Coronavirus – recruiting and retention

May 13th, 2020 | Industry News

So much is up in the air for businesses in the UK, and few businesses have been as impacted as the recruiting industry. Even the best recruiting software cannot answer some of the questions being posed by, and to, the recruitment sector. Such as those about the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS). This scheme, which looked like a solution for much of the temporary employment sector, is still confusing many recruiters. Promised by the government, it cannot come soon enough for the UK’s temporary worker sector. It’s not clear whether holiday pay can be included in that 80% salary sum that can be claimed back from the government pot. This means that many recruiters are expecting to cover that payroll cost (12.7%) themselves. Others believe that they can include holiday pay in the 80% and that they will be refunded by HMRC. The confusion comes because furlough allows employers to ask their employees to vary holiday entitlement, but as there is a statutory 5.6 weeks paid leave, this must presumably be covered – whether by the employer or HMRC.

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Digital recruitment – a Recruit So Simple guide

April 28th, 2020 | Industry News

The COVID-19 lockdown has disrupted every aspect of our lives: home, work, social, romance – everything… but when it comes to keeping businesses running, or at least ticking over, there’s quite a lot of help around. Government grants and loans, business support seminars, banks offering payment holidays etc.

We have our contribution to make too. While many businesses are mothballed, others are working against the clock: research teams seeking vaccines, builders refurbishing premises to become hospitals, and frontline staff in many sectors. How can recruitment software help?

Well, digital recruitment has to be open and transparent, as well as cost effective and precise.

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Coronavirus and recruitment – the current impacts

April 16th, 2020 | Industry News

Even the most basic recruitment database software reveals that COVID-19 has had immense impacts on the UK job market. From a record employment high of 33 million in January, recruiting in many sectors has slowed, hiring freezes are commonplace and job losses are certain to follow. Volatility in the market is commonplace – much recruiting software has been scrambling to keep up with the need to find applicants for a range of sectors, whilst handling the need to put other forms of recruitment on hold for the period of the lockdown.

Who’s hiring through online recruitment software?

Healthcare and supply chain are the obvious sectors that are in a massive recruitment drive. Frontline NHS staff, social care personnel and new key-worker roles supporting those on self-isolation have all become positions it is vital to fill.

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Coronavirus recruitment crises and recruitment industry awards

March 28th, 2020 | Industry News

Whilst companies like Amazon and Ocado are recruiting madly to fulfil orders being placed by panicked consumers, other sectors like travel and hospitality are being hit hard – as are specialist recruitment organisations in those areas. Flybe has already gone out of business, and hotels and cruise lines are predicting the worse crisis for twenty years.

Much recruitment software is also struggling – first to keep pace with the demand for temporary retail and driving staff who are needed to work 24/7 to keep shelves stocked and orders packed and delivered, and second to be the kind of applicant tracking system that UK employers need; able to recognise and track people not just through skills but through travel patterns, so that high risk individuals can be recognised and infection flashpoints can be avoided.

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Recent Improvements To Our Recruitment Software

March 20th, 2020 | Company News

We added some new features and made some improvements to Recruit So Simple over the course of 2019, here are the highlights:

• Made it easier to customise the list of fields which must be filled out when a record is added to the database.
• Added a new type of goal in the system which can be used to track the performance of a group of consultants.
• Added a new toolbar to make navigating between recently viewed records much quicker and easier.
• Overhauled our CV parsing system resulting in better performance, higher accuracy, increased language support, and many, many more improvements under the hood.
• Made various security and performance improvements to keep things running smoothly and securely.

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Communications and immigration both challenge recruiters

March 17th, 2020 | Industry News

In a recent American survey, one of the key problems businesses experience when dealing with recruiters is… poor communication. While it may seem astonishing that clients are still experiencing a lack of feedback, one in four of the companies surveyed said that this was a major reason they ceased working with a recruitment agency.

Recruitment software is a good aid, but it’s not enough… the best recruitment CRM has inbuilt systems that encourage agencies to engage with their client base and even automates many communication processes such as six month follow-ups for placements, which it can be easy to neglect when a recruiter has moved on to the next task. Equally unpopular though, was necessary communication – ‘update calls’ containing no updates and general waffling when the client calls to find out the progress on their recruitment. Creating positive experiences is as vital for agencies as finding the right candidates. An applicant tracking system allows a consultancy to rapidly search all potential candidates and respond quickly to client queries.

