Your tech stack plays a key role in how effective and competitive your staffing firm is.
What exactly do we mean by “tech stack?” We mean the set of software platforms you use to manage and scale your business.
But building the right tech stack for your company takes more than just choosing best-in-class tech. Your tools need to work well together, grow with your firm, and keep up with the rapidly changing staffing industry.
How do you build a tech stack that will scale with you? Here’s what we’ve learned from working with our staffing clients.
Why your tech stack matters
Why does the right tech stack matter for staffing firms?
First of all, the right tech stack helps you stay competitive. Early digital adopters have proven advantages over their slower counterparts. In fact, the growth rate of early adopters is more than twice that of companies who identify as technology followers.
The right tech stack not only creates efficiencies for your business, but it also enhances the candidate experience. From saving time by automating processes to taking a proactive approach to things like online reputation management, your tech choices help you give your candidates more time, provide better service, and keep on the pulse of your team’s performance.
Other key competitive advantages that the right tech stack can deliver include:
- Scaling faster
- Increasing the valuation of your company
- Improving your speed to market
- Providing smarter sourcing avenues
- Getting ahold of contacts faster
- Differentiating your brand
Building the right staffing firm tech stack
So, now that you’re on board with how crucial the right tech stack is for your staffing firm, how do you go about building one?
Ideally, you build your tech stack as an answer to the challenges you’re facing. If you’re like most staffing firms, your top challenges look something like this:
- Sourcing high-quality candidates
- Managing time between actively recruiting and administrative tasks
- Maintaining good lines of communication with candidates or potential candidates
- Managing your team’s reputation
- Maintaining a positive, transparent candidate experience
Using your tech stack to solve those pressing challenges
At Staffing Referrals, we are part of the Tech Stack Alliance, a group of staffing industry technology solutions created with these recruitment challenges in mind.
Here are some key solutions:
Automated referral management
Referrals are consistently a great source of top quality candidates, yet many staffing firms don’t have systems in place to manage them. Old ways of managing referrals include things like manual entries on spreadsheets and tasking busy recruiters with remembering to follow up with candidates. This can rapidly become too much for a firm to handle well.
Automated referral management makes sure this premier source of candidates doesn’t fall through the cracks. With automated referral tracking, scheduled referral follow-up, and dedicated referral dashboards, your team can grow your referral pool without taking on additional work.
Software such as Staffing Referrals allows you to easily turn your placements in the field into commission-only recruiters for your firm. It creates easy solutions, such as simple sharing of unique links and a transparent approach to referral tracking.
Business text messaging
By now, most staffing firms know that text messaging is the key to cutting through the noise and getting a hold of candidates. But not all text messaging solutions are created equally.
Your team is focused on matching candidates with their ideal job opportunities faster. Text messaging is faster than email or phone alone, but sending text messages by phone or via low-functioning platforms is cumbersome. Automated text solutions can get those opportunities to candidates quickly, increasing your speed to market and growing your firm faster.
We recommend TextUs, which allows you to personalize your automation so you can build relationships faster. TextUs also integrates with Staffing Referrals, allowing you to solicit and follow up on referrals faster.
Branded mobile app
Does your staffing firm have a mobile app? Many don’t as yet, but they can be a great channel to get more applications. Mobile apps can help you reach out to candidates more efficiently and also create a better candidate experience.
StaffUpApp and WorkN offer custom apps specifically for staffing and recruiting firms. These branded apps provide another touchpoint to help you remain top of mind for candidates.
Candidate experience and reputation management
If your candidates don’t have a great experience with your staffing firm, they’ll probably tell others about it. This can be a real problem in terms of your reputation and your ability to source more candidates. In fact, 41% of companies who received negative online reviews or critical social media comments said their revenue and brand value were badly hit.
A tool like Great Recruiters allows staffing firms to be proactive about both candidate experience and reputation management. The platform helps you monitor your reviews and take steps to improve experiences in real time. They provide company and recruiter profiles that provide transparency to your candidates.
This helps for both sourcing of new candidates and renewal of the old ones. Your company can get good ratings to attract new candidates and quickly address any situations with the current candidates so that they don’t escalate.
Job description and pay package transparency
Candidates often complain that staffing firms aren’t transparent with job details, especially pay packages. They may feel that recruitment firms are often a “sales” environment where important information that could help the candidate better understand an offer is held back.
When information is unclear or withheld, it’s more difficult for candidates to make career decisions. The more information on the front end, the better candidates can self-assess and then come to recruiters ready to take action.
Fortunately, some tech stack options can help you be more transparent. Wanderly has created a solution for travel healthcare staffing firms. Their platform is upfront with key information (such as pay packages) so that healthcare professionals can easily compare jobs through leading agencies.
Automating workflows
Communication through the recruitment process is essential, as is taking care of administrative tasks that often take a lot of recruiters’ time. Recruiters frequently say they run out of time for essential tasks, like candidate outreach, because they’re always doing “busy work.” Good automation tools as part of your tech stack can help to reduce that busy work and ensure that key tasks still happen.
Herefish was built especially to make staffing firms more efficient automating tasks key activities in the recruitment workflow, such as outreach.
Herefish screenshot
Final thoughts
The right tech stack will solve the key problems that your staffing firm faces — by automating repetitive tasks, facilitating great communication with candidates, and enhancing the candidate experience.
The more you can eliminate friction in the recruitment process, the more likely people are to follow through to the end.