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Staffing & Recruitment best practices

How to conquer the hearts of the connected generation?


The war for talent is fiercer than ever. Talent is one of the most scarce resources in our economy. And this is leaving its marks on the Staffing and Recruitment industry now. After a strong growth in 2018, this year in The Netherlands and Belgium the sector is facing a 6% – 9%  revenue decrease.

In Het FD, Timing CCO Paul Haarhuis signals that large listed companies are starting to fall behind modern flexible agencies. In our experience, innovation is a weak spot in many companies and often a clear vision is absent.

“Our advice: design a clear roadmap based on compelling candidate journeys, powered by alignment in marketing, automation, sales, recruitment and engagement.” – Talent Peaks

What distinguishes your agency from the competition?

To survive in this demanding market and face competition, agencies have to be strong, personal and distinctive. You can engage talent by making clear what is the ‘Why’ of your company. What is your purpose, what value do you add and why are candidates and customers better off working with you? What sets successful Staffing & Recruitment companies apart from the rest is a strong vision, an effective approach, powerful people and future proof technology.

As an expert in the market of Staffing & Recruitment it’s Talent Peaks’ mission to help agencies to excel by building strong strategies with compelling customer and candidate journeys. To achieve maximum impact, we engage and connect them to the right partners and the best technology.

How to Find, Win and Keep talent?

Together with two partners, we organized an inspiration session to challenge the business of the Staffing & Recruitment market. We co-hosted the event with Salesforce, expert in the world’s #1 cloud technology to improve your business and omnichannel marketing specialist Penfield Digital who work from the belief that building brand preference goes beyond technology.

Automating your business will create better experiences. Adding AI to the game makes those experiences more personal and relevant. But the appeal and sincerity of your brand story is what’s making customers stick. So always give a ‘human touch’ to digital touchpoints.

“We believe that people can really interact with each other when organizations use the best technology available. We are here to make that happen.” – Talent Peaks 

“With technology as a powerful backbone a Total Brand-approach is what’s making your customers stick.” – Penfield Digital

Industry leaders in the Staffing & Recruitment gathered to share knowledge, insights and discuss promising developments. With this, we hope to contribute to bringing the sector to the next level. Each company in its own way, based on its own expertise and with its unique approach for its own target groups.

The event had an inspiring line-up with speakers of diverse expertise areas who shared insights, tips and best practices. We’ll share them with you at a glance.

A Targeted Candidate First Approach

How can you engage with the young generations? YoungCapital and Penfield Digital shared a best practice on how they succeed to find, win and keep young talent. YoungCapital mapped their target groups and built the candidate journey around their needs and expectations. According to their findings key drivers for GenZ are: money, purpose, work hard/play hard, success and proximity. These drivers are the starting point and resonate in all marketing campaigns.

Generations Y and Z are digital natives, demanding a mobile first approach and already increasingly using innovations like voice search. YoungCapital showed how they use Salesforce Marketing Cloud to create a 360° view on candidate behavior and tailoring marketing activities based on these insights. It’s a never ending journey, focussed on attracting new candidates, but also engaging and nurturing them during and after placement.

“When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.” – Simon Sinek

Use your ATS to deliver an incredible Candidate Experience

Bullhorn showed how innovating on Salesforce can drive business value. They recently realized an integration with LinkedIn Recruiter in their state-of-the-art Bullhorn Connexys ATS. With this, the possibilities of getting to know your candidates have improved even more and recruiters can connect quickly and efficiently with promising candidates. This integration allows LinkedIn profiles to be synced in the Bullhorn Connexys ATS. Data, InMails and Notes are all shared back and forth and finding, filtering and tracking candidates can be done easily in one environment.

How an ATS on Salesforce makes your Recruiters more successful

Mysolution showed how you can create an integrated customer and candidate approach by combining the processes in the front-office and mid-office. Using the Salesforce Platform Sales (CRM), recruitment (ATS) Contracting and Signing, Placements & Regulations all workflows are integrated in the same environment. This allows recruiters and consultants to create a 360° view on candidates and customers so they can work fast, flexible and efficient. They now can connect with customers and candidates in an effective and personalized way, making full use of the data and the available toolbase.

