Discover how data-driven strategies can revolutionize the way staffing and recruiting organizations tackle operational challenges using data. In today’s dynamic business landscape, companies face numerous hurdles when it comes to finding the right talent and matching that with the right client. This webinar aims to provide valuable insights into how harnessing the power of data can lead to more informed decision-making and transformative recruitment practices.
Other Meetups and Events to check out:
Transcript from the webinar:
My name is Dave Chadwick. I am with AICG, which is the Artificial Intelligence Consulting Group. We want to thank everyone for allowing us this opportunity to share with you some of the technology tools we have developed that give professionals like all of you greater access and control to the intelligence you need from your data to make fast, accurate business decisions.
Our main presenter today will be Mr. Mike Jelen. He’s a Senior Vice President here at AICG and one of our subject matter experts. I’ll be turning this over to him in just a moment. But first, if you have any questions as we go along, feel free to drop in the chat.
And if you would like a one-on-one opportunity to discuss your specific data expectations, let us know that in the chat and we will contact you after this presentation to arrange a conversation with Mike at your convenience.
Okay. Our time is limited. So with no further delays, here is Mike Jelen. Thank you, David. Thank you, everybody, for joining us here today. Appreciate you carving out time.
And just a quick overview of Chadwick and myself. We’ve been in the technology and data space for quite a few years, and we’re happy to have you with us today. When we think from a staffing recruiting firm perspective or agency, we look at some of the challenges within the agency ecosystem over the last couple of years.
Growth is great in many aspects. But it also does prove some challenges along the way for you to be able to scale and manage effectively as you continue to grow. How do you take advantage of the opportunities?
And some of you might say, hey, we grew a lot more than what your 21% is indicating here and others might say, you know, we didn’t quite grow to that level. You know, as much as these are industry averages, whether you’re on either end of the spectrum there, there are opportunities and natural challenges that go along with that growth.
Of course, there’s also uncertainty within the current calendar year. And then you also have an election year next year, which will also provide some challenges and opportunities at the same time from a growth perspective.
A lot of organizations out there have been working with tools and processes for several years. And as they look to where do we want to go? Where do we want to be as an organization? We’ve talked to a lot of agencies out there and say, look we want to double or triple.
And when we look at the candidates out there, a lot of candidates, 50% of them are looking to move on from their current engagement, their current employer.
A big part of that is looking for higher pay. Now, customers aren’t necessarily eager or jumping up and down in order to pay for higher salaries. By the same time, it’s finding that blend between whether somebody is an independent contractor or somebody is just looking for placement short or long-term opportunity, or maybe even perms, that are looking for placement out there.
A lot of those folks have different salary expectations. And of course, some of those expectations outside of salary are have been defined or shaped from the pandemic or coming out of the pandemic. And of course, there’s lots of different articles and newsworthy items about going back to the office from an in -person perspective.
Some organizations embracing, some are forcing and demanding. And so because of that, when you look at organizations like yourself, you’re in the middle of broaching people with opportunities at the end of the day. So you’re walking a fine line and trying to empathize and work with all parties involved, even if they maybe have some different perspectives to say, all right, is there a happy medium?
So then that’s where you come in and you’re able to make everybody happy at the end of the day, which if your clients and your candidates are happy, then naturally your organization will have happiness within it as well. So when we talk about some of those problems, there’s different ways to look at addressing those problems.
And naturally there’s a technology aspect to addressing. And within that technology is a number of different components when you think of, all right, there’s the right tools for your industry, there’s no shortage of technology options.
A lot of you, maybe talking to your peers, you’ve worked at several companies throughout your career and you have a perspective from those companies as to how they leverage technology, but it’s really not necessarily always looking in your past in order to determine what’s the best way forward, you need to adapt your current organization to how are we going to meet our goals or to address some of our challenges or concerns by leveraging technology.
And of course, for better or worse, when you look at some of those challenges that you have limited IT skills and or budget, some agencies have a luxury of having a person or two that are either really good with technology, are dedicated to technology within your organization.
And many others are, well, technology is one hat of many that you end up wearing and trying to figure out what is the best approach. You have a lot of manual processes that at times are done with spreadsheets, many spreadsheets, which also involve hours of downloading and massaging and wrangling of data from different source systems in order to try to make sense of that data so that you can produce those KPIs.
