To stand out in the competitive hiring market and secure contracts, staffing agencies must have a robust recruitment procedure in place.

So, how can you ensure that your process is successful and efficient, particularly as recruiting becomes more remote-based?

According to a poll, 51% of recruiters had recently conducted remote interviews, with 42% making remote job offers. Despite the fact that there are more individuals on the job market, organizations continue to struggle to locate workers with the necessary abilities. With remote hiring becoming more common and skill shortages imminent, staffing companies must reconsider their hiring practices.

The good news for staffing agencies is that by using digital tools like as video interviews, pre-employment assessments, and automation, they can adapt to the ever-changing environment.

We’re sharing nine best practices for recruitment that staging agencies can use—let’s get hiring!

1. Focus on clients’ specific needs

The first step to recruiting the right people is knowing exactly the type of employee your client needs. 

Ask your client:

• What is the role about?
• What are your requirements?
• What is your budget?

Asking some simple questions at the start of the recruitment process can shine a light on what your client is looking for. You can then use this information to determine the best recruitment strategy for each role.

It’s important to remember that some clients will have different needs for different roles, which you can help them understand. For example, some roles will require recruiting candidates that have a certain level of specific skills and experience, while others will focus on broad abilities like conversational skills.

To prepare your staffing agency for this, you should create a flexible recruiting process that lets you build in specific client needs, like skill tests, and add in extras like background checks if you need to.

2. Set a clear timeline

You do not need to have a day-to-day strategy for each stage of the hiring process.

However, you must be realistic and establish a specific schedule and target. This is critical not only for the smooth operation of your employment business but also for the satisfaction of your clients. Including a timeline in your process ensures that your client has a clear idea of when you will have a candidate in place, giving them trust in your approach.

And if there are any delays in the procedure, please be sure to notify your client right away.

The easiest way to establish a timeline with your client is to figure out when they need the job’s start date to be. Once you have a start date, you can build a recruitment process backward from that day. For example, if a client needs a role filled in 8 weeks, you can use that date to map out a timeline like:

• Sourcing and pre-employment tests to happen in 3 weeks 
• First round of interviews in 4 weeks
• Second round of interviews in 5 weeks 
• Onboarding and training in 6 weeks

Mapping a timeline out will make it easier for your agency to manage your workload and your client’s expectations. 

3. Design a virtual recruitment process

As we’ve already highlighted, you won’t always be able to meet the candidates in person. 

So, you also need to make sure your recruitment process works in a remote setting. Even if you haven’t used the technology before, now is the time to start exploring remote recruitment tools like video interviewing and digital skills tests to streamline hiring over the internet.

For example, with one-way video interviews, candidates can use the tech to record answers to written or video-based questions in the initial application process, which reduced the need of time-consuming phone screens.

In short, digitizing your recruitment process will help you learn a lot about what a candidate is like before you ever invite them to interview. What virtual interviews also do is broaden your talent pool. As you can attract and interview candidates virtually, you will open up your hiring options to candidates who live abroad.

This same tech can also be used for a bunch of different recruitment techniques, like hosting a virtual job fair to attract even more talent to fill open positions.

Don’t forget that the best part about adding new tech to your recruitment process is the flexibility it gives you. Depending on your client’s needs, you can mix and match tools like virtual interviews and job fairs to attract their ideal candidates.

4. Employ online assessments

71% of companies featured in the Candidate Experience Research Report said they use pre-employment assessments. There’s a reason for that—they work.

Online assessments are a secret weapon for staffing agencies to find the right talent for a job role. Using assessments that are specific for certain job roles, you can see if candidates can do what a job requires and react to situations that will make them a good hire.

Read Also: The Importance of Temp-to-Perm Staffing Solutions

For example, suppose you’re hiring customer service employees. In that case, you can test them for spoken language, multitasking, and situational judgment to verify if they have what it takes to work in the industry.

However, online assessments aren’t just helping you to get the best hires for your clients. They’re for the candidates, too.

Online assessments give candidates a taste of what a job role will require of them. A situational judgment or skills test will prepare them for situations they will be expected to encounter in a job role, and they can decide whether or not they’re suited for the role.

And finally, these assessments will also help you uncover the transferable skills of your candidates. If a candidate has applied for a specific role, but they ace a test that shows they might be a perfect fit for another opening, you can use that assessment to recommend them for the other job role. Not only does this make sure you’re not letting talent slip through your fingertips, but it also means you can speed up the hiring process.

5. Match candidates to the right roles

This best practice is all about uncovering which role a candidate is a good job fit for.

Matching technology in recruitment can help you automatically assess a candidate’s skills and match them to a job role that suits them best. In your assessment process, you can add in specific assessment tests based on the role you’re hiring for, and once a candidate has filled them in, the tool will automatically rank them based on their results and show you which position they fit best.

