Recruitment agencies looking to hire or develop high-performing teams need a tech stack to match that ambition.
By investing in tools that help employees thrive in their roles and get the best return on their effort, business owners can create a positive cycle that boosts both attraction and retention.
When we talk about human-technology partnerships in recruitment, the tendency is to think about outcomes, efficiency, and bottom-line impact.
Sure, it’s a hugely important part of the story but it’s not the only angle worth considering.
The technology an agency invests in will have a direct impact on the performance of your team(s) but also your business’s ability to attract or retain the best recruiters, and by extension forms a central part of your Employer Value Proposition.
As agencies worldwide compete for the best recruitment talent on the market, there are some important reasons why technology is playing a bigger and bigger role in the challenge to build great teams.
Fuel Growth with Rookie Recruiters
Agencies who struggle to attract and retain experienced consultants can suffer slow corporate growth regardless of company size – even when client demand is high.
In contrast, recruitment firms using automation technology to successfully tap into the next generation of talent and help rookie recruiters to thrive can reap big rewards, growing fast and building high-performance teams from the ground up.
Recruitment agencies are built on people, and every ambitious company’s growth plans are governed by how quickly they can scale the teams required to win business and deliver candidates to their clients.
For many business owners, hiring seasoned consultants with previous agency experience feels like a safe path, sidestepping the need to invest in the detailed training required to build recruitment expertise in out-of-industry hires.
But ensuring a continual flow of proven performers – whilst retaining an existing team – is easier said than done, and many firms find their expansion held back by the challenge of hiring experienced consultants quickly enough to meet client demand or deliver on growth forecasts.
With the rise of automation in recruitment, agency owners and managers have recruitment tools in their armoury capable of rapidly developing junior hires and creating a new, large, and more relevant talent pool able to fuel fast-paced growth within a business.
Attracting Top Recruiters with the Best Recruitment Tech
The profile of automation technology in the recruitment industry has shifted in recent years, going from a ‘nice-to-have’ status to something that top recruiters expect to maximise their performance.
Recruiters who are serious about pushing themselves, their results and their earnings to the limit don’t just evaluate the market, culture and incentive plans of potential new employers, but also the tools they’ll be given to work with.
Employers who don’t invest in leading productivity tools can scare off tech-savvy applicants (from juniors to super-billers), sending out the signal that they either don’t understand the importance of automation in the modern recruitment industry or aren’t willing to invest.
Adopting a Blank Slate Mentality
For agencies who run their sales and sourcing processes with high levels of automation technology, rookie recruiters are an ideal option as they join the business with no working patterns or habits to ‘untrain’.
Although experienced consultants can offer valuable experience in managing clients and candidates throughout the recruitment cycle, they may also have workflows that they have depended on for many years – and which can be extremely hard to re-engineer with modern recruitment technology.
Embracing Automation From the Outset
This clean slate mentality provides rookies with a competitive edge in embracing cutting-edge tools, enabling them to learn the new technology alongside the role itself.
While many late adopters of recruitment automation tools may wonder how they ever used to do the job without them, new hires will know no other way.
This allows rookies to build their best-practice workflows around automation technologies, rather than having to bend their way of working to try and accommodate new tools that may not fit intuitively.
For the modern generation of recruitment trainees, automation becomes second nature.
Levelling the Recruitment Playing Field
Whereas the quest to find and secure high-performing, experienced consultants can be a long process, pairing rookie recruiters with an advanced recruitment technology stack allows business owners to hire more confidently without conducting a needle-in-a-haystack search.
Knowing that the right automation support will position new consultants to be successful – by automatically matching real-time leads and candidate pipeline – means agencies in growth mode can focus on greener hires with the right core attitudes and ambition levels rather than deep-diving for the experience.
With the technology enhancing the consultants’ chances of success, the available talent pool expands significantly – enabling fast-paced agencies to scale their teams and outperform their competition.
A Shortcut to Recruiter Upskilling
For a long time in recruitment there was no viable substitute for ‘years in the game’. The tips, tricks and habits of top billers took time to absorb, and it was accepted that consultants wouldn’t hit their stride until several years into their careers.
Disruptive technology, however, is changing the landscape by giving rookie recruiters an immediate view of what ‘excellent’ looks like, seeing from their first days in the industry how hyper-efficient recruiters operate and mirroring these workflows themselves.
New hires instantly see how expert searches are run, and how high-performing consultants track market opportunities in real time – rapidly connecting perfect candidate profiles with hot vacancies faster than their competitors.
Promoting Tech Stacks & Highlight Tech Adoption
As a direct result of this increase in the prominence of tech, more and more agencies are actively promoting their tech stacks in job advertisements and career pages as a way of demonstrating their commitment to giving their teams the best tools available.
This has a double benefit for business owners.
Firstly, it implies a tangible, practical impact on recruiter performance, indicating the increased billings and earnings on offer when joining the company. The rationale is simple – work with better tools, bill more and make more money.
Secondly, it represents an important stance by the company on both technology and reinvestment in general, positioning the business as a modern, tech-driven environment run by a team prepared to make the financial investment in a world-class technology and automation stack.
Cultivating a Word-of-Mouth Buzz
Technology that directly increases recruiter billings has a knock-on effect on business culture. Many high-growth agencies have benefitted from this market buzz, and often a hyper-efficient tech stack is a key ingredient for success.
Word quickly gets out into the market about environments where people are succeeding, growing rapidly, securing promotions and earning great money, leading to more referrals and ‘warm leads’ when it comes to talent acquisition.
Intelligent automation tools also help rookie recruiters ramp up their performance faster, making it easier and less financially risky to hire high-potential graduates. This in turn widens the available talent pool and increases the option for rapid growth.
Automating Repetitive Recruitment Tasks
Effective technology isn’t just about cranking out extra performance percentage points, it’s also about making sure that people love their jobs.
Tools which reduce time-consuming, repetitive tasks for recruiters free up their time to spend on the parts of the role that drive the most value – engaging with clients and candidates and putting together deals.
Understanding this and giving teams the support of a smart tech stack that compresses the amount of time they spend on low-value activities (replacing them with robotic automation) directly impacts how recruiters experience their work, while simultaneously boosting the output and reward for not only themselves but also your company.
To learn more about automation with SourceBreaker and leveraging powerful, high-performing technology, click here.
TL;DR Key Takeaways
- Investing in tools that help employees thrive in their roles and get the best return on their effort creates a positive cycle that boosts both attraction and retention.
- Technology an agency invests in will have a direct impact on the performance of its teams and the business’s ability to attract or retain top employees, forming a central part of the Employer Value Proposition.
- Recruitment firms using automation technology to tap into the next generation of talent and help rookie recruiters to thrive can reap big rewards and build high-performance teams from the ground up.
- Recruiters who are serious about pushing themselves, their results, and their earnings to the limit expect to have access to the best productivity tools.
- Employers who don’t invest in leading productivity tools can scare off tech-savvy applicants and send the signal that they don’t understand the importance of automation or aren’t willing to invest.
- Pairing rookie recruiters with an advanced recruitment technology stack allows business owners to hire more confidently without conducting a needle-in-a-haystack search and expands the available talent pool significantly.
- Disruptive technology gives rookie recruiters an immediate view of what ‘excellent’ looks like and allows them to mirror the workflows of hyper-efficient recruiters, rapidly connecting perfect candidate profiles with hot vacancies faster than their competitors.