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!

The value of Communities in Candidate Engagement

Recruitment is all about finding and hiring the right people, right? But what about the period someone is actually working for you and what happens after the assignment has finished? In many Staffing & Recruitment companies, those phases are somewhat neglected. Engaging talent through a Community just might be the hidden treasure for recruitment. Salesforce Community Cloud can stimulate talent to engage with your company.

A community can serve as a Self Service Portal in which candidates can find details about past and current assignments, download payslips, see tasks and discover new vacancies. But a Community is also a perfect place where candidates can get support and knowledge and where they can interact with each other. In a community talent can have discussions pose questions and help peers. They can share ideas for improvement, ask questions and get informed and react on relevant topics in the article section.

Communities prove to unburden HR, service and support thanks to the significant case deflection. And communities are also a great opportunity to engage with candidates and to collect feedback and ideas for improvement and innovation. The Salesforce best practice also shows how you can stimulate engagement with gamification.

How Adecco increased productivity in staffing & recruitment

Adecco shared a best practice on how they approached a digital transformation on the Salesforce platform taking the customer as a starting point. Taking a 360° view as the main goal, they designed both the customer and the candidate journey. Reinventing technology to optimally serve the business goals and transforming data in valuable information. This visual gives a nice impression of the scope of the project. 

Can AI help in matchmaking between candidates and jobs?

How can innovation, AI and predictive analytics impact recruitment? There are a lot of innovations entering the industry, like AI powered assistants, candidate rediscovery, Natural Language Processing etc.

Nice example of effective use of innovation is Unilever. They introduced an almost completely digital application process. The first step is simple, just upload your LinkedIn profile and answer a few simple knock-out questions. Next, gamification is used to collect relevant information about the candidates that supports the matchmaking procedure. Candidates can apply by a video interview where standardized questions allow algorithms to select promising candidates. This approach lead to significantly more applicants, a considerably faster recruitment process, 75% time savings for recruiters and, most important, less bias.

The magic happens when we are able to enrich recruitment data with relevant data on people analytics. Then we can use AI to predict hiring success and to get insights into how to extend the partnership with your candidates. At this point in time, however, data on skills and attitude still have little predictive value, so recruiters are still vital in matchmaking.

Still, Salesforce Einstein is very promising, because it can collect and processes data from different objects. In Einstein, AI is built in and scalable, so you can start your own trials (stories) without having to do any complicated coding. Einstein can tell you which factors are relevant and which aren’t and it can autonomously generate and evaluate models so you can predict on a personal level on things like absenteeism, job satisfaction etc. It’s interesting to see what the future has in store for us.

Looking for a consultancy partner? 

Are you looking for a consulting partner who will guide your digital transformation? Just keep in mind: technology is not a means, it is an enabler for your business. Don’t look for merely an implementation partner, but one who will facilitate your growth. Find a partner who knows your business and challenges you with industry best practices.

Each with their own expertise, Penfield Digital and Talent Peaks are business first consultants who challenge you and take your business to the next level. Based on our expertise and using industry best practices, we start with getting a clear view on your mission, strategy, goals and KPIs. After that we define the to-be journeys, the supporting processes and requirements and validations. All designed to create an engaging customer and candidate experience.

Make sure to put your customer and candidate in the center of your business and see that marketing, recruitment and sales are well aligned. Your brand is as strong as the sum of all interactions. Create a consistent brand experience and optimize every touch point across the customer, candidate and user journey. By doing that, you can Find, Win and Keep talent and stay successful in the Staffing & Recruitment industry. 

Talent Peaks helped us substantially increase both customer and candidate engagement through smart digitalization on the Salesforce Platform. We value their deep business knowledge, Salesforce expertise and their pragmatic and professional approach. – René Koier, Director Sales Olympia NL

I hereby like to especially thank Laura BeenEva Beenakker-HagenLars van Luyt and Gerben Busch for the collaboration in making this engaging and inspiring event happen!

Author
Manola van Diest

Manola van Diest

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