Amid the Great Reshuffle and prolonged talent shortage exacerbated by the pandemic, demand for staffing services is strong, resulting in a highly competitive environment for these firms. Enter HiringSolved, an artificial intelligence-based talent platform whose goal is to simplify recruiting for staffing suppliers. The platform’s business intelligence makes it easy for recruiters to search for and source candidates. Sitting atop a staffing firm’s applicant tracking system, CRM or other database, HiringSolved surfaces data to make it readable for recruiters, enabling them to locate talent that might otherwise be hidden within the ATS. It helps firms reduce the time it takes to fill jobs while also increasing diversity. Jill Stutzman-Deaner, vice president of customer success at HiringSolved, discusses the value of ensuring data integrity, educating your staff on the tech available to them from the get-go, and how HiringSolved’s arsenal of tools can help recruiters be more effective, enabling staffing firms to build stronger client relationships.

Jill Stutzman-Deaner
VP of Customer Success, Hiringsolved

How are your customers staying competitive while managing the staffing industry’s record demand?

This is a hot topic right now because a staffing firm’s competitive advantage is extremely important when demand is high. Working with companies like HiringSolved and investing in these firms’ technologies is one way to stay competitive. For instance, we put tools in the recruiters’ hands that are going to maximize their time and effort.

Another thing that is really important — and sometimes overlooked — is that there’s never a better time to tighten up processes and eliminate wasted time. In conversations with our partners, we hear them say all the time that there’s never a good time to really look at processes. But if you do it now, you’re going to save yourself time and set yourself apart.

Likewise, in the staffing industry, there’s really no better time than right now to focus on our relationships. It can be hard because you have all this demand for talent, but when you can use technology to save time there, you have more time to invest in relationships. For example, say you have Staffing Company A and Staffing Company B. They might be doing the same level of work and even sending over the same slate of candidates, but if Staffing Company A has a better relationship with the client, they will keep the business and win more business down the road. The relationship piece is important, even though it feels like there’s not enough time to do it. There are definitely ways to build your relationships with your clients, even in this tight market right now.

What do you see as a benefit of using technologies like that of HiringSolved?

Investing in technology can be overwhelming because of the time commitment. How am I going to train my recruiters, and will this take away from their time and focus right now? But at HiringSolved, we’re trying to maximize your time and make your recruiters more effective at their job so they get time back in their day to work on those client relationships. That’s the benefit we provide: We want you to use technology in a way that really gives you time back to be more consultative, especially with those clients that you’re really trying to fight for with your competition.

Given the competition in the marketplace, what are your differentiators?

Our data quality and data integrity set us apart. From our sales process through implementation, through our customer success team, throughout the partnership, we talk about data quality. With any new partner, we aren’t afraid to take a deep dive into their data. At HiringSolved, there’s no hesitancy to be transparent in what we see. We show our clients what they’re doing really well as far as collecting data and also areas of opportunity because that’s how we build those relationships. That data quality is so important not only in the investment that they’ve made in HiringSolved, but also in how the recruiters operate and how they’ll see long-term successes.

If you have a candidate base, and let’s say 40% of those candidates don’t have résumés attached in your ATS, you have a few options. One, you could do nothing. Two, you could purge them. Or a third option is to do some sort of outreach campaign — reach out to those individuals and gather their résumés, conduct an external marketing campaign — or,  and we know this is the case sometimes, look internally to find résumés sitting on recruiters’ desktops and their PCs. Let’s see what data and information we have that we’ve already collected. Maybe it’s conversations with candidates that we’ve had, handwritten notes — let’s get that into the ATS.

At HiringSolved, improving your processes starts by looking at your data first. We want to be open and honest about what we see and where improvements can be made, and then we’ll also be a part of that journey with you. And then your recruiters can see how things have changed because they implemented a process to collect that data in the most effective way.

What do you think is the No. 1 challenge that staffing teams face today, and how can HiringSolved help them to tackle that challenge?

What we have heard over the past six months or so from clients is how should they manage requisitions in such high volumes. Another staffing company is getting the same requisitions, too, so do they juggle them all and just try to do all of it at once, or do they try to prioritize them?

With HiringSolved, when you run a search, our tool can tell you almost instantaneously who you have in your database that’s available. This is a prioritized requisition. If you don’t get great results, you might not have candidates in your database who are available right now, so that might be something that you deprioritize. We definitely can help with how to manage that workload because we know that requisition volume will stay high, and when it comes to prioritization, we will help you find quality candidates faster so you can continue to stay competitive.

What other gaps do you often see in staffing teams’ technology stacks?

Something that we have found in these really transparent conversations is that recruiters don’t always know what they have access to in the tech stack. They might know of one tool that they have access to, but not another. So, I think training is probably the biggest gap.

We look at training in a fluid manner at HiringSolved and offer much more of the unlimited type of training and what works best for your staffing company. We used to just have a relationship with a client’s recruitment team, and while that’s still there, we also now have this relationship with the training and development folks as well during the implementation process. We build relationships with them and say, “Hey, you do training all the time with your group. What works the best?” And then we can cater that training approach to that organization. The way I see it, if you can’t train a recruiting team on a new recruiting tool in under 30 minutes, it’s probably going to be too complicated for them, and they’re much less apt to adopt that technology.

And really, the goal in any tech is adoption and usage, which lead to [return on investment], so I can’t stress enough how important it is to get stakeholders to be advocates of the tech stack. Our most successful partnerships are those in which we’re working side by side with the stakeholders and recruitment leads, driving the value of HiringSolved.

Given your expertise as a data company, how do you advise staffing companies manage their data better?

In any relationship, transparency is really key. Recruiters live in a fast and busy world of filling requisitions and making placements with quality candidates. But they won’t always attach a résumé or capture the data when doing an intake, which yields short-term gains.

Long-term gains for staffing firms come from being able to capture data from the beginning, having great processes in place and showing your recruiters the why behind it. We’re not just asking you to collect data to upload résumés for something to do. If you take the extra 30 seconds during the intake process, it’ll save you time later because you remember having a conversation with someone. You’re not searching for a résumé; you’re searching for notes on that conversation. Boom, there’s the résumé, there’s their information. You can quickly get that candidate over to the client and save time there.

Any time we ask recruiters or employees to do something, it’s important to explain what the long-term goal is. You’re only as good as your data, right? So if it’s not there, it didn’t happen — and we say that for data and for recruitment in general. But if you build that into your process specifically, whether it’s onboarding new recruiters or just getting that into their daily workflow, it’s really going to save you time in the long term and lead to more success.

To learn about how HiringSolved can help you get the most out of your tech stack, contact Laetitia Ouadah at Laetitia@hiringsolved.com.