How to Maximise Profitability With AI & Automation

The market has had a tough year, and whilst temporary & contract roles have increased steadily, the volume of permanent jobs on the market and therefore placements has struggled in 2024.  As a result, agencies are looking for ways to increase revenue without increasing headcount.

The easiest way to do that is by streamlining your existing processes to make each recruiter more efficient and higher converting – but how? 

‍The Challenge 

Recruitment has undeniably changed – and the reason for that is quite simple. Recruitment tasks have stayed the same – finding candidates,getting in touch with them, and matching them with roles. However, the world around these tasks has changed dramatically.

Recruiters no longer have only one way of communicating –the phone – or one space to search for candidates. There are multiple platforms, ways of working, remote opportunities, media channels, and so much more, which means that recruiters need to divide their time into all of those.And whilst the main goal stayed the same, the road to achiveing it has become much more complex. 

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KPIs

Agency owners are struggling with their recruiters not meeting the KPIs. What’s more, they often didn’t adjust the KPIs to the shifting market situations.

Productivity

Many agencies are not efficient enough in their processes to handle market shifts. The majority of recruiters only spend 2 hours a day with people, the rest of their time being wasted on manual tasks.

Connections

With modern technology, agencies can struggle to forge meaningful connections with candidates and clients and don’t know how to close that gap. 

Simplify the Processes

With all of these shifts in the way recruiters work, it’s no wonder they are not meeting their targets as well as you’d expect them to – they simply have too much noise that goes into the “simple” job of role filling.

So, the first step in remedying that would be simplifying the process for them. If you can get your recruiters to increase their profit,meaning higher revenue per recruiter, and reduce your operational costs on top of that, your agency is instantly more profitable. ‍

Eliminate Manual Tasks

You can’t jump straight into using AI or automation if you don’t eliminate the manual way of working first. In order to eliminate, you need to identify where these manual bottlenecks are, first.

This means looking at all of your recruiters’ processes and marking where they’re using manual work, like Excel spreadsheets, instead of technology. When you know exactly where these roadblocks are, you know which tasks need to be automated – and then you can invest in technology that’s realistically needed for your agency instead of buying a bunch of software without a strategy to utilise it in place and being surprised it doesn’t bring you the expected ROI. 
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Simplify the Technology

One of the biggest challenges recruitment agency owners face with technology is that there is simply too much of it. With so many different types of products that are meant to make your life easier, it’s easy to invest in too many that don't actually fit together. Eventually, agencies go back to filling the gaps between them with old-school methods. The primary goal for simplifying tasks with tech is to create a tech stack that works well together and feeds into one single source of truth, your CRM. 

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Increase Recruiter Engagement

The recruiter’s job needs to evolve with the times – and unfortunately this means that dealing with the recruitment process the same way they’ve had been for years is not in the cards anymore. Manual tasks need to be automated if you want your recruiters to keep making profit and placing enough candidates.

With that, you need to find a way to get them engaged with the technology and streamline processes they’ve been so hesitant to change. If your recruiters don’t utilise your CRM and make it the heart of your agency operations, your data isn’t gathered in one place – which means it’s in complete and unusable. And incomplete database makes any tries to bring AI into your business useless, as AI is only as good as the information and data you feed it. 

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Create a Strategy Based on Data

With all of your data available, you need to utilise it in a smart way. Creating one massive dashboard and quarterly goals is not going to help you control what’s going on in your business or become more agile – and it won’t get your recruiters on board and invested, either.

You need to divide your data into relevant areas– thinking of what each part of your business needs to know in order to perform better. With these various separate sections of data, you can effectively manage your agency and your team – and create strategies that are rooted in real information.

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Utilise AI & Automation

AI is not only a nice-to-have bit of fancy technology these days – it’s a necessity that allows you to truly increase efficiency and manage the various areas of recruitment that have grown so much over the years (and are impossible to handle manually). By 2030, 30% of the jobs your recruiters are doing right now will be automated. Realistically, you need to start automating some of these manual jobs right now to keep up with the competition.

There are 6 different areas where AI will help you increase your efficiency:

Notetaking‍

Key aspects of a structured database are the notes your recruiters take during meetings with clients and candidates, comments to profiles and roles,and more. But trying to manage them manually is not only causing data loss but also just inefficient. If you use AI tools to transcribe your notes for you and store them directly in your CRM, everyone in your agency knows exactly what's going on with each record.

Marketing

AI is probably most utilised in the marketing area, and fora good reason. It can automate so many of very time-consuming jobs your recruiters have to waste time on. 

From formatting CVs automatically, to creating job adverts for you, you can easily automate large portions of the journey to placement.

Recruitment

A lot of the recruitment tasks can be easily automated with AI. Whether it’s role profile writing, CV analysis, interview transcript analysis, or training your recruiters in noticing trends, AI will became increasingly valuable in the recruitment world. 

Segmenting

You need to target the right audiences with your content.This means segmenting your database into relevant pools of ICPs and personalising the content you send to them based on their preferences.

With automation, you can automatically trigger workflows that send relevant content to these pools, without having to think about each email you send.

Compliance

This is one of the areas with biggest possible time savings when implementing AI. Automated workflows that check the relevant documentation should be a standardised within your CRM, so you don’t have to delegate people to work on compliance alone.

Sales & Data Analysis

Putting your data into AI tools to get analysis and identify weak spots not only makes it easier for you to strategise, but also ensures you don’t miss anything.