Well, that’s great if you can do that once a week, once a month, there’s the opportunity there in order to streamline and automate that, which not only will save you time, but increases that accuracy and then you get that data updated on a more frequent basis.
So even when you’re looking at different aspects to technology, they’re selecting the tool, there’s integrating the tool, then there’s using the tool and how do you train people on the different tools and the processes? There’s a lot that goes into that approach there.
So when you think of, from a use case perspective, from an agency component, we have the challenges. For one of our clients that we worked with, they had a challenge around their staffing agents, very inconsistent in the productivity.
So while they had weekly metrics, monthly metrics, how people were being measured and achieving those particular metrics was very inconsistent. And a lot of times it was, well, I know my manager is not looking at these metrics or I know I have until Friday of each week in order to make sure my weekly numbers are looking good.
You notice that there was a tendency in the early part of the week to potentially do less work and just ride things out and say, I’m gonna have a strong second half of the week. And other folks would, they would work very hard on the first two or three days of the week and say, you know, I met my numbers, I’m good.
I don’t need to worry about the rest of the week. Well, from a manager perspective and leadership perspective, it’s okay. If you’re able to get your work done in two or three days, holy cow, maybe there’s the opportunity that we should be motivating and incentivizing people to get even more done.
And how do we use data to help showcase that? But at the same time, also get others on board, other of the sales folks in order to be competitive and who wants to be number one weekend and week out and how to reward those high achievers.
And so using data in order to extract not only, what is the data being entered into the CRM, but what is that productivity of phone calls and texts and not just, hey, you’re sending text messages out for the sake of sending out text messages, but what are those phone calls and are those meaningful phone calls?
Is a five minute conversation? Okay, that’s great. Those are, those can be important. But at the same time, if you have a new candidate that you’re talking to, that’s your very first conversation, ideally that’s a half hour, 45 minutes conversation or perhaps a candidate from a client perspective that you have a new job rec that you received or that you’ve identified and you’re trying to clarify and find out more information, those conversations take time.
But you can use that amount of time that individuals spend with those conversations and add that up through the course of a week in order to be able to determine how productive an individual has had throughout that week.
And it becomes a tool that you can have conversations if somebody is meeting their numbers, numbers from the perspective of they’ve landed X deals, they brought in X dollars to the organization in order to indicate, all right, if somebody has not met their revenue that they are targeted to bring in, well, why is that?
Can you go back and look at an individual week and say, well, let’s look at who you’ve spoken with, what types of conversations are you having? And to be able to provide coaching to those individuals and not necessarily use it as a stick of, hey, you only had 42 calls this week, you should have had 75 calls.
Well, depending upon the quality of those calls, that really is the devil’s in the details, but you can use data to help tell that story. So working with this particular customer, we leverage their data and really help them to see what is the true story of the ins and outs on that daily, weekly basis of the quality of conversations and connections that they were having with their candidates and their clients.
And by implementing that, it really changed their organization and made them a data -driven organization more so because you’re providing visibility to all sales agents which increase their productivity, which naturally increased productivity leads to top -line growth and that top -line growth allowed them to also add additional agents because they had the technology and processes in place.
I wasn’t just, we’re gonna throw more bodies at the problem and magically it’s going to resolve itself using a data -driven approach is one of those ways that allow you, you think of a staircase of growth within your organization allows you to continue to step up with that growth.
So if we were to say, well, what can I do at the end of the day when we look at understanding what are those metrics that really provide that insight to the organization? Like I mentioned earlier, it’s not just about the number of phone calls that someone has, it’s what’s the duration of the phone call and naturally you get down even further.
Well, what are you talking about? Is it you talking about your summer vacation or you actually talking about an opportunity or maybe the industry or the trends that you’re seeing in order to help guide and coach your clients and your candidates out there.
There also needs to be a willingness to change or improve within the organization in order to really go down this path of a data -driven culture. You need that executive buy -in in order to say, yes, I’m committed to that. I’m committed to using the dashboard and asking questions and using data to help tell the story and to help drive us forward.
Because that’s really how you’re going to be able to provide that insight to all of your users, not just to the executives, but to everybody, to have that clarity and that clarity to what is and what’s not happening also leads to increased accountability within your organization.
