In this roundtable discussion, Crelate’s staffing and recruiting industry experts explored the most important metrics for staffing and recruiting agencies in 2021, and how insights garnered from this information can lead to greater agency success.
Transcript
Sean Leslie:
Okay. If you panelists are all ready, I think we can get rolling. So welcome, big hello to our attendees today. Thank you for joining us for this Crelate webinar on recruiting and staffing metrics. Big thank you to our panelists, Chris Hesson, Tim Keckler, and Sarah Koss. Again, thanks for joining us. We’re excited to get rolling.
Sean Leslie:
We’re going to talk about metrics and how, with proper analysis they can provide insight into business performance that can lead to smarter, more informed decisions. In the world of staffing and recruiting, there are countless metrics that can be tracked, but which of these gives you the best insight into your business? And how do you properly analyze them to inform better decision making?
And with that, I’ll introduce our panelists. So, first of all, I’d like to introduce Chris Hesson. Chris is Crelate’s senior product consultant. He’s also an MRI consultant and a former recruiter, but there’s more to you than just your title, Chris. If you wanted to dive into your background a little bit more than that, please feel free.
Chris Hesson:
Thanks so much for having us here. Ultimately, I still view myself as being a recruiter. I haven’t run a desk in a while, but that’s where I started off. That’s where I cut my teeth. I worked on the temporary and interim side in clinical staffing. I did fully retained leadership search, as well, and I worked in the contingent market. So I really ran the gamut as far as agency or external search goes.
My goal is to work with our customers on how they can use technology to really operationalize efficiency in their business. How can you ultimately make faster placements, and make more money, and have technology do a lot of the heavy lifting for you? So that’ll be my take through most of this.
Sean Leslie:
Awesome. Thanks, Chris. We’re excited to have you here.
Next I wanted to introduce Tim Keckler who is a senior account executive at Crelate and an expert in custom technology solution implementations for staffing firms. And if you wanted to explain a little bit more about what that means, Tim, please feel free.
Tim Keckler:
Sure. Sean, thanks so much for having me. This is really exciting. I spent the last several years listening to different recruiter’s processes in different organizations and the magic they bring to recruiting and staffing. And lately I’ve been working on the sales side of that, embracing the vision, just diving into what’s possible.
And when it comes to building custom software solutions, I’ve heard all types of different processes described to me, subprocesses, metrics. A lot of which we’ll be talking about today, but all of those require something special to be done there. And that’s where I fit in, helping those organizations realize the dream or the vision and build that into their standard processes.
Sean Leslie:
Excellent. And then last, but certainly not least, Sarah Koss. Sarah is Crelate’s product owner and a former staffing agency VP of service operations. So Sarah is an expert in all the staffing metrics. If you just wanted to talk a little bit about your background, Sarah.
Sarah Koss:
Of course. Thank you, Sean. I’m super excited to be here today. Like Sean mentioned, I’m a senior product manager today, but in my past life I did run a staffing agency. I did temp direct hire staffing really focused on that nonclinical healthcare, admin, finance, tech, you name it. That was my world. And being an operations leader, I’m a reporting gal. Show me those reports, let’s motivate a team, let’s use data to drive decisions. That was my life. So not only have I done that, I’ve got a lot of experience in MSP contracts. I had a big MSP contract when I was in staffing EOR, all sorts of different types of staffing. I love that I’ve been able to really bring that real life experience into my product role today to really be that voice of the customer. I’m excited to get to be heard today with all of you.
Sean Leslie:
Awesome. Thank you, Sarah. And so with that, I would like to just lob in a question as I promised and get this roundtable discussion going. So we talked about starting off with some recruiting metrics. Recruiting is the first step in the flow.
What staffing and recruiting metrics you find most useful, and why?
And I was just wondering, Chris and Tim, if you could speak to what staffing and recruiting metrics you find most useful and why. And then how do you properly analyze them and make them actionable to drive business improvements?
