As you know, the digital transformation is impacting every industry. And it’s clear why.
Every minute, 572 new websites are created, 188 million emails are sent, and 12 new businesses are launched.
With more competition than ever, more businesses fail faster than ever before. Since 2000, over half of the Fortune 500 companies have gone bankrupt, been acquired, or simply ceased to exist due to this digital disruption.
The good news is that businesses that are intentional about their tech choices and build a strategic tech steck are often the businesses that thrive — even in this competitive environment.
And, for the staffing industry, one of the cornerstones of this digital transformation is recruiting automation.
That’s why we sat down with a few staffing industry leaders at Resource 1, BridgeView IT, and MAS Medical Staffing in our recent webinar to discuss how they’ve built their tech stack to win the digital transformation. In this webinar (watch on-demand here), each leader shares insights into how they use Herefish, Bullhorn, and Staffing Referrals to automate the referral management process.
Here’s a brief overview of the software they discuss on this webinar:
- Bullhorn, the staffing industry’s most popular ATS, serves as a single source of truth for all candidate data.
- Herefish, the first automation platform built for staffing and recruiting agencies, eliminates busywork by automating candidate outreach.
- Staffing Referrals, the only automated referral management platform, helps agencies reduce sourcing costs by scaling their referral program.
These platforms integrate seamlessly to create a referral-generation machine that helps firms reduce sourcing costs and eliminate administrative work while improving the candidate experience.
How can you benefit from this tech stack?
1. Reduce sourcing costs and place more candidates with automated referral management
By adopting automated referral management, all three staffing agencies saw an increase in referral placements, which helps drive down sourcing costs and eliminate dependencies on job boards.
What makes referrals better than traditional sources like job boards?
- Referral candidates are 55% faster to hire
- Referrals stay with your company 70% longer than traditional hires
- Referrals can save you up to $3,000 per hire compared to traditional job boards
“Referrals are the top driver in our business,” said Tim Glennie, Co-Founder & Managing Partner of BridgeView IT.
With Staffing Referrals, there’s no doubt if you implement the tool, you’re going to get more referrals.
Tim Glennie, BridgeView IT
2. Give recruiters more time to build relationships by automating repetitive tasks
For Resource 1, automating referral outreach with Bullhorn, Herefish, and Staffing Referrals means that their team can spend more time building the relationships that their business thrives on.
“Every time you get a piece of software like Staffing Referrals, you’re removing all of this manual effort and labor, all these extra clicks, all this extra time,” said Valentine. “The process and the automation drives itself, and our producers find a lot of time available to them to really focus on critical tasks.”
Valentine describes how the power of automation is multiplied when you integrate Herefish and Staffing Referrals.
“You can implement Herefish to really put Staffing Referrals on steroids.”
Anastasia Valentine, Resource 1
When a new referral comes in through Staffing Referrals, the source is automatically marked in Bullhorn. This triggers a nurturing workflow through Herefish, making sure the firm stays top of mind — and not just for candidates.
“We’ve really noticed that our referral program has benefited not only from the automation, but now it’s on everybody’s mind,” said Valentine.
3. Break through the noise with automated candidate outreach
BridgeView IT also found that automating referral outreach helped break through the noise in IT staffing where candidates have been bombarded by recruiters for years.
“Candidates are just hearing from everybody all the time, and it’s one of the challenges for recruiters,” said Glennie. “They reach out for a certain amount of time, and then there’s fatigue from leaving messages or emails.”
To get candidates’ attention, Glennie uses a combination of Bullhorn, Herefish, and Staffing Referrals to automate outreach based on the actions talent has taken. Herefish uses this info to send referral requests to the candidates who are most likely to engage, such as those who have given the firm a high NPS score.
We’re able to start them on nurturing campaigns within Herefish and really base outreach on actions,” said Glennie. “We’re getting good communications out to them to further the process. We’ve had really good success with that.”
4. Improve the candidate experience with a transparent referral process
Traditional word of mouth referral programs leave a lot to chance. They rely on recruiters to remember when to follow up on referrals, whose referrals were placed, and when to make sure someone has been paid out.
This means your promoters or brand ambassadors are often left in the dark about where they are in the process, which can lead to poor experience and fewer future referrals.
“One of the worst things that could ever happen is, if you get a great referral, go through the process, and they get placed, but the person referred doesn’t find out — or worse, they don’t get a bonus,” said Glennie. “That will create a very bad situation with that person. [Staffing Referrals] takes that risk away.”
By creating a transparent process, automated referral programs strengthen trust with candidates, instead of breaking it.
“Staffing Referrals gives transparency to the person who’s giving the referral,” said Glennie. “They get their own brand ambassador page. They get a dashboard to know the status of their referrals. It’s a great system. [Staffing Referrals] did something that we didn’t even know was possible.”
By giving candidates a window into the referral process you empower them to share more and you increase trust between you and your candidate.
“The path is very transparent. We can watch all of our data points and how referrals get into our ATS, whether they’re coming in from outbound, us inviting through an ATS, whether they’re coming in through a website, whether they’re coming in through a signature tag,” said Valentine. “We can actually watch a lot of this information, collect that data, then we can look at our referrals and say, ‘Alright, what’s the best way that we can solicit people?’”
That’s all great, but how hard is this to integrate into your system?
As you know, product adoption can be difficult. The good news with these three tools is that they integrate seamlessly so that recruiters don’t ever need to leave Bullhorn to see the benefits of the tech stack.
Staffing Referrals and Herefish work in concert directly within Bullhorn so that your recruiters can go about their normal day to day activities while the automation works in the background.
“The technology that you add has to nurture itself and be a minimal disruption to the flow of someone’s primary work, and then I find that they’re more willing to accept it and adopt it,” said Anastasia Valentine, President & Managing Partner at Resource 1.
“It doesn’t take anyone any effort to adopt Staffing Referrals.”
Anastasia Valenetine, Resource 1
“The integration with Staffing Referrals was almost as seamless as a click of a button,” said Alicia Ghannad, Marketing Manager at MAS Medical Staffing.