So if we were to go and look at, what could this look like? And so before we get there, we do have one poll that we’d like to ask everybody. So Heather, could you please bring up that question? Maybe I have it here.
Okay, I will bring it up here. Let’s see, so this particular question, just what CRM are you using today within your organization? You can select more than one. And you’re just curious as to the folks out there, as to what your background is from a tool perspective.
And we understand you might not see your tool listed out here. That’s okay. We were limited as to the number of tools that we could put there. So we tried to pick some more of the popular ones, but we definitely understand it’s not all of them at the end of the day.
So thank you all for responding there. It’s good. Looks like Bullhorn is the most popular one out there, which isn’t surprising. Naturally, that’s its core bread and butter and focus is for the staffing and recruiting industry as a whole.
So that definitely makes sense. And thank you for everybody for responding to that. All right. So if we were to go look at, what could this potentially look like? And so with that, we have a dashboard and this dashboard is pulling together multiple data sources.
One of these data sources is a CRM. Another one is a source that tracks your communications, your outbound, your inbound communications through phone and text messaging, and allows a number of ways to slice and dice this information.
We can look at things as a whole across everybody on a daily basis. And in this particular instance, we’re really looking at things for a particular week. So if we look at last week, what was that productivity that we had last week from the different folks and knowing that, okay, last week, perhaps your business does most of your communications on a Monday through Friday.
Well, that’s all right. There’s plenty of communications that happen at night or on the weekends that, and you wanna be able to capture all of those, but you should see a pattern of having less communications on the weekend compared to your weekday.
So there’s one thing to say, I had a number of communications through a text or phone, but then there’s the natural logging of, well, did that information actually get set up and entered into the CRM?
So it’s one thing to have a phone call, but well, who did you call and what did you naturally talk about? And to have that information, that data logged, you’re able to do that within the system here. So again, we’re pulling from the customer’s CRM, and then we pull from some of the call and text system at the same time as to where that information is tracked.
And really we bring that data together so it sits alongside each of the data sources so that we put those metrics. We also understand that there are gonna be times where those communications, you’ll have intra company communications, and then you’ll have naturally those communications outside of the company.
So to be able to delineate our two people within the team talking to each other, perhaps too frequently, relative to just talking to outside organizations. So we have to say on an individual day, we’re able to say, okay, for this particular day, we can see some of the productivity, which on a daily basis might be interesting, but it’s those patterns.
And when you see a high performer, you know, okay, the high performer, well, what does a high performer really mean and how do you get others within the organization to see and understand what that is?
If we look at…somebody here, Daryl, Daryl had 25 calls that lasted 38 minutes and we logged 22 of those calls into the CRM system. Well, those calls could be as simple as one of them. Those calls have been a voicemail and somebody called you back. So that’s why you might not have logged all 25 phone calls.
Great. Daryl appears to be doing a decent job in regards to kind of following the process from a tracking perspective. But then we look at somewhere down here, we also see some outliers.
So this individual, you know, Blythe, they had 24 calls that lasts 121 minutes. Like, okay, you know, decent amount of time, not great. But it had 429 text messages. Well, text messaging, yes, it is important within the construct of communication but it seems to be weighted in this particular instance quite heavily to text messages.
So is, you know, to be able to have the conversation with Blythe to say, what, why are you having so many text strings going on here? Maybe it’s legit, maybe it’s not, most likely it’s not. And should, you know, Blythe really be looking at having more conversations and less text messages.
If you can get ahold of somebody through a text message but then push them to have a phone call, great. Use that to your advantage. Try not to have an entire, you know, dialogue, you know, just on text messages. So that’s an opportunity to talk with Blythe in order to help facilitate, you know, those conversations.
Then we get on the opposite, you know, a little bit opposite spectrum here. You have Iggy who has 119 total calls, lasted 202 minutes. Okay, those are very short calls. Couple of text messages with only log 26 calls.
Why are they logging only 26 calls? You can go in and look and have a conversation with Iggy to say, all right, for whatever reason, you’re not logging these calls out of 119. We understand you might not get somebody you’re leaving voice mails or you’re playing Fonte.
That’s a natural course of any sort of relationship. However, in this one, we seem to be on the other side that there’s a lot of phone calls, but they’re only lasting about, you’re only logging 26. So again, all right, you need to follow the process.
