From Medium-Sized to Mighty: Growing your recruitment and staffing business through digital transformation.

Medium-sized recruitment and staffing businesses – now is your time to shine.  With complaints from job applicants at an all-time high, and new business models appearing, creating the best customer experience combined with digital strategy can truly be a competitive advantage. This can only be delivered with an optimised combination of people, process, and technology.

The opportunity to transform is enormous and according to data from McKinsey, “medium sized businesses have typically half the productivity of their larger competitors” and all businesses are “realizing less than a third of the value of their digital transformations”. The cost of the digital transformation and the effort to change a relatively traditional industry creates tangible barriers to success.  But with the right focus there is a clear opportunity for you to make a real change to unlock the potential a well-executed digital transformation can deliver.

So, what can you do to drive digital transformation in a medium-sized recruitment and staffing business?  From our experience and the research available, we’ve distilled it into 10 key focus areas:

1. Culture is key – the recurring theme in every study on transformation is that without the right culture amongst leaders and their teams, transformation value will never be realised. Start with a unified leadership team and then focus on becoming customer centric, being agile (more on this below), embracing learning and taking collaboration to another level.  And of course, managing the change with honest and clear communications ensures your behaviours and messages match your culture and outcomes.
2. Be data driven and focus on first party data – You must become data centric, making data-driven decisions and being able to visualise your progress through data. It is also critical to ensure you focus on building and profiling your first party data.   Gone are the days when buying a database was the quick fix.  Now with data privacy and customer experience so vital, it is important to have a mid to long term strategy to build and mine your own data, B2B and B2C.  This will help personalise your offerings and enable increased trust of your brand and allow a single preference centre for your customers. Calculating your customer lifetime value will help you reframe the importance of customer data, but we will come onto that later!  Don’t forget, with a focus on first party data comes the responsibility of data security, so you must ensure the processes and systems are in place to enable you to safeguard this.
3. Define the REAL NEEDS of your business – this seems obvious, but too often we see digital tech bought and deployed based on very superficial issues rather than true needs. Deep dive into your business to really understand the underlying requirements which will enable you to deliver genuine optimisation. Then, ensure you can measure the impact against these real needs and show the results of the transformation as both functional improvements but, more importantly, as the impact on the top and bottom lines. This ensures your transformation can be articulated in a business language everyone will understand.
4. Don’t assume tech will fix all your problems – Technology is almost the easiest part of the problem, driving the change needed to transform is the bigger issue. Without the right underlying data models, processes, culture and a concerted learning and adoption focus then your investment is close to worthless.
5. Beware of over-engineering and start simple – a demo is the easiest place to wow a prospective customer. Don’t be tempted by vanity features.  Stay true to your REAL NEEDS and only pay for the functionality you need to deliver these.  You can always add more functionality later, but a simple start will reap tangible benefits more swiftly.
6. Map the ENTIRE experience – don’t be tempted to overhaul only one part of the process, such as candidate attraction, onboarding, or payroll. Start simple but always put this in the context of the entire experience so over time you can build the best journey for your customers.  It may take time to get to there, but keeping this vision in focus throughout will make for improved decision making and prioritisation along the way.
7. Trust marketing expertise – as a marketing and technology business Maxam Digital would say this! But marketing has the power to completely transform your business. However, they need board-level sponsorship to do that, so let your marketing team spend their life obsessing about the customer experience, testing, and learning in order to create the best for your customers. If they can shape the experience, they can also create the campaigns that will make you mighty!
8. Focus short term and long term – how do you hit this month’s sales targets whilst still transforming your business over the mid to long term? Well, it’s not easy but it’s about ensuring your business leaders support your short-term sales goals as well as addressing the long-term transformation goals.  Balance them both in everything you do and focus and incentivise your teams accordingly and you will see progress.  Focusing on the lifetime value of your clients and candidates is a very powerful way to give your business a longer-term focus and will ensure more of a customer-centric approach.
9. Embrace agility – the big advantage you already have is that nothing in place is too big or cumbersome to slow you down. Even with legacy technology there are now flexible tools to help you bring together your data.  Embrace agility and you will be amazed at what your team can deliver.  Adopting Agile as a methodology can be very powerful and will ensure you can make tangible progress quickly whilst maintaining the ability to be flexible as needs change over time.
10. Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to compete – nothing would be complete these days without a mention of AI. AI can really enhance your transformation.  Whilst the big players wrestle with trust issues and bloated data models you can be quick to embrace AI in the right way, as long as it is used alongside the power of your people.  Whether it’s your own home-grown product or use of AI in bought technology, it can really improve your productivity and help your business flourish.

Digital transformation is vital to your business growth to drive greater productivity and enable you to embrace new and improved revenues, as well as create the optimal, trusted experience your customers expect.

As a medium-sized recruitment and staffing business, you are well set to become the mighty. Find out how we can help you make the leap.