Tim Keckler:
I’m going to use the term KPI, but I think foundational reporting measures activity. Where are we spending our time during the day? Who are we talking to, how long are we talking to them, and what are we talking to them about?
When we’re talking about actionable KPIs, we’re oftentimes talking about what these metrics can expose to us. And if I get a big picture of where we’re spending our time, who we’re talking to, I can start to see this big picture of here’s our bottlenecks because we’re making far too many calls or we don’t have enough offers compared to the number of calls that we have.
Chris Hesson:
Yeah. First off, I liked that you said the word actionable because I think there’s a big disconnect between just a KPI and one that you’re going to take action, make informed business decisions with. And I think that is really going to be the crux and I’ve seen recruiting firms both internal HR shops as well as agencies really go one of two different directions. One, they measure everything, including how many times did you cough during the day and trying to find some bit of minutia from that data. They don’t track everything and just hope it works. So I think, for me, it’s actionable. And I’ve worked with a lot of firms where they’ve really built that pipeline so that they can diagnose problems. And I think diagnostic metrics are some of the most actionable you can come across. So when I ran my desk and when I ran a team, I would look at what is my submittal to first send out rate.
Chris Hesson:
So of the people I submitted, how many or what percentage of them made it to a first interview? What’s the percentage of people that got a first interview and continued on? And I would be able to use those metrics to help understand is my team lobbing things over the fence and seeing what sticks. If that’s the case, I will have a very, very low submittal for send out or first interview ratio. If it’s high, I’m presenting on paper what my client says they want.
Now, that is on paper. We all know there’s the human element, the cultural element or personal element because companies are not hiring pieces of paper. So that second metric of now that they looked good on paper and my client talked to them, what percentage of them are moving forward? And I like to look at where is this number and how is it trending. I think for a lot of firms, especially if you have not been capturing metrics, please don’t go out there and say, “Hey, what are the averages? What should it be?”
Chris Hesson:
Start tracking it yourself and start to look at where are you trending, which direction are you going, because recruiting is such a nuanced industry because every type of client is different. If you’re recruiting accountant, you’re going to have different numbers than if you’re recruiting developers or if you’re recruiting people in HR.
Don’t try to compare yourself to another firm, compare yourself to where you were last week or where you were yesterday.
I’ve worked with firms where they took those metrics a step further. They went as far back as how many resumes or screening calls did I have to have in order to submit a person over to a client? How many calls did I have to make in order to get somebody on the phone to screen them? So I’ve worked with firms where they could go backwards to how many calls did somebody make in a day and tell you probably within five or six bucks how much they would make next quarter.
Chris Hesson:
And at its core, I think recruiting is a very, very metric driven business, but look at those actual metrics. And think of what is this data telling me and how can I change. Don’t collect the data just to collect it, make that decision upon it.
Sean Leslie:
That’s right. You mentioned collecting the data and then not having it drive any action is something you’ve also seen, but, Tim, there was something you wanted to add there.
Tim Keckler:
No, that’s actually the part of the question that I wanted to speak on, was when a lot of people hear KPIs they do think of how many units, how much activity. And somewhere somebody has defined a bar of success with that and I think that tracking those metrics is extremely important at a foundational level, but they only tell part of the story. It has to evolve into something actionable, it has to evolve into a bigger picture?
Sarah Koss:
I would say, too, as someone who has led a recruiting team, I think what I’ve experienced as I was learning the industry, I wanted to track everything. As Chris said, how many times did you sneeze or cough during the day, that is very real. And something that I learned very fast is you can quickly get into these silos where you’re actually rewarding bad behavior.
When you’re looking at actually how many calls did you make, it’s not how many calls did you make, it’s the quality of those calls. It’s not how many people you submitted at the end of the day, it’s how many people actually got interviews. So, to Chris’ point, yes, you can track everything, but at the end of the day you’re always refining what that looks like because your numbers may be totally different.
What are the types of behaviors that you want to reward, which I think was a really good learning for me in the industry and something I want to make sure we chat about today.
