Recruitment agencies operate in a highly competitive market in which employers rely on them to find the personnel they need rapidly and accurately. The business effectively serves two masters – the prospective employer and the candidate, with the recruitment agency in the middle to find the best fit for employers and workers alike. A vital part of the business is clear and timely communication. Failure to understand requirements can lead to lost revenue opportunities.
The need for rapid, well-informed responses requires agents to understand the employers’ requirements and job specification while, at the same time, knowing the qualifications, experience and preferences of candidates. They will, for instance, know if a position needs filling urgently or if a candidate is prepared to wait for the ideal opportunity to come their way. However, both employers and candidates expect to be able to contact recruiters who already know their needs.
Accurate logs of previous calls, access to correct information and the ability to answer queries consistently in real-time are key attributes of recruitment agencies and customers expect to be treated in this way. For agencies themselves, this can be challenging to achieve due to the substantial changes the sector has seen in recent years. In addition to the internet transforming job and application search, recruitment agencies have consolidated from being small, local operations, with one or two branches, into large nationwide organisations with resources spread nationally.
With this widely-dispersed workforce, recruitment agencies still need to provide a tailored experience and this relies on centralised access to data to provide a single-point of visibility into real-time or historic data. For example, if a candidate calls in to ask if there have been any new opportunities becoming available since they visited a local branch last week, a centralised call centre agent needs to be able to access their details and answer their query in real-time.
Similarly, if an employer wants to know how many applicants a recruiter expects to have for a specific campaign, that information needs to be available across the business, enabling the customer to be updated on progress. Don’t forget that this total visibility is required across the customer-facing recruitment agency offices, back office functions, the call centre and remote workers based at home or on the road.
