressed an interest in having the chance to test out new features before they are fully released to the market. Again, if you are someone who is regularly seeking tips and insights from your account manager, you are far more likely to be someone who’ll be on their radar when they are looking out for people to involve in a new beta test.
Can you see how even one of these reasons could have a material impact on hitting your targets for the coming year? Of course, if your reason for not speaking regularly with your account manager is simply that they’d not want to provide that level of service, then you may just have identified the reason it’s time for you to look at alternative providers…
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 (and we are VERY proactive about helping our customers!).
Click here to arrange a FREE demo or get in touch now on 0800 311 2750.
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