Sean Leslie:
Sarah, being an expert on this having led a staffing agency, are there metrics that you focus on more and why? And what sort of actions did they drive?
Sarah Koss:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve got a few that I’m pretty passionate about. I’ll maybe take it in pieces, but the first thing is margin. What is your gross margin and your gross profit? And that at the end of the day is how much money are you truly making? It is one thing to look at revenue. I think a very common mistake is that a lot of staffing agencies just look at revenue.
At the end of the day, you have to figure out things like your burden rate. You have to know how much these payroll costs are because, yes, you could be generating all the revenue in the world, but if your costs are too high and your service fees are low, or you’re giving lots of discounts, you’re not actually truly making a lot of money at the end of the day. So really understanding all those regulatory costs. Sure, they are not sexy, but these are the things that make your business grow and the things that help you sustain what is a very cash heavy business. I would say another thing that I cared a lot about is redeployment.
Sarah Koss:
And I know that Chris and Tim probably have a lot of opinions on this, as well, because this is for me this really unturned rock in a lot of staffing and recruiting agencies. People don’t track this a lot. It is something that I’m very passionate about and basically at a high level when you look at the cost to get a new employee, so your employee acquisition cost, it’s high because not only are you getting that job order, you are paying a job board to post it. So you’re using your job credits, you are interviewing, you’re screening, you are going through this whole process.
It is so much easier to have somebody that’s on an assignment go to another assignment rather than having to acquire a brand new employee again and again. So one metric that I really paid attention to was my redeployment rate. And we build tools and the ability to view these assignments. When are these people coming off of an assignment? How can I get them on another assignment without ever having a break in work?
Sarah Koss:
And feel free, Tim or Chris, if you have opinions on this or if you’ve seen this work or not, but for me it was like I incented my people on this. I was like, “Hey, you get a bonus every time you redeploy someone,” because at the end of the day we’re helping people stay working, we’re keeping our customers happy, and our company is making more margin. We’re making more money on this because we’re not having to spend all that time on the job boards, and posting, and interviewing, and screening. So that is something.
Chris Hesson:
And those don’t have to be incredibly expensive rewards. The things I’ve seen people do for a $20 Amazon gift card, in all reality there’s not a lot I wouldn’t do for a $25 gift card… So when you look at incentivizing that behavior, this doesn’t have to be you’re cutting a gigantic check. Hey, you’ve got a placement today? Awesome, I worked at a firm where, if you made a placement that day, you were done, you’d leave. I mean, how cool is that? That’s an incentive. Well, if I make a placement every day I can go home early. Well, I’m only working four hours a day, but you’re making a placement every day. Who cares at that point? So these do not have to be expensive incentives, but I love the incentivize the behavior you want repeated.
Sean Leslie:
And it keeps your employees happy, too. They come off assignment and there’s another job for them right there, lickety-split.
Chris Hesson:
Absolutely.
Sean Leslie:
Tim, is there anything you wanted to add there?
Tim Keckler:
I think the incentive part of that is extremely interesting. What Sarah was mentioning is a concept that I’m hearing quite a lot about, this concept of talent on tap or talent inventory. And that’s because we have the employees, and they’re ready to go, and we know they’re coming off of assignment. They’re a shoe in for these new contracts that we’re going to get. So how do we start to measure again the amount of talent that’s becoming available and the amount of potential projects that we have upcoming and suiting the two or marrying the two. And I think that it’s always really good to have those employees on tap and go to that pool first rather than, like Sarah was saying, the more expensive hiring route.
Sean Leslie:
For sure. And, Tim, something that you spoke about before, and I know there’s an excellent video of you from a conference last year on building the perfect reporting dashboard. And that’s something we can totally share out after the webinar, but you had spoken a little bit to how that dashboard tells a story, and choosing the right metrics helps you get the story of how your agency is doing, and maybe some areas for improvement, and that kind of thing. I was hoping you could speak to that a little bit.
How would you build your recruiting metrics dashboard?
