As mentioned, the recruitment space is filled with innovative automation tools, some of our favourites include:

• Herefish
• Odro
• cube19
• Recruiter Insider
• Calendly
• Referoo

These tools do a stellar job of removing time spent on repetitive/highly touch administrative tasks so recruiters can spend their time doing what they do best, recruiting!

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as signing your life away to a tech stack, it takes time to ensure your team has adopted the tools along with continuous support to secure value from your investment. However, when you do so you’ll find your agency will:

• Increase profitability and performance.
• Attract higher quality candidates.
• Reduce attrition and improve productivity.

That’s where recMate comes in, providing thorough, continuous support from onboarding and implementation, to training and after care.

“recMate applies a consultant mindset to the training process, ensuring that both the technology and people of the business are best managed, utilised and optimised.” Jodie Rickett, APAC Sales Manager, cube19.

Automation is a loose term, it can be intimidating to begin and there's hundreds of ways to ‘automate’. So, to narrow it down and give you a starting point here’s the top 5 processes that we think every staffing agency should automate…

1. Application to job response

First impressions last, it’s important to start the candidate’s journey off positively - this is a really easy way to ensure you do so every time. When a candidate applies to a job, they should immediately receive an automated response that lets them know you’ve received their application and will be in touch with them soon.

2. Post placement care

This is where many recruiters fall short, the candidate journey shouldn’t end as soon as they’ve been placed. Check out our blog on customer journey mapping for more information on the candidate journey. As a recruiter you have a responsibility to ensure the candidate is happy in their new role and also to ensure the hiring manager is happy with the candidate. This in turn secures new business with both parties.

This could be as simple as…

24 hours before they start, sending a quick text message:

“Hey Andrew. Good luck with your first day. I’ll be in contact tomorrow to see how it is all going. Thanks, Georgie”

Set up an internal reminder for me to check in with both their hiring manager personally.

Every six weeks:

Internal reminder to check in with both parties.

For permanent placements, at 90 days:

Have the placed candidate complete an attachment report to review how strongly that candidate has adopted their new role. If you leave this much later than 90 days then the risk of losing a new employee who has not settled in well is heightened.

3. Job closed updates

Another simple one that makes a big difference to the candidates' experience. When a job has closed it’s common courtesy to let unsuccessful candidates know that the position has been filled. Often times recruiters shy away from this as it is ‘bad news’. Don’t forget that bad news is better than no news! To action this it simply requires a quick automated email or text update. To go the extra mile you could include similar job postings that are still open or other value add type material to help them with their job search.

4. Nurture candidates that have applied for a job, but were unsuccessful

Post placement care is important, but what about the candidates that haven’t found a role? Keeping in touch with these candidates and providing them with valuable information and advice throughout their journey will vastly improve their experience working with you. Keeping them warm with regular updates and calls to action. A quick text example may look like:

“Hey Andrew. Are you still looking for opportunities? By the way, thought you might be interested in this article [insert link to article on company website]. All the best, Georgie”

With sophisticated automation tools like Herefish when asking the above question you can channel their answer down a branch of Yes or No when asking if they are still looking for a new job/contract. If Yes, tools are available to market specific jobs via symantec job matching tools so you are serving relevant roles for them to review. If NO - automate the updating of their Candidate record by asking a few quick follow up questions like:

Hey Andrew. Thanks for letting us know you are no longer looking for roles. Have you found a new Job? Yes/No

If Yes - you can take them down an automated pathway to find out more information about what they found and if a contract/temp role when they will be looking next (all this can be fed back into your database automatically)

5. Contractor availability status updates

Finally, when a contractor finishes an assignment, their availability status should automatically update to prevent them from missing out on new opportunities. Candidate redeployment is often overlooked but it’s a huge missed opportunity within recruitment. If you’ve already worked with a candidate you’re equipped with all their details and a first hand reference - why let them go elsewhere?