It’s common knowledge among staffing professionals that every step in their staffing business should be consolidated and automated. The benefits are intuitive – companies can save money by retiring redundant systems and upgrading to the latest staffing software. Staff will become more efficient and departments can truncate the hiring process, thereby saving more money.
Sounds easy, right? Not exactly. How many of us were able to successfully automate and consolidate?
Automation of any kind is inherently complex work. Despite the fact that it ultimately minimizes manual steps, up-front human input is necessary in order to define the process being automated.
Take the critical role of souring for example. Sourcing is the cornerstone of any effective hiring process – it is, after all, the pool from which qualified candidates are drawn. And this process is comprised of multiple, smaller sub-processes, all of which may be handled differently.
Recruiter A may source from partner temp agencies, while Recruiter B may opt for online resources like Monster.com. Then there’s the exploding world of social networking: Facebook and LinkedIn, among other sites, that provide tremendous sourcing potential.
Add to the equation the fact that recruiters may reach out to candidates in different ways and across different channels (e.g. email, call, text) and may track these conversations differently, and you see how complicated just this one single process can be.
Ultimately, this example serves to underscore not only the importance of a consolidated, end-to-end staffing software or a recruiting software solution, but also the need for effectively being able to map your business process. And that mapping is not necessarily for how you conduct business today, but how you want to conduct it in the future.
Can you clearly define your current business process? More importantly, can you clearly define how you want your business process to look in the future? New software can help support your business process, but do you want it to support your same, possibly inefficient, one? You should be able to clearly understand how all software will be integrated and the process within that software.
The criteria you use in choosing software should include how well that software company can assist you in creating an improved, efficient and money-saving process and how well their software can support it. Otherwise you will be automating your current process and may discover little improvement. Make sure that the software company has an overall holistic approach to understanding how you operate your business.