Tim Keckler:
For sure. I don’t know if anybody attended any conferences this year, but they were all the first stab at virtual conferences. It was pretty fun, all things considered. It might pave the way for technology to make us able to connect from a distance, but I did. I spoke a little on building out metrics dashboards there and I feel like there’s certain concepts that are really important to pay attention to. Take forecasting and measurement, both of them are extremely important. And what I said earlier when I mentioned things like foundational KPIs, and activity units, and number of calls, and submittals, and texts, and emails, and in mails, that really is the beginning to a bigger story.
I think that the metrics dashboard that you want to end up with or that is your continual work in progress over time is really one that takes and evolves those metrics and tells a really big story.
Tim Keckler:
I’m quoting a mentor when I say I’m not interested in being the best at being lucky.
And what that means is we need to really have metrics dashboards that tell us how we achieved a certain amount of success. We’ve all come to those meetings where we had an upset or we had success where we thought we were going to fail. And it’s important in those times to ask, “how?” “What did we do differently? What went our way?” And a good metrics dashboard and the right kind of mixture of metrics on a dashboard can really expose that pretty quickly.
Sean Leslie:
Well said. Chris, is there something you wanted to add there?
Chris Hesson:
Yeah, I think when you look at that story, I think often firms focus on only one part of the equation. And often they’re talking about those recruiting metrics of what does it take to acquire talent and build in inventory. And that could be across staffing, fully retained, whatever it is. They’re often very driven on that side of the operations function and sales often gets … It’s the wild west. They’ll have very strict metrics, very driven policy for what their recruiters are supposed to do, but on the sales side it’s just get it done.
I think there’s a huge glaring opportunity for more firms to really analyze that business development, business acquisition, or client acquisition model of understanding what does it take to bring in a potential deal.
If your firm does have metrics, if you track on the recruiting side, try to find their parallels on your sales or business development end as far as what’s the conversion ratio of contracts I’ve sent out to placements I’ve made. Getting a contract signed is not a win. Getting paid, that is the win.
And you could send 100 contracts out every day and if nobody signs them, you never make a placement. It doesn’t matter, you’ll fail. So let’s start analyzing what we have there. This ties into something I think Crelate does very well with the CRM component, but managing your sales pipeline and sales funnel. I worked with another ATS and it didn’t have anything, so I had a whiteboard behind my desk. And I would just write on the whiteboard here’s the deals I’m trying to bring in and clients I’m trying to reach out to. And I would just move things around on my whiteboard and it was a mess.
Why don’t we use our system to manage? What are these opportunities we’re learning about? What’s the potential cash value of these? What’s our probability to make a placement? I mean, really treat your business like a sophisticated sales organization because there is so much inefficiency on acquiring a new opportunity. And I think a lot of firms will be shocked to look back and see the level of effort it took to bring in one deal.
This also starts to tie in are you making placements on the right things? The first retainer I ever sold I think took 18 months and 37 candidates to place. If I did not work on that, I probably would’ve made a whole lot more money because I wasn’t wasting my time with a bad deal.
Look back at your metrics to indicate, are there trends you can analyze to say are these the right companies I should be working with, are these the right jobs I should be doing? Chasing that short term money can often end in heartbreak because you’re missing out on something longer term.
Sarah Koss:
I have to jump in and share a relatable moment, is when you said, Chris, that you have this whiteboard behind your desk. I feel like that is every staffing agency’s reality. We are queens and kings of the paper checklist, of putting things on a visual board, because no matter what, every ATS CRM system that I had ever used in the past, it was that’s how you tracked things.
It was hard to find it in your system. It was hard to see workflows, it was hard to see that pipeline and that funnel. Yes, I can tell you every single morning in my staffing agency, you know what we did? We gathered around a whiteboard and we talked through all of our opportunities, all of our pending sales.
