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Stuart Gentle Publisher at Onrec

The Access Group Blog: The onerous side of recruitment

By Louis Urbanowski, Recruitment Industry Specialist

As much as we’d like to believe that the world of recruitment is full of thrilling conversations, business strategy, changing lives and glittering parties to celebrate your continued record-breaking billings, it’s just not. It is of course fast passed, exciting and you definitely do change lives, but amidst those placements and heavy fee earners, there is a dark underbelly to recruitment, and by dark we mean dreadfully dull. This is the side of recruitment that is full of admin, arguments with the finance team, soothing contractors that haven’t been paid and finding yourself dragged into payroll debates. All things you’d rather not do.

At the very top of the most tedious recruitment tasks is timesheet management, and the hours you spend bent over the photocopier and an outdated excel spreadsheet as you try to reconcile paper timesheets. We know for a fact that no one has time for that kind of behavior, let alone recruitment consultants.

And your life doesn’t need to be that hard, especially if you already have the difficult job of running a recruitment agency.

The facts:

A manual timesheet process is an arduous long and drawn out affair. You generally have to maintain and manage various different systems to authroise timesheets and once the data is collated, you begin the lengthy job of liaising with candidates and clients to approve and amend as necessary. Not to mention that the responsibility of checking that the timesheet hours match the placement hours falls on your shoulders and with such things, mistakes are always bound to happen.

The solution:

We all know that the more you automate your internal process, the easier your recruitment agency begins to run, and therefore the more money you make. Technology is disrupting everything, and recruitment isn’t an exception. Access Recruitment CRM is built with online timesheet portals your clients and candidates can enter, view, edit, confirm and play around with the details to their hearts content while cutting you, the middle man, out of the picture.

Automated emails and text message reminders will keep both sides on track when things need to be approved or submitted. It also means you’re not breathing down everyone’s neck to remind them, and nor are you spending hours importing and exporting information into various systems. Timesheet portals should always link to your recruitment database to ensure everything happens in real time.

The benefits:

Apart from the very obvious fact that a timesheet portal dramatically frees up your consultant’s time to do what they’re good at, recruitment, it also gives your clients and applicants real time visibility on submission status and automated notifications. As an agency the ability to keep your candidates informed every step of the way will be the reason they become repeat customers.

It also improves your relationships with both candidates and clients as the responsibility to submit information into the timesheet portal is not on your shoulders and you steer well clear of the blame game. In addition, you have the opportunity to increase the volume processing without the heavy duty admin fees, while also offering a better level of service to your customers. And then you throw in the ability to report on timesheet margins and the data you can collect, and the whole thing becomes your saving grace.

We could go on and on about the benefits of candidate portals and online timesheets, no seriously we could, but there’s no point in pointing out the obvious. It just comes down to how much time do you want to save, and how much you’re willing to make. Access Recruitment CRM is designed to do just that, save you time and move candidates to cash quicker.

Online timesheet portal for clients and candidates to enter, view and confirm timesheet details as well as submitting expenses.