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Screening and software – when data is a recruiter’s friend

March 2nd, 2020 | Industry News

One of the most important developments in recruitment has been the effect of digital processes. Smart recruiters use recruitment agency software to identify candidates, streamline recruitment and follow up on placements. Increasingly, recruiters use web based recruitment software as a screening process to identify likely locations for strong candidates and to investigate their backgrounds. Regulatory regimes are tightening up on how recruiters can screen candidates at the same time as employers are demanding deeper and more powerful evaluations of candidates, including social media activity, before interview. SAAS recruitment agencies have a distinct advantage, because they can use real-time data to update and inform their candidate profiles and to share relevant information with employers before decisions are made.

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation has recently published a blog post talking about what people need to know before starting a recruitment business. The second heading in this blog is ‘Data is your friend’. For sure! While they go on to plug their reports – and at Recruit So Simple we agree that knowing your industry is vital to success – we’d say that “data is your friend” in a much more fundamental way, when it comes to recruitment. Recruitment software can make or break your business for three reasons:

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Recruitment in focus

February 7th, 2020 | Industry News

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation has recently reported that on any given day in the previous year, the recruitment industry had placed over 1.1 million people in temporary and contract roles. It’s a great success story for the industry, especially as the report goes on to say that 82% of the firms that used recruitment agencies were satisfied with their service. A warning note is sounded by the average operating profit of 3.8%… suggesting that many agencies are not able to convert enough of their gross profit to operating profit. The reasons for this may be:

1. Excessive agency costs

The best online recruitment software helps agencies streamline their back office costs so they can reduce expenditure and create more operating profit.

2. Fire fighting

Recruiters can get stuck in a cycle of working on last minute placements or filling and refilling temporary placements in hard to recruit sectors. Over focusing on this kind of problem recruitment means they miss out on opportunities to expand. Recruitment management software that is sophisticated enough to automate many processes can free up consultants to look past the immediate issue and pursue longer-term strategies to grow their sectors.

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Recruitment 2020 – how to ride the trends to success

January 24th, 2020 | Industry News

There’s been a vast amount of change in the recruitment industry in the past decade, and no sign of these changes slowing down. In fact they seem to be accelerating. So how can recruitment agencies ride the crests and avoid the troughs?

The best recruitment CRM builds resilience in recruiters as well as in placements

Candidate relationship management software isn’t obviously a solution to the problems of recruiter stress and resilience, but increasingly we see that truly good recruitment management software actually helps an agency to be more adaptable and buoyant, for three reasons:

1. Recruitment software that supports relationship building with candidates often frees consultants up to focus on clients, building strong links and creating bonds
2. Recruitment CRM software allows consultants to check out their intuitive responses to a candidate boosting that difficult-to-define but invaluable element that allows a good consultant to make a judgement call about the way a candidate will fit into an organisation
3. Web-based recruitment software provides recruiters with the ability to instantaneously review and update candidate profiles and client vacancies, meaning that the agency moves faster to fill need, which boosts confidence as well as income.

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2020 – the vision for recruitment

January 14th, 2020 | Industry News

APSCo (The Association of Professional Staffing Companies) says that the number of recruitment companies in the UK has increased by 500% since the turn of the millennium. It’s an astonishing figure – even given the short life of a reasonable percentage of recruitment start-ups – so why the massive growth?

1. There isn’t universal agreement on the figures… other analysts suggest lower numbers are more accurate. Recruiting software isn’t purely purchased by recruitment agencies, many enterprises, such as consulting firms, purchase web based recruitment software as they have elements of head-hunting or employee retention activity in their remit.

2. Recruitment has become a much more specialised business in the last twenty years. Recruitment management software allows sophisticated applicant tracking, automated communications with potential clients and deep investigation of CVs to help highly focused recruitment decisions to be made rapidly but with stringent analysis. This individuation of the recruitment sector has led to many more smaller agencies establishing themselves in niche areas of the job market.

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