And that workflow piece that I know that we’re very passionate about at Crelate, that ability to drag and drop and see everything in one view, I remember that was a game changer for me when I was looking to coming onboard here. I was like, “Man, if I would’ve had that, I could’ve taken away that manual process.” So I’m a huge fan.
Sean Leslie:
Yeah. It’s awesome to have someone with that kind of experience designing our products. Sarah, you had mentioned, speaking of staffing again, that some of the metrics you were tracking were things like gross margin. And you mentioned that that is an area that trips a lot of people up. Anything you wanted to add there?
Sarah Koss:
Yeah, I think that when you’re looking at your gross profit and your gross margin, it’s not an easy thing to get excited about. It’s not an easy thing to learn and to really dive in on. And I think when you’re looking at those KPIs I think it takes a really deep understanding of why is your market price the way it is. What is your burden rate? What is your service rate? I think a really common misconception of those in the staffing agency is that you charge so much. The pay rate’s this. Why is the bill rate that high? What are you truly marking up that much?
What I think people don’t understand is in that it’s all your payroll costs, so things like FUTA, SUTA, all the regulatory costs. You’ve got benefits in there, you’ve got all these business items that are built into that bill rate and then you have a service fee. And I’ll tell you what, guys, that service fee is not that big.
And it’s a service fee per hour, so I think that it’s important to not just look at revenue, to look at your entire gross margin, what you’re truly making at the end of the day, and then base decisions around that.
If you’re just looking at revenue, you’re not truly understanding that health of the business. And we give discounts, there’s always discounts on bill rates, there’s always chances where you make more or less gross margin depending on your bill rates and your pay rates. So really understanding that part of it and knowing what those costs are, that to me was that breakthrough moment where I was like, “Wow.” This is how I price myself to not only be competitive, but to be competitive within your own business as well.
Sean Leslie:
Awesome, very cool. So you’ve mentioned you can track everything from how often you cough during the day to actionable metrics. Are there metrics you found that are often tracked that aren’t as useful as perhaps people think they are?
Commonly tracked but less-useful recruiting metrics
Tim Keckler:
So when you have all of those metrics, what you’re really looking to do is you’re looking to identify the amount of X that it takes to achieve Y. So take all of those commonly tracked, but not necessarily useful metrics, how many emails did I send. If I want to say recruiter A has made 25 phone calls today, pretty good by some standards. Recruiter B made six phone calls today. At the end of the week we add all of those up, but recruiter B making only a fraction of the amount of phone calls has double the offers on the table. And I think that’s where those metrics, though they’re not extremely important to track by themselves can evolve into telling that story.
Well, what can we learn from recruiter B there who obviously is making more impactful? This goes back to what Sarah was saying before about the quality of those different things that we’re tracking. What’s recruiter B doing over there that we need to pay attention to because the offer acceptance rate has nearly doubled than recruiter A who’s doing double the amount of work to achieve lesser results.
Chris Hesson:
I think to that point, Tim, a lot of it has to do with the sophistication of your team or people as individuals. I’ve trained and hired a lot of rookie recruiters and in the beginning they don’t have that level of sophistication. So, for me, I want to measure activity. That’s a huge telling for someone who’s very, very new in their role. We all know recruiting is not a job for everybody. And if you’re not willing or able to put the activity in the beginning, you know you’re not going to come out on the other side.
However, later in the road for me it’s shifted from how many calls are you making to how many people are you talking to. And then the core metric for myself shifted to how many submittals are you getting. So I think you can look at your team and have KPIs, but don’t necessarily judge everybody by the same standard. I worked at a firm where we had someone who I think was our top billing recruiter.
Chris Hesson:
He worked Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:00 to 11:00 and billed $750,000, $800,000 in direct hire fees because he’d done it for 30 years. He was calling his friends at that point. You can’t measure a rookie to that level and say I only have to make eight calls. No, you didn’t see the 4,000 calls he made a week in his first five years. So I think having that sliding scale of what are you tracking, and what does that mean, and making that individual to your people on your team.
Sean Leslie:
That’s great.
