How do you ensure that your recruitment business is operating with precision tools rather than blunt instruments?
Or put more acutely, how confident are you that your recruitment team isn’t fundamentally disadvantaged in the market because you’ve bought into the wrong tools for the job?
Recent technological advances mean this is both a lesser and a greater problem than ever before. Sounds contradictory, right? In fact, both are true – and understanding why may be a key to your business success in the coming years.
Regular readers will recall that in a recent blog, we explained “How integrated solutions are the key to success in recruitment and beyond”. We highlighted that the ways different technologies can now “talk to one another” has opened up the potential for huge productivity gains – in everything from Finance to Sales to Recruitment functions.
In a labour-intensive sector such as recruitment, this is clearly one key reason to embrace the emergence of APIs and integrated solutions. But just as important is the flexibility this gives recruitment business owners to adapt their businesses and ensure they are always utilising the very best technologies for the job.
So, back to that contradiction.
Before the emergence of APIs and integrated solutions, business owners were in the unenviable position of trying to determine the best overall solutions for their businesses. Technologies would typically try to perform a wide range of essential recruitment functions and be the “one stop shop” for a recruitment business’ needs.
The problem with this was twofold. Firstly, once invested into a solution, it was very costly for a recruitment business to ever switch technology provider. You only need think of all the companies who’ve remained locked in to an inferior CRM/ATS to appreciate the scale of the problem here. But secondly, the “one stop shop” approach invariably involved compromise. A technology that’s best-in-class for one piece of functionality is unlikely to be best-in-class for them all. And so recruitment business owners had faced the thankless task of choosing a provider that ticked all their boxes to an acceptable degree, whilst tolerating that that meant they’d have to live with the deficiencies that that entails.
The good news today – and the reason this is less of a problem than before – is that APIs mean different technologies increasingly interface with one another. So it’s no longer the case that a business owner has to choose just one solution to serve all their needs. Instead, they can choose different providers for different bits of functionality and then have them all interact with one another so that the recruitment team have a complete solution made up of many parts.
This makes the problem of having invested in the wrong technology far less of a concern, because the time investment to switch is far lower – and each provider is a smaller cog in the wheels of a successful recruitment business.
To give you a sense of what’s happening here, partnerships between tech companies are becoming truly collaborative in their drive to add value to the customer experience. So, for example, idibu actively talks to partners such as Bullhorn and Daxtra – with the goal of ensuring that, rather than being burdened with a software that is a jack of all trades and master of none, customers have software that is a master of all trades within each line of business.
The advantages of doing this for the tech companies are that they are able to strengthen their offering by breaking down the walls between each line of business and take the time to really understand each partnership, what they offer and how this can benefit their customers, helping each other to grow. For recruitment businesses, the upside is that the potential to find the ideal technologies for your business is now truly there.
To return to the contradiction, though, this also explains why technological advances have made choosing the right technology a greater challenge than ever before. In days gone by, once the decision had been taken to invest in a particular technology provider, the next years would simply see the recruitment business get on with using that technology and adapting to its limitations. Whereas today, there’s a constantly-evolving array of suppliers providing a massive range of recruitment technologies – all of which are battling to stay ahead of the curve as the leading provider for the particular recruitment functionality that they provide. Knowing that you’re paying a competitive price for all your various technologies is also made more complicated by this evolution in the market.
What that means in practice is that recruitment business owners now have to pay greater ongoing attention to developments in recruitment technologies, in order to ensure that the team are working with the very best tools and not at a competitive disadvantage when compared to other agencies in their niche. The contradiction actually makes sense – recent technological advances mean this is both a lesser and a greater problem than ever before. Arguably the challenge facing recruitment business owners is every bit as difficult as it ever was though! If you haven’t done so for a while, take a look around the market and make sure you’re not missing out on the opportunity to really get the best solution for your business.
idibu is next-gen candidate attraction software designed to maximise your recruitment CRM. Click here to arrange a free demo or get in touch now on 0800 311 2750.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our blog and keep your eyes peeled for joint blogs and podcasts with some of our partners where we will be discussing how this approach can add tremendous value to recruiters.
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