It’s no secret that the staffing business is dealing with financial modifications. Based on the SIA | Bullhorn Staffing Indicator, staffing hours have dipped 16% year-over-year as of July 2023. In the meantime, rising rates of interest are driving up prices, throwing vital monetary choices into query. How can staffing companies set themselves up for achievement, no matter these headwinds?
Harvard Enterprise Overview carried out a examine of 4,700 firms earlier than, throughout, and after a recession and uncovered some precious insights:
- 17% of firms don’t survive a recession.
- 80% that survive don’t return to pre-recession gross sales and revenue progress charges even three years afterward.
- 9% flourish post-recession.
The organizations that flourished weren’t those who battened the hatches and weathered the storm; they had been forward-looking and took a progressive strategy. What do they do in another way from their competitors?
- Function effectively to scale back prices completely.
- Keep carefully linked to prospects to win market share.
- Make investments strategically in instruments to reply sooner to a future rise in demand.
With these methods, these companies outperformed their friends by a minimum of 10% in gross sales and revenue progress. On this three-part weblog sequence, we’ll take a deeper have a look at this progressive strategy and unpack how one can set your agency up for each short-term and long-term success.
To speak about greatest approaches to financial uncertainty, Bullhorn’s Joe Wertz spoke with three best-in-class business consultants who deliver greater than 70 mixed years of expertise to the desk – Lauren Jones, Founding father of Leap Consulting Options, Maurice Fuller, Founding father of StaffingTec, and Tom Erb, President at Tallann Assets – to unpack how organizations can optimize their current processes and run a extra environment friendly enterprise.
Learn on for his or her ideas on documenting processes, streamlining workflows with automation, and the Metrics That Matter, or take a look at a recording of their dialog.
Understanding your corporation
All of it begins along with your mission, imaginative and prescient, and values. Have a transparent thought of who you’re as a company and wrap the whole lot you do, together with expertise and course of, round that, mentioned Jones. As you make clear your imaginative and prescient, keep in mind your three key stakeholders: your candidates, purchasers, and colleagues.
As soon as that’s established, it’s time to take inventory of your processes. Staffing corporations have a surprisingly great amount of processes, mentioned Fuller. Documenting these company-wide processes is foundational to start optimizing your corporation. He suggested that for those who don’t have the time and assets to doc all of them, deal with those who you wish to enhance upon, particularly these tied to the Metrics That Matter. Accessing insights into how your corporation is working, even in just some key areas, can drive actual monetary outcomes whereas working inside restricted assets.
“When you don’t have course of in place, you’re winging it,” added Erb. When your competitors is slowing all the way down to climate the storm, that’s the right time to guage and doc your workflows and acquire a aggressive edge.
Leveraging information and expertise
After you have an understanding of your course of and workflows, it’s time to guage the instruments at your disposal: your information and your tech. Understanding your information is the important thing to remaining each agile and aggressive, mentioned Jones. Wertz echoed this, noting that information hygiene and well being go a good distance.
When you could have your entire processes aligned and your information organized, it’s clear the place tech can do the heavy lifting. “Course of is just pretty much as good as its implementation,” mentioned Erb. He added that almost all staffing expertise already has greatest practices in place. There’s no have to reinvent the wheel; seek advice from and implement these greatest practices as they relate to your current workflows, even when that you must modify them to fit your group’s wants.
That is very true for automation, mentioned Jones. Her group’s mantra: “Automation on repetition, folks on relationships.” What work is repetitive? The place do that you must deal with relationships? Fuller suggests constructing a listing of how recruiters and gross sales reps use the majority of their time to determine the place to focus automations to optimize processes. “Automation gained’t be your greatest funding, but it surely strikes infinite quantities of metrics,” Jones added.
Your success with instruments like automation will probably be restricted in case your information isn’t clear. With out clear information, it’s tough to correctly consider your metrics and discover the place to develop.
Automation might help construct connections along with your candidates and purchasers by retaining you seen, and your folks can shore up these connections by constructing significant relationships. In spite of everything, candidates, purchasers, and even colleagues wish to really feel linked above all. When you leverage tech to optimize your processes and construct connections, you’ll be able to’t go incorrect.
For extra on constructing connections to steer by uncertainty, take a look at the second a part of our weblog sequence.