Sarah Koss:
I just want to reiterate when we talk about rewarding good and bad behaviors. You always want to start with what the outcome is. So, Chris, when you’re measuring activity because you’ve got to get some skin in the game and you’ve got to do stuff to produce stuff. The two biggest ones for me, I’ve spoken about revenue. I never looked at revenue reports, I only looked at gross profit reports. So that is one thing that I can say.
The second is time to hire.
I feel like over and over again people care so much about time to hire. And I know Chris mentioned this at the beginning, time to hire is not always your best indicator of how hard you’re working and how good of candidates that you’re putting out there.
So I would say that’s a misconception of things that people track often. People are very incentive. How quick can you hire, but how often are you retaining those people? How good are those hires? Are they getting that temp to hire contract or are they ending after three months? So that would be one that I think I’d put out there.
Chris Hesson:
And on that point, and I will say this is something Crelate does not track natively, and I have demoed everybody and I’ve never seen anybody track this natively. For me, it was less of time to fill and time to hire, but time to present the winning candidate. If that’s a metric you guys can look at on your side, how long does it take your team to submit the person that ultimately gets placed?
Time to hire, especially on our side, you may present the right person within 48 hours, but your client takes six months to make a decision, how much is [inaudible] this now becomes a very valuable marketing metric, as well, when on our placements we average presenting you the winning candidate within three days or within a week. There can be really good metrics of is your team getting the right people. Now, if you have a big discrepancy between time to present and time to hire, how well are you managing or setting expectations with your client through the course of that process?
Sean Leslie:
Excellent. And this could be open to interpretation. How often do you think agencies should be tracking specific metrics in order to get any sense of performance? What has worked for you in the past?
How often should recruiting and staffing agencies be analyzing metrics?
Sarah Koss:
I think it’s something that if you’re not living in your reports all the time, then I think you’re missing data. So I would say personally there are reports you look at weekly, there’s reports that you look at monthly, and there’s reports that you look at quarterly. And something that I didn’t share earlier with this whole margin stuff is staffing is volatile.
So you might get a contract for a call center and you might hire 35 to 50 people in one month. And they might be doing a one month or two month project and then you look at your gross margins and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I made a lot of money that month. How am I going to repeat that?” So it’s important to always look weekly.
You want to know how many people are out on assignment, how many hours they’re billing for. You want to look monthly because you always want to beat your last year. You always want to beat your month last year, but then it’s great because you also want to beat your quarters. And sometimes where you get revenue will move months.
Maybe this call center job you got in May. Maybe next year you’re going to have it in June. So it’s really easy to get down and be like, “No, my month is down or my week is down in my margin or in my gross profit,” but when you look at the singular and then more holistically then you get a better sense of your health of the business. It’s important that you know all of it. You can’t just look at one weekly report or just one monthly report and get that full snapshot of the health of your business.
Sean Leslie:
Yeah, great insights. Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you wanted to address when it came to metrics, and KPIs, and how the right analysis can drive improvements?
Sarah Koss:
Sorry, can I answer the question that came up in chat?
Sean Leslie:
Yes, absolutely. We had a question, I think you’re speaking about bill rate. Is that correct?
Sarah Koss:
Yeah. So, Aaron, thank you for asking your question here. So I’m not sure if everyone can see this, but what he had asked is how do you choose your markup and your bill rate. And what does that look like and how do you get started? And one thing that I found really fascinating in staffing is that your fees and your rates, they change by the industry and the type of recruiting that you’re doing.
So if you look and you take an administrative assistant and then you take a warehouse worker, one of those is probably at a higher risk to get injured than the other. And your costs are going to be different for both of those. So your FUTA, your SUTA, your unemployment, all of that is much higher for that person in that warehouse versus your person that is working at a desk job. So when my company, when we were evaluating what our markup rates were, we had a gross margin calculator.
And I hope there’s some staffing people on this call that have one of these as well because I feel like we’re notorious for having these really crazy calculators that have everything in there. So you have your different rates, you know where you make the money and you don’t. So you can charge a higher rate on the jobs with more risk and you can charge a lower rate for the jobs with less risk.
