Managing Director, Allen Recruitment Consulting
Brian comes from a process improvement and IT background before he moved into the world of recruitment. Three years ago, Brian and Louise Allen took Allen Recruitment down a path of building efficiency into their recruitment processes so that they would be in a position to scale the business and move into different markets/locations.
Welcome to our video series, The Experts. In the series, we interview staffing and recruitment leaders to hear their perspectives on industry trends, lessons they’ve learned in the careers, and their leadership philosophies.
In this clip, Brian Cunningham, Managing Director at Allen Recruitment Consulting, explains how his agency is leveraging recruitment technology partners to build efficient and mobile processes.
Brian Cunningham: If you’re looking to implement new technology, the most important thing is to understand your processes and what you want to get out of the technology. There are three things in a successful implementation. There’s technology, the process, and the people. If you don’t have all three of those you will fail. Know where you want to get to and understand what you want to get out of the product. That’s the key part.
With Bullhorn, you have all of their marketplace partners. All of those guys are experts at what they do. They can make your system do what you want it to do. But if you don’t have an understanding of your processes, it’s hard to succeed. So get the process right.
Something that will give Louise Allen great happiness is data quality. Our Herefish scores are off the charts. Herefish cannot understand why but it’s because of our data quality. We control the data coming into our system using DaXtra. We control which fields get filled, so we have the right data in the right place and we trust the data. That really helps us leverage the different systems. Know the processes, prioritize data quality, and pick the tools that support your business, not the shiniest or newest one.
BC: One of the things we’ve been trying to do is build a very efficient and portable/mobile process. By having your applications in the cloud, it takes away that need for having physical servers, networks, and switches. Our guys are laptop in hand, headset on, working from wherever suits them. They work from home. We’ve had someone who’s been in Australia for the last while. We have someone who just moved to Canada and they’re still working for us. Without the likes of cloud applications like Bullhorn, our central application tracking system, CloudCall and the many other applications that we use, we wouldn’t be able to do that.
Cloud applications also allow smaller agencies to use big company systems that prior to the cloud, only the biggest of companies could afford to buy and would take three years to implement. Whereas now you can buy a product, implement it and build on other products really quickly. And that’s what the huge change has been. Providing our staff with the systems that support the way they want to work is really important. It builds that culture. It’s the modern way of recruitment. Sitting at a desk wearing a suit with a spreadsheet and notepad–that’s old school now.
Click on the image to tweet it.