You know, we have a process for a reason. And so in this particular instance, we look at, we’ve got, you know, almost 20 different employees that are really sales agents at the end of the day. And you’re able to look at their productivity just for a given week to say, all right, there’s opportunities for improvement, especially if you look at Iggy is or is not, you know, making their number from the amount of revenue.
But you can dive in even further and to be able to say, okay, Iggy at 119 total calls, great. I’m gonna go and find Iggy. We just wanna look at Iggy’s world at the end of the day here and to be able to say, all right, let’s find out some more of that, the details here relative to Iggy.
And we can go in and say, all right, let’s look at every communication, you know, okay. So they had a lot of these one minute calls to individuals. We’re able to see, you know, what company they were at and to be able to even dive into and say, all right, did you log this into CRM or not?
So now we can have a more detailed understanding. And these are conversations that you can have with Iggy to say, all right, you have a lot of one minute calls. That’s interesting, one minute, typically that would mean a voicemail.
And then you have a lot of different, you know, text messages, all right. Obviously you’re having just by looking at inbound and outbound text messages, you can tell between VEDA and Iggy, all right. They’re communicating back and forth, awesome, great.
And then just keep going further down. You can see we had a six minute phone call. All right, great, not bad. And then, we get some 10 minute and some six minute phone calls, let’s be able to say, wow, Iggy, you’re not really getting people on the phone to have meaningful conversations.
And so that’s a way to have more of a coaching type of conversation with Iggy to say, how are you trying to engage with these folks? And maybe it’s too hands off of an approach. It needs to be a little bit more forthcoming or aggressive, but this at least allows you to have that constructive conversation.
You’re not using a stick, so to speak, to say, wow, Iggy, you just need more minutes with people, go make it happen. No, let’s figure out and look at individual components here to say, all right, Iggy, your two minutes conversation with Nicola here, what did you talk about?
And what did that overall larger conversation look like throughout the week with Nicola and what opportunity you’re working and to be able to coach Iggy to be more productive. That’s really when you look at that sales manager, employee perspective, using data to help facilitate that conversation.
And if we go back and we just say, we’re gonna select everybody again, reports are gonna rerun. And you can look at, all right, the amount of minutes by employee, the total number of calls, and you’re able to see patterns and to say, great, look at the Iggy example, all right.
Iggy had it, call it in the middle from the number of minutes that he spoke to somebody throughout the week, but he had the most amount of calls. Well, all right, Iggy, what did your week look like? And were you just trying to just call anybody and everybody were you being proactive or reactive to different conversations?
And then to be able to also look at just even by, let me zoom out here, the time of day that people are having phone calls, you’re gonna see a natural spread between the normal business hours within the day. And then just even looking further down, what are those busy times of the day and are those busy relative how you would expect them to be?
So that’s one way to look at and leverage data, but there’s also from an audit perspective when you look into your CRM, the data is only good as to the data that you put in there. And so within the CRM, each CRM has some strengths and weaknesses, but a lot of times it’s really data entry at the end of the day that is your core bread and butter.
So to be able to say, well, what are some of these duplicate phone numbers that you have within your CRM? And even people that perhaps that you have somebody’s name, but you have no phone and no email, well, is that really a person or a contact that is worthwhile to have within your CRM?
But this gives you an opportunity to go and do some data cleanup at the same time. So lots of different ways in order to use data in order to help drive and make your organization better. So when we think about leveraging technology or leveraging data to make better decisions, you want that, whatever that end solution is, you want it to be easy to access and on demand.
Then when we say easy to access, I need to hit a web browser, just have me put in some credentials and I should be able to get that information by automatically being directed into the dashboard. Don’t have me click on 47 different buttons, open up through different applications and download a bunch of information, combine it with another file, make it easy, but make it meaningful to that user.
So if your responsibility as a sales manager or sales leader is for a number of folks, that sales leader should be able to easily get to, be able to see how is his or her team performing. Again, don’t make them have to filter too much information in order to get the information that you’re looking for, but all comes down to leveraging technology.
It’s easy to use, it’s user friendly and it’s really intuitive. You don’t want to also set something up The data process and the reporting looks great. However, you have to have some sort of advanced degree in order to be able to leverage that technology.
You don’t want that at all. So when we think of how we did this, we looked at from a demo perspective, we did see that. But really at the end of the day, it’s all about taking the data from your different operational sources or maybe even one source.