So, Aaron, I wish I had a perfect calculation for you, but what I would say at 60%, 65% markup, that’s standard. At least here in Seattle that is what people do, but you also have to think about what your costs are. So what are the regulatory and the payroll costs? Are you paying someone to do your payroll and to be an EOR or are you taking on that responsibility? And then also think about the service that you’re providing. I know that for some customers we did Wonderlic tests. And so for them our service that we provided was higher, therefore our markup was higher.
So it’s a game, it’s a little dance, but what I will share more than anything is be transparent with your customers about your pricing because you’ll build trust a lot faster. The more transparent you are, and you talk through, and you share those bill rates, and those pay rates in your service fee, and what they’re getting, and the value that they’re getting from you I believe the better relationship that you’ll create with those customers. And then they’ll choose you over the other agencies in the future.
Sean Leslie:
Great answer, Sarah. And Aaron gives you a big thumbs up. He said thank you.
Tim Keckler:
To tack on to something that Sarah was saying there. The most mature organizations understand things like seasonality, things by differing bill rates by job title and things like that. And I think this is where metrics can become extremely beneficial in tracking that. Well, what were we looking at last year for the same bill rate? What were we looking at by role, that sort of thing? A good metrics dashboard is going to be able to track all of that kind of information, surface what we were doing at certain times, and where we found that success.
Sean Leslie:
Great. Awesome. Anything else before we invite some more attendee questions?
Chris Hesson:
Only thing I have to add is in order to have your tool pull this data and these dashboards out, you have to put it in the first time. Especially if you look at our opportunities, you can track bill rates, pay rates, margins. You can create custom fields to track anything that’s not there. If you’re not putting this information in your tool, there’s no way you’re going to be able to get it out in a usable format.
And it doesn’t take long to really manage it, so look at where are those points where you think you can improve because once you start tracking a lot of different data points you’re going to realize there’s other places that will be more impactful. Hey, if we shift focus here or if I provide additional training to my team here, you can see a greater result in revenue and profit down the line.
Sean Leslie:
That’s awesome. Thanks, Chris. We had a question asking if there was going to be a webinar on how to use Crelate to do metrics tracking and for sure. If people want a demo, I’m going to send out a demo link after the webinar. You can also find the page on their site, so please feel free to reach out either via the registration email that I sent out, or via the website, or however you like.
One last question I think as we’re butting up against our time limit here, but we were wondering if there are any lesser used metrics that perhaps any of you have seen that you’ve also seen to be beneficial.
Other beneficial metrics
Tim Keckler:
I think there’s some lesser used metrics that databases typically don’t track. If you think about the lifecycle of recruiting, we’re in from the client, out to recruiting. We match the talent and it’s out the door. We’re developing all these relationships with talent, as well, on the other side. And some industries focus on this type of recruiting entirely, very candidate centric. Your specialists, your engineers, you got legal. The idea here is that we are using our talents in order to create opportunity from the clients. And I think that it’s extremely beneficial to track that because we’re making one placement when we get a requisition, or we’re filling five warehouse workers, or we’re sending several nurses out on site, that sort of thing.
We have this entire untapped talent pipeline that we can then use to create other opportunity with. And I think if we look at the candidate side of the house, what we’re not seeing a lot that I think is extremely beneficial is what’s our probability to place a certain candidate? How much money is a certain candidate worth to us if we place them versus an opportunity that we get from a client?
So I think more metrics and analytics on the candidate side of the house. And what we’re doing in order to create opportunities with most placable candidates and things of that nature.
Sean Leslie:
Awesome. Thanks, Tim. Chris or Sarah, is there anything you’d like to add there or anything in general before we wrap up?
