Digital technology is unlocking unprecedented opportunities for growth in the staffing
industry. New technologies are disrupting the staffing world at a faster than ever
before pace, offering staffing companies the potential to attract both, their clients and
their candidates, through customized and innovative experiences.
Strengthening the technology function and bringing in more capabilities for their sales
and recruiting teams is a top priority for senior executives at most staffing companies.
Many are empowering their teams with an extensive technology stack. While selecting
the right technologies that suit the organization’s culture is critical, it’s even more important to
ensure that their sales and recruiting teams are fully leveraging their tech stack.
Fulfilling this mandate, however, can be a challenge.
Below are five approaches that can help senior leaders get the most out of their
technology spend. Applying these to specific components within the staffing lifecycle
while keeping the bigger picture in mind, can help bring significant improvements with
the tech stack ROI.
1. Tech Stack Strategy
Often a typical staffing company’s wish list of technology investments exceeds its technology budget. Senior leadership must, therefore, focus on prioritizing high-value investments by identifying the areas where tech transformation will bring maximum efficiencies.
The tech stack goal should be to streamline operations such that their sales and recruiting teams can have more time to focus on the tasks that need human expertise. To achieve this, the selection, implementation, integration, and adoption of new and existing technologies must be closely tied to the organization’s four cornerstones: people, architecture, process, and culture.
2. Business Intelligence
Senior leadership must constantly question how they track and maximize the value produced by their various technology investments. Most staffing companies subscribe to a variety of SaaS-based tools to bring efficiencies in their sales and recruiting workflows. It is important to establish ROI analysis that:
- Measures the payback and returns from the various technology investments via
operational, directional, and analytical report dashboards that give senior
stakeholders a clear and concise picture of the strengths and weaknesses of their
tech stack utilization.
- Indicates the need for a reallocation of spend to newer, promising technologies that will give the organization a competitive edge.
3. Employee Innovation
While technology advances are helping bring significant improvements in productivity and efficiencies, Staffing will always remain a people business. Hence, successful staffing companies are the ones who actively mine and manage the collective wisdom and experiences of their sales and recruiting team members by promoting a culture of innovation.
Organizations that encourage their sales and recruiting team members to share their knowledge, experience, skills, suggestions, and recommendations, can set the right priorities and better utilize their technology stack. Leveraging proven frameworks and methodologies like Design Thinking and applying them to specific routines and workflows within the staffing lifecycle help bring innovative techniques that drive business goals.
4. Collaboration
When staffing companies make simple organization changes that specifically promote seamless collaboration between their various functions (sales, recruiting, HR, finance) and have the business users and tech teams working side by side, they can help spark new ideas and broaden perspectives. Alignment between the technology teams and business teams with regards to goals, purpose, vision, and best practices of their staffing routines and workflows results in improved utilization, optimization, and adoption of the various technologies that they subscribe to.
As more and more staffing organizations are opting for cloud-based applications, AI techniques such as machine learning, natural language processing, chatbots, and virtual engagement tools, there is a higher need for people-centric approaches to their digital transformation initiatives.
5. End-User Empathy
As staffing organizations subscribe to a wider variety of SaaS-based tools, it is becoming more and more important to keep the end-user at the center of their decisions. End users in our staffing world are both, internal users like sales, recruiting, hr or finance team members who rely on the tech stack to perform their daily activities and also external users like clients and candidates who interface with the selected applications.
Maintaining a strong focus on the end-user during technology implementation and tech stack management leads to stronger end-to-end processes. When empathy is applied, morale improves, milestones are reached and a viable and useful solution is delivered to the end-user.
