this-is-why-you-want-to-manage-sales-and-recruitment-on-the-same-platform

Manage sales and recruitment on 1 platform

Lack of customer insights, scattered communication, poor data quality? You can do so much better!


Over the past couple of years we have been lucky enough to meet a lot of great people and organizations in the Staffing and Recruitment business. Almost all of them have been facing the same challenges at some point in time. You might recognize some of the following pains we have faced head on with our clients.

#1 Lack of customer insights

We are all committed to serving our clients to the best of our abilities. And this requires full customer insights from every angle. Only too often we’re only working from the scope and skills of our own department, whether this is sales, recruitment, project management, support,…

You would be surprised how many people still work on their own little island. I like to call it working ‘Customer 90°’. Not sharing insights and registering interactions with a candidate or client within a recruitment or sales department is a missed opportunity. How painful was that call again with the candidate you finally reached only to hear your colleague just rejected the same candidate for a similar position?

A great example how we add value for our clients is getting departments to actually interact and share information on the same candidate or account. And so, we pave the way for a 360° approach.

A true customer 360° platform offers all people involved access and insights to all relevant data (to the extent you specify). Once recruiters gain insights into the valuable one-on-one time sales colleagues spent interacting with a client and his environment, they will become increasingly more adept at making a durable match for both the candidate and the customer.

#2 Scattered tools of communication

You send emails, make notes, log calls and set up meetings. All of those individual actions are often registered in an email/calendar client, a note-taking app or a personal document. Sure, we try sharing them as much as possible, but it tends to become a data-spaghetti where pinpointing relevant information becomes extremely hard. Seeing which colleague interacted when with which clients and getting full and real time insight at first glance is why registration on the same platform should be a no-brainer. 

#3 Poor data quality and availability

Not convinced yet? What about reporting? How often are you still crunching together data from different systems and spreadsheets trying to come up with that ‘all-in-one’ report? How do you make sure all of your data is on the same platform and reporting definitions are clear and agreed upon? And if you do have more than one system, like almost everybody does, you do want data to be stored and linked back to a ‘master-platform’ with an open architecture and integration possibilities.

Making sure you are measuring and reporting on KPIs for both recruitment and sales on the same platform allows a better interpretation. These two are often communicating vessels; what happens in sales impacts recruitment and vice versa. Getting the bigger picture allows realistic KPI-setting and interactive follow-up discussions with your colleagues. At the same time ease of use and registration for users ensures data quality. If logging a call or interview is done automatically by the system at the same time you are actually doing the action, you won’t get the “I still need to log this month’s calls” at the end of the month.

# 4 Static information is blocking proactive acting

Let’s say you have a great candidate or employee whose assignment at one of your customers is about to expire. Do you want that valuable resource to sit idle until you have scouted and contracted a new project and accepting the risk of losing him to another agency with a cool project? Or do you want sales and project management to have a great new opportunity ready on hand the day he finishes up his last assignment? Smart automation and cross-departmental insights are key to improve efficiency and working towards operational excellence resulting in satisfied employees and project-resources. 

Check out the Best Practice Attentia

Optimize your customer journey and engage with target groups in 360º way? Read the story on Attentia’s Salesforce multi cloud approach, project management, experiences and results.  Download the full story!

So, how does all of that work in a real-life example?

Meet John. He is a sales rep at a Staffing & Recruitment agency. One year ago, his company decided to start working with Salesforce. In the months following, the company subsequently implemented their CRM, ATS, Marketing Automation, and some other cool solutions available on the Salesforce Platform. This made life for John a lot more fun. His work became ever so much easier and, perhaps even more important, in the last half year his sales ROI increased by 52%. Let’s take a look at an example of how business is done in the Salesforce era.

It’s 9:00AM. John gets a lead alert pushed into his Sales Cloud environment. AnneHR manager at an IT consulting agency, has filled out a form to request a personal interaction with John’s organization since they specialize in the recruitment of the IT-profiles Anne is looking for. John calls Anne to ask if he can be of any service. Anne is very interested in the unusual approach John’s company is taking on the recruitment of IT professionals. Of course, Anne wants to know more about the costs and terms. So, John promises to present her with a personal offer before the end of the day.

This is a piece of cake. John automatically generates a quote by simply adding the ‘recruitment support service’- product Anne is looking for and throws in a small discount. The digital document of the quotation is sent out via email straight from the platform allowing Anne to digitally sign the quote. When she does, John automatically gets notified that the quote is signed ad the opportunity is closed.

Time for recruiter Claire to take over. Conveniently for her, John already gathered a lot of information about the new customer and added it to the customer profile. After the deal was closed a new recruitment project was automatically created for Claire, including all the information John gathered. So Claire can take a head-start on this exciting new project. No manual transfer of tasks and information necessary.

Claire checks the ‘Talent Pool’ en sees that only last week her colleague Blake spoke to Bill, a great potential candidate. After scanning the assigned candidate qualities and interview report, Clair is convinced that Bill is a great fit for the role at Anne’s company. She presents Bills profile to Anne the day after Anne signed a quote, what a service! Bill turns out to be a ‘bullseye shot’! When Claire finishes up her project a reminder is automatically set for John to follow up with Anne. So he can check her satisfaction with the placement of Bill in a couple of weeks.

In comes Donald, the CEO of the company where John and Claire both work. Donald feels that since his company is working with Salesforce he is completely in control. He gets real time insights into the forecasted revenue John and his team are generating. At the same time he sees how Claire and her team are doing on their variety of recruitment assignments and how well customers value their matches.

And when Donald ran into Anne at an event later that week, he can adequately address her, as if he had been the sales rep and recruitment consultant all along. How? As soon as he spotted Anne, Donald quickly checked his Salesforce mobile app. In the app he directly saw Anne’s profile and got an overview of all opportunities, projects, notes and activities his company managed for Anne’s company. This is how Donald knew he should certainly ask about how Bill’s onboarding had been.

Salesforce boosts your Staffing & Recruitment business

Yeah, right. Isn’t that all just a dream? Most certainly not! All functionalities mentioned in the above example are easily configurable by only using Sales Cloud, Bullhorn Connexys and SignRequest. Using the Salesforce Platform can considerably increase your ROI. Did you know that companies on Salesforce report an average 38% increase in sales revenue and 43% more placements. Imagine what impact Salesforce can have for you.

Are you curious about how your business can profit from the Salesforce Platform? Contact us now. We would love exploring the possibilities with you. 

Author
Karel Vergauwen

Karel Vergauwen

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