Are back-office demands slowing down your recruitment strategy?
UK recruitment has never been stronger, with employment levels at a record high. This makes life busy for HR personnel, but not always in the right way – are you fully able to capitalise on good conditions for attracting new talent?
A look into many businesses today shows that a vast amount of HR effort is being spent on managing the recruitment process, rather than finding the right people to employ and nurturing those relationships
The reality is that too much time is being spent on back-office tasks such as collating timesheets, formatting expense claims, managing invoices and payments – a recent US study revealed that administrative jobs such as these can take up 3-4 hours of each DAY for HR professionals
The result of this is that more resource is being put into mundane, everyday tasks that do not make a significant difference to the bigger picture, rather than focusing on value-add tasks
So how can the industry reduce the drain of recruitment admin for your business? Many HR leaders choose to work with an external agency for additional support, but this doesn’t always make the process quicker and easier
The secret to a stronger recruitment strategy – whether managed in-house or with an agency partner – is to remove the back-office burden, and this tends to be done most successfully through technology
The reason technology is the answer to greater operational efficiency is that it automates many of the recruitment tasks that currently take up a lot of time, leading to greater accuracy despite fewer man-hours being spent on those jobs
Examples of this include:
1. Timesheet and expense claim processing. Rather than expecting everyone to file documentation in the same format, back-office tech can process paperwork submitted in a number of different ways to create a single end figure
2. Chasing up missing information. Rather than this being a manual task, recruitment software can automatically send email/text notifications to those that have missed the deadline
3. Invoicing. Once all timesheets and expense forms have been submitted, back-end software can match data to the right client and automatically create invoices for payment
A number of tech companies are already working with recruitment agencies and HR professionals in the market to integrate this technology into their business, including ETZ, Voyager and TBOS
However, there is still a huge gap in the market for HR teams to either bring back-office software on board, or to work with a recruitment agency that uses such software, in order to reduce the burden of managing daily operations
Ultimately, HR teams are most productive when you can focus on the thing you do best, which is working with people – and for good reason. 47% of HR professionals say staff retention and turnover is their biggest challenge, with recruitment close behind
Anything you can do to reduce the time, effort and expense spent on admin, and focus on your recruitment strategy instead, is a positive gain
Therefore, savvy HR personnel should be looking into back-office technology available through companies like ETZ, as a way to remove time-consuming but low value tasks, and instead focus on bringing fresh talent into your business, and keeping the skilled staff you already have on board satisfied.
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