As a recruitment firm, you create, access, and store exploding quantities of data daily. This data has the potential to fuel a new era of fact-based innovation in your businesses, backing up new approaches with solid evidence.
Buoyed by hopes of better performing AEs, lesser time-to-fill, improved job order quality, streamlining operations, and successful sales strategy, recruitment and staffing firms have for the past few years amassed data, invested in business intelligence and data analytics software, and paid handsomely for analytical talent.
Yet for many organizations, a strong, data-driven culture remains elusive, scary, confusing, and data is rarely the universal basis for decision making.
So, why exactly is it so hard to transition to a data-driven environment and what can be done to make it easier?
Before we dive into the specifics, it is important to share that the biggest obstacles to creating data-based businesses aren’t technical; they’re cultural. It is very easy to describe how to introduce data into a decision-making process at an organization. It is much harder to make this normal, even automatic, for employees — that shift in mindset is a daunting challenge.
With that, let us look at the 5 main obstacles that hold recruitment and staffing companies back from making the leap and how to overcome them.
1. The change has to start at the very top
Businesses that make data-driven decisions have managers who set the expectation that strategies must be backed by evidence and that doing so is perfectly normal, not exceptional. This belief and expectation advances downwards and creates a substantial shift.
2. The All-or-nothing Problem
While talking to CEOs of recruiting companies, it often comes as a surprise when they don’t have numbers for the most important metrics but now all of sudden would like to track everything. Not knowing what metrics to track is equal to not knowing what you want your AEs to accomplish. CEOs, sales trainers, and managers must carefully choose the metrics that need to be analyzed so it can help in creating successful sales or hiring strategies.
3. No access to data and we don’t mean the Excel sheets!
This is by far the biggest issue next to the culture shift. Recruitment companies with over $5M annual revenue have a hard time providing access even to the most basic data. If you do not have any data on your team’s activities, you cannot visualize the success or failures of your strategies. For recruitment and staffing companies, the easiest way to gather data automatically is to use an Applicant Tracking System like PCRecruiter and a VoIP service like RingCentral. Remember, data-starved analytics software cannot provide actionable insights. Once you have a clean source of data figured, embrace the transparency and discipline it brings into your workplace and sales team. The automated real-time data analytics and insights help build trust with the data and engagement with your AEs.
4. Expecting an overnight coup
Transition to data-driven is smoother when you create test cases as proof of concept before training your AEs. This is something that works very well in organizations that have over 15 AEs. Rather than rolling the software out to everyone at once, a step by step rollout results in a smoother digital transformation. Start with your sales trainer and your top AEs and gradually move it down the line.
5. You don’t have to be the data scientist.
As technical as a BI tool is, you don’t have to a certified data scientist for it to work. Recruitment firm owners often sweat over how complicated the process of implementing the software could be. Truth is, it is not. You are not the coder and don’t have to be one. All you need is to have #1, #2, and #3 from this list figured out.
Business intelligence and data analytics software for the recruitment and staffing industry helps provide a form of evidence to back up hypotheses, giving managers and AEs the confidence to jump into new territories and processes without jumping in the dark. But simply aspiring to be data-driven is not enough. To be driven by data, businesses need to develop cultures in which this mindset can flourish. CEOs and sales trainers can promote this shift through example, by practicing new habits and creating expectations for what it means to root decisions in data.
If you are a recruitment or staffing company contemplating the transition to a data-driven environment, contact us today for a consultation. Spotlight Data is the only 100% customizable business intelligence and data analytics software for the recruitment industry. Contact us for a free personalized demo today.