Most likely multiple sources, put it together into the data cloud and then make it meaningful from a dashboard perspective so that you have centralized data and centralized dashboards for the different folks within your organization.
So let’s pause here. We’ll open this up for discussion and Q &A. So feel free to type in your questions. We’ll go ahead and respond to those as we see them come in. So let’s give it a moment here for some questions to come in and I’ll read them off as soon as I see them.
All right, so the first question is, do I need to have one of the CRMs that was listed in your poll in order to leverage this platform? Absolutely not. We understand that there’s many, many different types of CRM vendors out there.
We can connect to all of them and help you centralize that data and present that on the dashboard. So any CRM that’s based in the cloud, we’re able to easily connect to that CRM and bring your data in.
That’s a good question. Let’s see another question. Let’s see, one is, the recruiters rely heavily on email linked in for reach outs. Is this able to track those? So linked in depending upon how you’re doing the linked in.
So for example, if I was Mike Jellin, I’m just messaging individuals, I’m messaging David Chadwick and is this able to track that? Linked in does not provide that ability in order to say, all right, did Mike, how often did Mike communicate with David versus Heather versus Tom versus Sally?
So linked in does control, unfortunately, or I should say block that level of access. But from an email perspective, depending upon how you’re doing the email. So for example, if you’re in Outlook or Gmail, just by itself, we don’t have a built -in mechanism.
However, for some organizations, they will leverage communications, all communications, email, text messaging, even the phone call things through eight by eights or Ring Central that were able to tap into the data in those systems in order to bring that data in to the dashboard here.
Good question. And then how is phone call data or text data integrated here? So what we tap into from a corporate plan perspective, we see, for example, an organization, all of their sales agents have been provisioned a Verizon cell phone from their folks or from their company.
And so the company really owns that number and it’s on the company plan. And because the company owns that number, we’re able to pull in and access that call details. So if you have that type of a corporate plan, we’re easily able to tap into that data and centralize that and then marry that up with the data that’s in Bullhorn to be able to say who you’re calling, where’s that person from, from a company perspective, or maybe just if they’re an individual candidate to be able to show that information from that perspective.
Good question. All right, another question is abbreviate here. It seems to focus on the managerial level. How can an individual recruiter leverage this data as quantity does not always equate to quality?
Yeah, absolutely. So the same dashboard that we’re looking at, we looked at the Iggy example earlier, where this dashboard can be accessed by Iggy. And Iggy can go in and see, their data or perhaps Iggy has a manager or maybe you’re in a smaller organization and that there’s just the owner of the company and then there’s sales agents and everyone’s working to be able to look at, all right, how am I performing relative to the company goals that we’ve set out.
And those company goals, there’s gonna be revenue goals. All right, each individual is gonna naturally have a revenue goal that you can tie to. And so you’re absolutely right. Just because Iggy, for example, reached out to a hundred people, Viggy is landing two candidates per week and placing them.
And that revenue is what they need in order to make their number, then great. Iggy’s in a good spot, but if you have Tim and Tim is having 40 phone calls with people in the week, but he’s not landing any data or he’s not making his revenue number for the week, then it’s all right, we need to have a conversation with Tim around, what are you talking and how are you approaching these particular opportunities because productivity wise in one lens, which doesn’t tell the whole story, it seems that you’re having enough reachouts and communications, what’s the quality of those communications that is off and to be able to have that conversation with Tim to say, what are the coaching feedback items for Tim to be more productive?
Good questions, everybody. All right, and so then we have one final poll here before we let you go. So when we look at potentially meeting with discussing our particular staffing or your specific staffing and recruiting, now definitely let us know.
For those folks that ask the questions, we’d love to be able to dive into your particular use case and your situations to be able to help you and guide you. Of course, no expectation other than we’d love to give you some free advice and free direction and see where it goes from there.
So feel free to answer accordingly and we can go from there. So I see a couple of folks have answered. Thank you much. In conclusion, I really appreciate your time here today to really look at leveraging data to really help transform and drive forward your agency or staffing and recruiting firm.
We’d love to talk to you more if that makes sense for you, but otherwise feel free to check out our website for more information and for future webinars. But thank you everybody for coming. Appreciate it. Have a good rest of your day.