This not only saves staffing agencies a ton of time, but it also makes sure you’re hiring the person that’s the best fit for the job role.

6. Use automation

There’s no denying it—automation allows us to work more efficiently. It helps take care of the more mundane parts of the hiring process, like data entry, screening candidates, follow-up emails, interview appointments, and onboarding.

Founder of the StaffingTec Conference, Maurice Fuller, says that using automation hasn’t been a priority for the staffing industry.

“Now, even small staffing firms can automate and eliminate repetitive, low-value and time-consuming administrative tasks across the staffing continuum — including sales and marketing — that currently take staff members away from interacting with candidates and clients,” he says.

“The real value of robotic process automation is that it takes “the robot out of the human.”

What Fuller says about taking the robot out of the human shines a light on solving a problem in the recruiting process—bias. Humans, whether they try to or not, can have bias when recruiting candidates. Robots don’t, meaning candidates will be automatically screened and ranked based on their skills and assessment results before you ever see them for a 1-on-1 interview.

Because all of this can now be done automatically, you can hire faster, smarter, and also fairer. 

7. Keep your candidates engaged

It’s important to remember that the hiring process isn’t just about you, but it’s also about your candidates.

While you’re eager to fill empty job roles for your clients, candidates are also vying for job roles and waiting to hear back from you about the progress of their application. With that in mind, you must keep your candidates engaged, are flexible in your communication, and provide answers to their questions as fast as you can.

Remember, it’s likely candidates are working with multiple agencies, so you need to keep them interested in your roles to attract top talent. Even if a candidate’s application isn’t going to progress any further, it’s important to keep them in the loop. Consistent communication can leave a candidate with a positive impression of your company in case they apply for another position in the future.

The good news is that with recruiting automation, you can easily engage even larger volumes of candidates, for example, by sending them automated updates based on their status in your ATS or CRM.

8. Maintain your talent pool

Remember how we just said that it’s important to leave a candidate with a good impression of your company?

That strategy is all about maintaining a talent pool for you to use for future job openings. Even when a candidate isn’t successful for a particular job opening, you should keep them on file in case one arises. That way, you can reach out to them at the start of the recruitment process to see if they’re interested.

Now, maintaining your talent pool takes work. You need to engage with your talent pool occasionally, whether it’s checking in with an automated email or sending them relevant content. But that effort will pay off if a job opening comes up and it turns out a candidate in your talent pool is a perfect match for it. 

9. Use data to optimize your process

Finally, use your data to measure how satisfied your clients are. As hiring the best people is the ultimate goal for staffing agencies, it’s important to check in with your clients to see if you have been successful. Ask your clients directly if they’re happy with the employees you’re providing them with, if their skills have measured up and if they’re proven to be a good job fit. 

However, it’s not just client satisfaction you should be measuring. You should track your own recruitment process, too.

Setting up internal recruitment KPIs can help your staffing agency to track and measure where your best candidates are coming from, what methods are bringing in the best results, and how you can make your hiring process more productive. Look at your data to see:

• What recruitment channel is bringing in the most candidates
• What recruitment channel is bringing in the best candidates
• How long a typical hire is taking your agency
• How satisfied the candidates are in their hiring experience

The last measurement—candidate satisfaction—links directly back to maintaining a talent pool. The happier your candidates are (whether you hire them or not), the more likely they are to interview for a possible role in the future.

If you keep on top of your data and make sure your candidates, clients, and also your internal processes are doing well, your staffing agency will ultimately be more successful.

Final Thoughts

When you hire new workers for your staffing or recruiting business, or when you sign on new clients, you will often see surges of growth. While all growth is desirable, you want it to be sustainable and scalable, which requires optimizing your recruitment process.

It sounds complicated, but it basically boils down to three factors for most employment firms:

• analyzing your current recruiting process
• finding bottlenecks
• finding ways to optimize or automate processes to resolve those bottlenecks

The good news is that you can do most of this quite easily – by using the right tools.

Every client cares about two things: filling their vacancies fast and saving money. You can help them achieve both by using the right tools and processes to ensure positions are filled quickly. This needs to be a mix of:

• using the right applicant tracking systems
• automating data entry to save time for your recruiting team
• automating parts of candidate communication
• automating the way you schedule and hold interviews
• automating the hiring pipeline updates, from job boards to the end of the process

The first part is easily solved by using a great staffing agency software like Recruiterflow.

And for the second part, this entails just listening to your recruiters. They will know exactly which processes are most time-consuming and what needs to be added or removed to enhance the candidate experience. Once you know what you want to automate, you can use the recruitment automation suite in Recruiterflow to automate large parts of your process.