When you first get your recruiting business off the ground, you’re focused on pretty basic things: #1, get a job order, and #2, submit a candidate they will interview. Once you accomplish those two goals, you’re off to the races.
But as your recruiting business starts to grow, so too do the data inputs – so much that it can be mind-boggling at times and sometimes downright impossible to keep track everything.
Your ATS (Applicant Tracking System) is a crucial tool and vital to capturing your data for further analysis.
As a pilot uses flight controls to fly her plane, so too does a recruiter use an ATS to drive her business.
The trick is, your ATS doesn’t work on autopilot. You must FEED data into the system, manually, if you want to have data to later analyze. So, it is imperative you track every:
- Candidate submission
- Interview
…you set up, so you can review at the end of each week all of the candidates you have in play and cross check them against all of the job orders you have in play.
Do this, and you’ll uncover new opportunities without having to look very hard for them. Case in point:
I had a candidate in my database (call him “Phil”) that I submitted to a job order a few weeks ago, and who we are waiting for feedback on in terms of next steps. At the same time, I now have a new contract-to-hire job order with ACME Corp. that Phil would be a great fit for, but I forgot about Phil, because I have twenty or thirty other candidates I’m working with.
By reviewing my “Active Candidates” report (which is just a download from CATSOne of all of the candidates I have submitted or interviewing in the past 30 days), I am reminder of Phil. When I open up Phil’s profile in CATS, I see that his last position was a contract role, and he’s currently in between contracts. BINGO! This is a candidate that I need to try and place, immediately! Better yet, he may be my MPC – the most placeable candidate (more on that in a moment.)
I look back at my open job orders and see the position at ACME Corp and realize Phil is great for it. Now, not only can I go back to Phil and let him know that even though we don’t know his status at the company he interviewed at, ACME might be interested in his profile for their opening. That gives me a new potential CANDIDATE SUBMISSION on the new job order, and I’m a happy person!
Now, Phil may or may not be my most placement candidate, but I can figure that out pretty quick, just like I can figure out whether or not the position at ACME corp is my most fillable job order. I talk about that in this new video:
The most important thing here is that you realize that your recruiting business is like a river, ever ebbing, ever flowing, constantly changing from day to day. You would not put your raft in Class V whitewater without first surveying the conditions, nor should you attempt to operate your business by coming in every day and assuming “you’ll figure it out.”
It reminds me of when I first started in this business, they used to have you plan each day’s calls in a big, stuffy “call planner”, the kind you imagine some out-of-shape guy in the 1970s sweating over while smoking a cigarette and drinking cold coffee in a short-sleeve button down shirt and brown tie. I can’t find the actual one I’m thinking of, but the pages looked something like this:
Obviously, there are far more effective ways to plan our days. And I’m not saying you need to literally write down everyone you plan to call, but you do need to, at a minimum, keep track of every candidate you are submitting and scheduling interviews for, and every job order you are working on, because there will be opportunities to tie things together you wouldn’t otherwise have thought of if you weren’t keeping track of everything. It feels so good to say that, so let me say it again. If you keep track of all of your activity,
You will discover opportunities to tie things together you otherwise would never have though about on your own.
And remember – your recruiting business is a living, breathing thing. You must constantly be refreshing your activity using the data to inform you investing your time in SMART ACTIVITY.
Despite what you may have hard, not ALL activity is created equal.
