So much of a staffing team’s job is managing their pipeline. Which Job Orders should be prioritized? What is clogging up the flow? When the pipeline is moving swiftly, everything else just seems to fall into place. Here are three ways to manage your pipeline smarter that will lead to more placements.
1. Know when to purge your pipeline of inefficient Job Orders.
Sometimes, it’s ok to give up. Especially when a Job Order is turning out to be a drag on your staffing team’s time and resources. Limit the time you spend working junk Job Orders and you can keep your pipeline flowing smoothly.
To facilitate this, set a threshold of metrics that historically constitute a Job Order likely to be lost. This could be a set number of days it might be stuck in a certain phase, the number of consecutive days it hasn’t seen any activity, and the value (ie. if it’s lower than a certain dollar amount, cut it loose after X days). Once you set a profile of a junk Job Order, you can make more decisive cuts to what is in your pipeline.
2. Know how your pipeline is growing (or shrinking).
It’s not enough to know how many Job Orders are active. Your team will benefit from knowing the stages they are in, so you know where to place your efforts in your pipeline.
Are the number of Job Orders in the Sendouts stage increasing month over month? If so, you might want to focus on getting them to the Interview stage in the next month. A growing count in a stage can mean a block in your workflow that needs to be diagnosed. A dwindling count means your team needs to work harder at pushing Job Orders through the pipeline. Either way, visualizing the trends as in the chart above is a great way to manage intelligently.
3. Know your employee’s pipeline forecast.
Get granular with your team’s pipeline by breaking it out by employees. Knowing what each of your reps are forecasted to bring in shows you weaknesses in your team that can be addressed early, before it leads to losses.
If one of your employees looks to be trending low for the next month, you can work together to diagnose the issue in their pipeline. Were they spending too much time on a bad deal? Were they not filling the pipeline with fresh Job Orders? Do you need to distribute work more evenly between employees? Employee-level forecasts can help you spot pipeline problems before they happen.
Managing your pipeline by the numbers will help your team be more efficient than ever before. And for more on smarter forecasting, check out our e-book below.
