As we enter 2023, there’s increasing pressure for recruiters and staffing agencies to find top talent and deliver a positive return on investment (ROI).
Many companies are looking to hire talent, and it’s becoming increasingly important to turn to advertising to supplement the candidate flow. To stand out from other employers, staffing agencies need to ensure the right talent is seeing their jobs, which means they need to understand how their money is performing.
One huge aspect to consider is ensuring that the agency has the right tools to keep their pipeline of candidates full. With competition for candidates remaining at record highs, looking into new ways to increase efficiency is a trend going into the new year.
Read on to learn more about how staffing agencies can set themselves up for success and why turning to automation can help.
What are the Benefits of Automation?
Staffing automation technology can help increase productivity, improve the quality of hires, improve the candidate experience, and reduce hiring time. With this, staffing agencies can improve their operation and create a structure of momentum, growth, and improvement.
Automating Job Advertising
One area recruiters and staffing agencies should focus on is programmatic job advertising. This is one of the best ways to use automation in recruitment. By automating job advertisements, companies can target their ideal candidates, save money on ads, and help improve their ROI.
Optimizing Programmatic Job Advertising
Programmatic job advertising allows companies to focus their budget on positions that need the most support while limiting spending on positions producing results. Most importantly, this prevents wasted spend, which can lead to more applications and placements. This can help support the staffing agency to increase gross margin.
Programmatic advertising is all about optimizing spend. Companies can build campaigns around their highest priority job types and put in applicant spend caps to spread traffic out to different roles. This allows efficiency in the best way to spend the budget.
Tip: It’s always recommended that agencies run programmatic job ads on Indeed, ZipRecruiter, paid search, and social advertising (which is a great way to generate awareness). But companies might want to spend more on social media, where they can specifically target people who are searching for certain companies – ensuring they tap into active and passive audiences.
Knowing the Data
With recruitment optimizations, it’s all about how much companies bid on each click or how much is being paid for applications. They’re working to consistently increase or decrease application flow, which can be automated through programmatic strategies (like mentioned above).
To do this, companies need to have robust data. Data allows companies to see how campaigns are performing and what type of ROI they’re receiving on spend. If staffing agencies are not tracking their data, they’re not understanding how their investments are performing. Without numbers to showcase this, recruiters are left guessing about their efforts – which doesn’t lead to a sound recruiting plan.
Having visibility on data also allows companies to stop spending once they hit a certain amount, or when they hit a certain amount of applies. Once the apply goal is hit, the budget can be fed to roles or other advertising that needs it.
Tip: Data is a huge aspect of figuring out what recruiters are missing and figuring out what they need. The first piece of the puzzle is to audit the data, see what is missing, what is being tracked, what they’d like to see, and then recruiters can build a plan from there.
End-To-End Analytics
One way to understand the data is with end-to-end analytics. E2E allows recruiters to have a more holistic view of their recruitment marketing efforts – which enables them access to actionable insights from the data they’re processing.
Combining data-driven evidence from end-to-end analytics and anecdotal evidence from candidates, staffing agencies can develop better sourcing outreach and recruitment advertising – backed by targeted spend.
Know the Hiring Goals
It’s crucial to know the staffing agency’s hiring goals. If recruiters don’t have a clear vision of what they’re working towards and if they’re hitting hiring goals, they can lose focus or not know what is needed to accomplish them.
Staffing agencies need to audit their supply and demand, which can help fill openings and increase revenues. Understanding the supply and demand at the agency is a huge step in planning automation campaigns as well.
As mentioned above, a big piece to all of this is for agencies to tie apply data back to internal structure for openings. It’s helpful to understand how many applies the agency actually needs to source, and what campaigns and spend need to be in place to hit those goals. This means knowing, at any given time, how many openings they need to fill around the country and what needs are anticipated in the funnel. That way, campaigns and strategies can be built around those needs.
Tip: It’s a great idea to partner with a platform that can understand and provide the data. That way, staffing agencies can make the best decisions when it comes to building automation campaigns.
Know the Pipeline
Staffing agencies should audit what is needed in the pipeline to know where the openings are. It’s helpful to understand how many applications are actually needed for the roles, since eliminating overspend is essentially the key to optimization.
Ideally, companies should only be paying for as many applications as they need, since spending the budget on unnecessary clicks and applies is not wise. Here, it’s helpful to know exactly how many applications (on average) it takes for recruiters to make a placement. Doing so allows recruiters to utilize their budget more efficiently, ensuring that jobs get the number of applications that are actually needed to make placements – not a single application more.
To do this, companies should seek to find a happy balance. If recruiters don’t have enough applicants, they won’t fill their positions. On the other hand, if they drive too many applicants, they will fill the position, but now they’ll have a bunch of candidates that can’t be placed – spending more money than necessary to acquire the needed talent. This can lead to a bad candidate experience, which might deter candidates from working with the agency in the future – since they weren’t placed the first time.
Talk to the Recruiters
Many recruiters have a network of candidates at the ready, since many focus on networking. Through networking, recruiters can tap into a qualified talent pool, in turn shortening the time to hire. Knowing the pipeline is part of the process, and partnering it with the talent pool from recruiters is the second half. Why source talent from automation if recruiters might have talent in their network?
Combine the talent pool from recruiters with the talent obtained through automation, and the recruiter’s hiring strategy is taken to the next level.
Partner with a Platform
Automation helps staffing agencies get the results they want, but it’s essential to know where they stand before implementing strategies. If recruiters are looking for guidance on understanding their goals and adjusting automation rules, finding additional support is helpful. Partnering with a platform helps recruiters get additional support, resources, and knowledge to help activate channels and implement best practices. This can help recruiters gain strategic support and get invaluable help to maximize results.
Tip: A partner like Recruitics can help staffing agencies fill in the gaps; agencies know the hiring goals, Recruitics can provide the data to build rules and strategies around to help the flywheel move on.
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If you’d like to learn more about automation or how to implement it in your recruiting strategies, Recruitics can help!
