How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

JobAdder

eBook

How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

Table of

Contents

Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 03

How are recruiters undertaking business development now? ................... 04

How challenging is business development for recruiters? ............................ 05

What are the key business development challenges they face? ............. 06

How do client communications and relationships play a role? .................. 07

The key tech inefficiency holding many recruiters back .................................. 08

How the Opportunity Pipeline transforms business development

for recruiters ............................................................................................................................................. 09

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................11

About JobAdder ..................................................................................................................................... 12

3How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

IntroductionBusiness development is a crucial component of any recruitment agency’s long-term success.

Unfortunately, many recruitment leaders and recruiters face a range of challenges when it comes to boosting and tracking their business development efforts.

The JobAdder team created this eBook to present our exclusive findings from recent research we’ve conducted in this area, and provide some helpful insights to recruiters on how to transform their business development approach.

Read on to discover the key challenges and pain points recruiters experience on a daily basis when undertaking business development, and how this doesn’t need to be the status quo.

4How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

The results are in...

Recruiters are struggling to control and organise their business development efforts. When asked, ‘how on top of your business development activity do you feel,’ respondents delivered an average rating of 3.3 out of five, with one being ‘it’s out of control’.

Other key insights that the survey unearthed include:

• Collectively, 70% of respondents answered it takes from less than one week to two weeks to convert an opportunity.

• 56% of respondents answered the number of opportunities as the most important metric from a pipeline perspective.

• 64% of respondents answered conversion rate of opportunity to job order as the most important metric from a pipeline perspective.

How are recruiters undertaking business development now?

So what are the challenges and pain points that are holding recruiters back from making the most of these business development opportunities?

5How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

JobAdder conducted a survey of 75 recruitment agency users to better understand how recruiters are approaching business development.

When asked to rank their biggest challenges, business development was third in a list of the most challenging demands.

How challenging is business development for recruiters?

Sourcing candidatesMost challenging

Least challenging

Getting jobs on

Business development

Placement after care

Maintain and engage talent pool

Submission and client feedback

Screening candidates

1

5

3

7

2

6

4

6How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

The current approach to business development is often hindered by irregular communications and a lack of organisation and automation. Below are some key pain points and challenges that were revealed in JobAdder’s research:

Recruiters are storing and recording business development activity in different locations and tech tools.

This means it’s hard to see a top-level view of all their prospects, where they sit in the funnel and who they are, so they know what tasks need actioning to progress leads.

Recruiters need a means of tracking every interaction with a lead across different touch points, whether it’s via email or phone or other channels.

This information needs to be easily accessible and compiled in an accurate and automated way.

Recruiters are time-poor, juggling multiple tasks at once and relying on memory to follow up on clients.

This often leads to overlooking urgent or overdue tasks and irregular and inconsistent communications with clients. The time to convert is directly correlated to response time and follow-up time.

What are the key business development challenges they face?

“Recruiters are screaming out for automation, smart suggestions and reminders.”

- Chris English Product Manager, JobAdder

7How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

Building trust

The relationship building with clients or prospects is extremely important to recruiters but it can be hindered by a lack of organisation or automation.

Our surveyed recruiters were spending a lot of time ‘convincing’ and building trust with clients, which is crucial to these relationships but does hamper their business development bandwidth.

Progress delays

Our conversations with recruiters also revealed that clients can be key bottlenecks in business development efforts.

Understandably, clients are busy people and take time to make decisions, respond and come back with the information recruiters need. This was one of the biggest factors that affects the progress of a lead or opportunity.

Recruiters are also finding it difficult to prompt clients to respond, commit and confirm job requirements.

Following up

Recruiters often struggle to remember to follow up and make regular and frequent contact with clients and prospects, which can hinder client relationships and further business development opportunities.

Recruiters would also like an automated way to give feedback on prospects after each interaction.

How do client communications and relationships play a role?

8How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

Too many tools

Recruiters are performing and tracking business development activity across a number of different platforms and tools.

This could be in their applicant tracking system (ATS) like JobAdder, in a third party sales tool, in Excel across multiple sheets or even in written notes.

In our research, we found that a staggering 60% of our agency users were managing all of their business development outside of the JobAdder platform. Additionally, compared to the rest of the recruitment workflow, business development was where our agency users feel unhappiest.

This was clearly a pain point we needed to address, so we created the Opportunity Pipeline module in our JobAdder platform.

The key tech inefficiency holding many recruiters back

9How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

How the Opportunity Pipeline transforms business development for recruiters

Our Opportunity Pipeline module allows our agency customers to capture and manage their inbound pipeline of jobs to fill through a simple workflow, all from within JobAdder.

So, what are the key benefits of this new module?

• The larger the team, the harder business development becomes to manage: The Opportunity pipeline allows all leads to be captured and managed in JobAdder.

• Recruiters can pull sales through the pipeline, see when the next task is scheduled for an opportunity, or schedule one to keep the process moving forward.

• Converting to job: Once the opportunity is won, users will be able to convert their opportunity to a job record, transferring all key information across.

• Having a dedicated area for opportunities allows the sales process to be scrutinized and improved upon where needed.

• The workflow header allows users to quickly filter their leads by where they are in the pipeline and prioritise who they need to reach out to.

10How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

Task

Drive opportunities through the workflow by keeping on top of the ‘next tasks’ for your opportunities, see what’s coming up, what’s overdue and where needed, schedule in your follow ups

Workflow header

Prioritise who you call and when, by quickly filtering your Opportunities based on their currency stage

Change stage

Progress an opportunity to the next stage in the workflow

Estimated close

Sort your opportunities by when you think they’ll close

A few features to call out:

11How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

ConclusionBusiness development doesn’t need to be a time-consuming and stressful part of a recruiter’s day.

We hope this eBook helps recruitment leaders and their recruiters to boost their business development efforts and cut out costly inefficiencies.

At JobAdder, we’re dedicated to providing the tools and support that recruiters need to make the recruitment process more joyful and a whole lot easier.

Please reach out to our friendly team if you have any questions about our Opportunities feature and how it can streamline your business development efforts.

12How to boost your agency’s business development and remove inefficiencies

About JobAdderJobAdder is a leading cloud-based recruitment software solution that helps in-house and agency recruiters find and manage talent more effectively through automation.

JobAdder’s flexible powerful technology works with existing recruitment processes and HR systems to offer a seamless experience. Recruiters get the tools they need to do great work, ultimately enabling them to focus on what matters most.

If you would like to know more about JobAdder, click here to contact us or visit www.jobadder.com

Attract candidates fasterEffortlessly post to more than 200 job boards and social sites. Create branded career pages.

IntegrateConnect JobAdder with the tools you already use as part of your recruitment process and talent management.

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TrackSee job status, review resumes, conduct interviews, update candidates and hiring managers.

SaveDetermine which job boards have the highest ROI and allocate budget efficiently.

EfficienciesDesign workflows, create jobs, email templates and auto-responses to match your hiring strategy.

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