How To Leverage Insights in Staffing

Managing a Staffing Business is like practicing an elite sport. It’s your mission to stay active, relevant and a high quality service provider to both professionals and customers alike.

After all, you won’t keep people happy in the long term, or stay ahead of the competition and the continuously changing market, by only celebrating momentary successes.

You are not just a high performer who is practicing a sport of endurance, but have set your eyes on being and remaining a front runner. And because of that, simply reacting to opportunities or threats when they appear will not be sufficient for you. Knowing where and when you may expect good fortune or adversity, allows you to preemptively adjust your course back to the horizon.

So how will you achieve this level of proactivity that you need to pass your endurance test? What you need is forward perspective, a glance into the future, so to say. Check out these five meaningful insights that ensure you will remain preemptive, efficient and effective. Like a sportsman, you will see those hurdles coming and you’ll have collected the right momentum and amount of strength to jump.

Tip 1: Set goals and keep your eyes on the WHY

I actually wanted to share this one with you last, because I think it makes for a proper take-home message. A cherry on the cake, if you will. But instead, I know I must start with this topic so that the rest of the story makes more sense.

Our first advice to you as a star player is to set goals, because actually goals provide your data with meaning. So what if a number, such as your monthly revenue or number of job applications, says 100, or 1,000 or 10,000? Is this a good or bad thing? Is this number keeping us on or off our course? The best way to answer this question is by setting goals and use them as an anchor of comparison. You know where you want to go with your business, so define what you need for that and then you’ll be able to determine whether or not the numbers ‘add up’ to that need.

Because let’s face it: numbers are interesting, but not always equally relevant. How do you know which goals are actually relevant and meaningful for your business? What do you truly and fundamentally need to keep going forward? In order to find the answer, you should start by looking backward, all the way to the starting WHY. Why are you in this business? What is your purpose and point of existence? Why would the world become an unhappier place without you?

When you have your business’s existential purpose clear, now define what you need to achieve this purpose. Break down your master-goals into chunks of measurable goals, which will guide your day to day business along your road to success. This purpose-to-goal breakdown will most definitely help you make sense of and create meaning for your beloved numbers. It will help you determine what numbers are relevant, and certainly which ones are not! And it will help you tell the story to your business, your colleagues and your customers of why you actually do the things you do.

Tip 2: Gaze into your sales future like a pro

Obviously, one of your core goals as a Staffing Business is to propose the right candidate for the right job. Delight both your customer and the professional. But in order to achieve this goal and offer attractive projects to professionals, you’ll need a steady pipeline of work. Not just for today, but also tomorrow, and all the days after. If you are set for endurance, your sales division also needs to be game for the marathon. Your sales reps should become adept in tackling the present opportunities in order to shape the future.

You’ll have set goals for sales, naturally in terms of currency per year and quarter. But ideally some goals are relevant for the quality rather than the quantity of your business. Like having a healthy mixture of bigger and smaller customers. Or perhaps you focus on enriching your relationships with existing customers.

In any case, you’ll want to be able to look into the future. Where are you a couple of months from now, based on your current portfolio and what’s happening in your pipeline? You’ll want insight into how many deals you’re handling, in what phase they are in the sales process, what kind of business they’re about and, of course, what their value is.

Don’t just react to leads and opportunities left and right when they present themselves. Proactively determine how you can achieve your future goals. Again, adopt that backward tactical approach of goal definition: if you need at least five new and big contracts to start in the third quarter of the year, then how many big deals must be closed by the end of the second?

And also: keep track of the hours in the pipeline. Know what size jobs or projects will be acquired next month or quarter, directly relates to the next two tips.

Tip 3: Focus on retaining talent

On the Salesforce platform using the Byner app, you can easily keep an eye on what projects are about to start and whether you are on track with the recruiting and onboarding of the right professionals.

So now you’ve got your hands on some new assignments, either by new customers or existing relations. Here your next challenge begins: finding the best fit talent for the job. The standard action often is .. start recruiting talent. Ironic, since Staffing companies usually have a wealth of talent already sitting in their databases. Instead of investing in finding and convincing new talent, wouldn’t it be far more lucrative to deploy professionals you already know? Still for many this is not self-evident.