Chris Hesson:
Yeah, I think I mentioned my favorite, the time to present. And not just time to present, but time to present the winning candidate. I think both of those become very valuable metrics. My goal with any new search was I wanted to have at least a test candidate into my client within 72 hours. That was going to give me a good line of sight to understand how serious are they, are they going to be responsive. If I present a candidate and the client never gets back to me, I’m not going to waste my time in sending over any more.
So being quick and looking at how long does it take your team to get somebody in. And then looking back and saying how long does it take my team to get the right person over to the client. I think that’s going to help you understand your sourcing capabilities, maybe even understand the health of your database. Are these people coming from job boards?
Are these people coming from inside your database or are you going out on LinkedIn and having to pull new people every single time? And how can you become faster as you move forward?
Sarah Koss:
Chris, you just brought up such a good point, is understanding where your candidates and where your leads are coming from. I would say that that is something that I didn’t start tracking until I became more of an expert. It was one of the things that it was like, “Okay, how many people do we need on an assignment each month? How much margin do we need to bring in?” But then when you start digging into most of my candidates come from ZipRecruiter, over Indeed, or these types of candidates come from this source and not the other. Then that’s how you make really good decisions on where your marketing budget goes. I need to put some more money in ZipRecruiter and have more job postings there or I need to be able to do an incentive.
Again, we really incented people on bringing their friends. Get a referral bonus because, again, we don’t have to post. That’s a win-win. We know them, they come from a mutual source, and same thing with your customers. How many of your customers are coming from a referral versus where are they finding you?
Once you can tap into that, and when you have the space, these are the things that you add on once you have a really good foundation. I mean, you can choose when you decide to focus on this, but when you know where things are coming, that’s when you can really dig in and figure out how you maximize those avenues or those channels.
Sean Leslie:
Great. Thank you, Sarah. If any of the attendees has a question, now would be the time to ask it. If not, I think we’re about to wrap up here. So I just wanted to say a big thank you to Chris, Tim, and Sarah. And I realize I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Sean. I am also at Crelate. And on the marketing team, I was listening carefully to Sarah talking about how you can drive up your marketing budget there. Always looking for more budget, but anyway, just wanted to say thank you. And, again, I’m going to send out a recording of this webinar afterwards along with a link to Crelate demo if people are interested. We had some questions about using Crelate to establish a metrics dashboard, as we’ve been discussing here, and that would be the place to do that. So just a big thank you to all the attendees. A huge thank you to our panelists here unless there’s anything else, Chris, Tim, or Sarah, you’d like to add. Hold on, we have some more questions coming in.
Sarah Koss:
I was just going to type an answer to Aaron. He was asking about referral bonuses. So we did two types of referral bonuses. So we did them for our employees that were out on assignments. So if they referred a friend or anyone who got hired, we would give them 50 bucks, or a Starbucks gift card, or something like that. You can choose your amount, what makes the most sense, but I will tell you what, people get real excited for that. And then on the other side we would do a client referral bonus. So a lot of the staffing that we did was in larger companies, so let’s say I had a relationship with the accounting department. And if my hiring manager referred another department’s manager or another company then we would give them a discount on their service fee for the next couple placements. So you can choose how you would like to do that, but I tell you what, people love free stuff. Even if it’s a $5 Starbucks gift card. They love feeling like they’re acknowledged, and that they’ve helped out, and that they’re getting rewarded for it.
Sean Leslie:
Awesome. Thank you, Sarah. Chris, Tim, any last thoughts?
Chris Hesson:
Other than just saying thank you for having us. This has been really exciting. Thank you for all the great questions. I see follow-up questions and things like that out there. If anybody has follow-up questions, Sean’s mentioned how you can get ahold of us. We’re happy to dive deeper any time you’re ready.
Sean Leslie:
Yeah, we’d love to hear from you. And on that note, thank you again, Chris, Tim, Sarah. Thank you to all the attendees and you will be hearing from us with just a post webinar recording and all that kind of stuff within a day or two. Thanks, again, and thank you, Chris, Tim, and Sarah. That was great.
Chris Hesson:
Thanks everyone. Thanks, Sean.
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