Allen Recruitment, a Dublin-based recruitment agency specializing in filling positions for companies in the IT sector, faced a conundrum. Their recruiters were working themselves to the bone trying to fill positions, but they weren’t seeing the returns they expected from their work and they couldn’t figure out why.
The management team decided that had to change, so they turned to their data to figure out how their recruiters could fine-tune their approach and reap the benefits of their efforts.
“We felt we were working really hard, but we weren’t getting the results that we thought we should be getting,” said Brian Cunningham, Director of Allen Recruitment. “And in order to do that we needed to be able to show our recruiters real live data as to how you do things, or what’s needed to fill a role.”
Brian and the rest of the team at Allen Recruitment chose InsightSquared to solve that problem, and have seen a marked improvement in their business as a result.
“In the last few months our billing has gone up quite dramatically (by 20%), and the number of placements we’ve made has been steadily going up. Where this has come from is we’re now prioritizing the work — we’re working much better than we did before.”
We had the chance to speak with Brian about why Allen Recruitment began using InsightSquared, and learn how “working smarter” has contributed to their 20% increase in revenue.
What were the initial business challenges you wanted InsightSquared to solve?
The first is we’re taking people with low levels of experience in recruitment who are smart educated people and we look at training them up. We’re basically giving them a tool so that they can work and react like someone with ten years experience.
The next thing is, within Bullhorn and probably a lot of the other recruitment software, it’s very difficult to identify — what’s your pipeline? When you look at the stats within the likes of Bullhorn you get a very static picture — you’ve sent 25 CVs and you have 3 interviews.
But we have no idea from that whether those 25 CVs are being considered, or whether those 3 interviews have happened and we haven’t got feedback, or if they haven’t happened yet.
So one of the big things was to be able to give us a real live view of what our pipeline is. Pipeline for recruitment agencies is really, really important, but we wouldn’t have that information if it wasn’t for InsightSquared.
The other big thing that I’ve found is that, with regards to understanding the business and what we do, we used to know how well we did two months later when the money came in. So two months later we went, “that was a good month,” or, “that was a bad month,” whereas now we know what the month is going to be like.
You mentioned InsightSquared helps your team prioritize work effectively. Can you provide a concrete example?
I heard a conversation the other day between someone who has 14 months experience and an account manager who has 10 years experience, and the account manager said, “I’d like you to work on this role.” The recruiter went back and said, “Well, we haven’t made a placement in 3 months in that area. The last time we worked on a role for this company it took them 3 weeks before they came back to us with feedback on the candidates. I have this other role over here where the client is really responsive; we fill them all the time, so I think I’m going to fill this role.”
That conversation was empowered by InsightSquared. The recruiter was able to show information to the account manager.
“Work smarter” is a term that’s thrown around a lot, what does it mean to you?
We’re actually trying to say to people, I want you to make less calls. I want you to fill as many roles as possible, but I want you to work on the ones that you think you can fill.
Do whatever you think you need — but use this tool to tell you what you need.
We did an analysis of February against May, and in February we made more calls, sent out more CVs, screened more candidates, and did more interviews than we did in May. Yet in May we did twice the number of placements, and that comes down to not working harder, but working smarter.
How has InsightSquared changed the way you manage clients?
We’re now looking at them going, do we really make money out of them? We bill a lot with them, but the reality is it takes them a long time to come back with feedback.
A client just came to us the other day saying, “We need to hire 10 people.” But we know it’s normally 6 weeks before they come back again, so we don’t need to do any work with them for another couple of weeks. We would do the work now, send them the CVs, and in 6 weeks they would start to come back. By then our guy who sent the CVs is annoyed with them because he hasn’t gotten any feedback yet.
We know that now, but we didn’t know that before InsightSquared.
Thanks Brian! We hope your team continues to work smarter and more profitably with InsightSquared.
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