Finding the right professionals is one thing, retaining and keeping track on them is another. Make sure your tooling allows you to engage ‘your’ professionals during the entire journey. Keep track of them from the very first point of contact, to starting an assignment, to the off boarding after a project, and beyond. And see to it that you have a real time insights into who is available when and for how long. Plus .. keep track on the development of your professionals when it comes to skills, qualifications, ambitions etc. Make sure you can use all available data in your search for talent. The closer you know your workforce, the easier you can find and assign them to new projects.

Get the proper technology to support your recruiting consultants and you’re ready for stardom. You can save valuable time through automations, reducing manual work and by swiftly finding available professionals in your database. Think of what awesome additional things you’ll be able to do with all that saved time.

Tip 4: Deliver your resources on a silver platter

A key insight for a Staffing Business that deploys professionals is to know who is available, when and for how many hours. You need these insights ways before a new project is being launched. Your master planner needs to receive shared insights into the sales pipeline to see what projects will potentially arrive and when. So he knows how many resources over what span of time are needed. Based on scheduled and still available resources, your master planner can preemptively determine who will be up for the job. Since you want the right professional to be available for the right job at the right time, segmenting your capacity insights into, for example, skill categories or levels will provide better insight into whether the proper resources will be available. Use the numbers to make the term ‘busy’ less ambiguous and provide it with meaning. Keep the sales and project delivery teams highly aligned and to make use of visual representations of capacity to nip that resource planning in the bud like a pro.

This example from a report on the Salesforce platform clearly shows the available hours per professional for the next weeks. This way operation knows what’s the current resource capacity to take on projects

Tip 5: Align your finance department with the operational players

We’ve finally arrived at the department that just lives for the numbers and eats them all up: Finance. It’s the dream of the finance department to see green and growing numbers. This indicates that your business is not only going to endure throughout the year, but is actually growing into stardom.

This might be the department we’ll have the least to teach regarding the meaning of numbers. Still we’d like to share some worthwhile insights. First of all, that goal setting tip also rings true to finance. Goals are the converted value representations of the organizational dreams.

Usually, goals based on currencies are set for a year and are then divided into quarters. The additional value that finance can add to the success of the business is by keeping close and preemptive track of those goals. And to be predictive of their status, instead of simply declaring afterwards whether a goal was met or not.

Based on predicted billing and scheduled hours on projects, where will you stand relative to your goal tomorrow or next month? If we keep going like we are doing now, will we reach our quarterly goal? If yes, can we rely on the excess to compensate for less fortunate times you might predict later in the same year? But if no, what does sales need to accomplish and within what time frame? What projects, assignments or customers are consuming too much time and resources relative to the value they yield?

The key to preemptive insight is forecasting and understanding the cost effectiveness of the work that is being done. So that as a finance professional you can consult the business concerning its progress, risks, opportunities and valued relations.

Byner on the Salesforce platform will out-of-the-box facilitate you in your expected versus actual revenue reports. This allows you to keep your hands on the steering wheel towards your goals.

What makes you a champion?

Sales, Recruitment, Planning, Delivery and Finance: they all play their own indispensable role to make a Staffing Business successful. A continuous collaboration and rotation of each of these cogwheels in unison will ensure the business is all set for endurance. The right digital tools, such as Byner for Salesforce, will help take control of this power machine and set you up for success.

With Byner you can efficiently manage customers and jobs, the onboarding of professionals and project management. Combining the power of the Salesforce platform, it will provide you with both ease, effectiveness and scalability every day for all players. This allows you to focus on growing and achieving those goals together. Ánd deliver you with all these meaningful insights that will allow you to manage the pillars and people of your business like a pro. That way you will be able to create value and impact for a long time, for both professionals and customers alike.

And when all your teams are aligned and chase that horizon together, you know you are going to win the day, and every day from now on, like true champions!