Shane's Recruitment Software Blog
30 minutes to become a genius or your money back.
At truLondon I ran an impromptu track to create a few geniuses. We had ten people take part and all were transformed within the allotted 30 minutes.
The process is actually quite simple. Firstly we ran a simple test of Intelligence, Dee Allen was the winner and borderline genius before we even started. After this we ran a creativity exercise to see just how creative people can be, then we ran the intelligence test again. Everyone in the room qualified as a genius.
This is a fun exercise that I have used in my own business and is based on work by Tony Buzan (the inventor of Mind Maps) and Edward DeBono (who developed the concept of lateral thinking). The intelligence test is Tony Buzans, it’s real and does give a good measure of creative intelligence. This is a massively powerful technique and it opens the door to achieving fantastic things within your business. I am interested in this area as it allows me to develop really clever products for the recruitment industry. By thinking creatively, we can invent all sorts of new ways of approaching the problems created by recruitment.
Since TruLondon I have been doing more research in this area and have found examples of how creative thinking has generated millions of dollars of sales for small companies. Perhaps, for truUSA, there may be another impromptu track and see if we can create even more geniuses. If anyone is interested, let me know.
Why invest in recruitment software?
I have often said that recruitment software is not about recording information, it's about retrieving it and doing something with it. Well, I'm going to say it again!
I seem to keep having the same conversation with prospective customers who say 'I just want something simple' but then go on to propose the most complex solutions to relatively simple problems and miss the point that so much more is possible with much less effort.
Todays video compares the standard simple solution, Excel, against what is possible with a little Intelligence. My though is that your starting point is the question that you want to answer and very often the solution will present itself.
So, How can you improve your business?
How can you make more placements?
Find better candidates?
Exclusively find vacancies to fill?
Always find the right people?
Never find the wrong people?
Work smarter?
Corporate vs Agency recruiters
I was looking at our software products and wondering why I don't have more corporate HR customers. I came from an agency background and I know how agencies work. We sell Intelligence with the promise of making agencies more money and this is quite a strong sales message. Unfortunately it is not a message that strikes a cord with corporate recruiters. Corporate recruiters don't make a commission, HR departments don't make a profit.
This has an obvious impact on how I sell to this market but it has an even more dramatic effect on the way these types of recruiters see themselves and think about recruitment. Agency recruiters need to make placements or they starve. Corporate recruiters are not motivated in this way and in fact I've seen a whole range of motivating factors that have influenced the recruitment process and hiring decisions.
For the agency recruiter it is often a race against the clock to present a few decent CVs before moving to the next assignment. If the job can't be filled quickly then the placement will be made by one of the many other agencies competing for the business. For the Corporate recruiter they need to keep everyone happy including the financial department who will be looking closely at the cost of recruitment. It is not in their interests to spend time working with one agency so that they really understand the brief, in fact, it is often the case that the corporate recruiter doesn't understand the brief themselves.
Given the short term motivations of both corporate and agency I sometimes wonder if getting the best person for the job features as a priority for either group.
This week has been about designing simpler software
I have been working for some time now on some new software. There are lots of things I want to do to enable cleverer smarter ways of working.
My problem however is that no matter how clever our software is, this is not necessarily immediately apparent to our customers and even less apparent to prospective customers.
This week therefore has been about looking at usability and trying to design complex products to look as simple as possible.
This of course is more than simply making something look nice, there is a much more significant purpose to my plan.
Information management is all about extracting value form information and conveying this to the user.
By designing the simplest and easiest to use products I am making this 'conveying this to the user' process as effective as possible. If its not easy to use then people wont use it.
Recruitment Software is not necessary!
I read a blog article which discussed wither a recruiter really needs recruitment software or an applicant tracking system.
The assumption of the blog was that the database is a storage space for all the companies information and that this was its primary purpose.
On this issue I feel I have to disagree. The information management system within a recruitment company should not be about storing information it should be about doing something with it to make more placements.
Drive Thru HR with Bryan Wempen
Bryan Wempen has asked me to come on his radio show Drive Thru HR to talk about how recruiters can work smarter and make more placements.
This is a subject I have been working on and talking about for years. Why is the recruitment process so inefficient? Why, with thousands of job seekers and thousands of employers, most recruiters make only a handful of placements.
It doesn't have to be this way. A good recruiter is not an average recruiter who just works harder. Good recruiters work in smarter ways that just work better than the average.
Listen or call into Bryans show and see if you can improve the way you recruit.
If you like this video blog please tweet it or recommend it to some friends.
Recruitment Software - Return on Investment
I received a call from a person about to start up a recruitment company and she wanted to know the price of our recruitment software.
Unfortunately that seemed to be all she wanted to know as this was the only criteria she was using to initialy select from lots of different recruitment software vendors.
Is it just me or does this seem ridiculous? How can someone make this business critical decision without any knowledge of what they are getting for their money?
I pointed out that cost is only one side of the equation and that the return of a good system should make this cost negligible. Any good system should return more than 10 times its cost.
She told me that in her previous company they had invested a lot of money in a system but did not know how to calculate roi. I asked if it made them more placements. She said it had not. My conclusion, roi = 0.
If your recruitment software vendor cannot demonstrate a ten fold roi and give you some sort of guarantee of this then perhaps you should look elsewhere.