It’s been a couple of weeks since the American Staffing Association hosted Staffing World 2022 in Las Vegas. We were thrilled to actively participate as both sponsor and exhibitor and to share the power of the Leadline platform. We’ve been extremely excited by the continual positive feedback and the new partnerships created.

Reflecting on our many discussions with hundreds of individuals during the show, it was very apparent that many Staffing Agencies are challenged with the same sets of issues:

• Spending too much money on job boards
• Getting too many under-qualified and/or unqualified candidates
• Losing candidates due to the inability to authentically engage and nurture them quickly and at scale
• No way of understanding where candidates are coming from (or where they’re at)

The bad news for employers is that these talent acquisition challenges will never go away—in fact, they’ll probably get exacerbated as more and more employees and employers opt for temporary or part-time employment opportunities. The good news is these challenges can be effectively addressed, and Staffing Agencies are in a prime position to capitalize on the opportunity if they utilize the right tools.

There are hundreds of technology vendors and solutions in the market. So which Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Software is best for attracting and retaining the best candidates? Rather than look at the vendor landscape, let’s take a closer look at each of the challenges above, why they exist, and what the solutions are.

Spending too Much Money on Job Boards

Some of the spend figures we heard here were astronomically high. At the end of the day, job board value is parallel to that of billboard advertising—it’s a single outlet to try and get the attention of people passing by. Like billboards, the advertising reach offered by job boards is limited only to traffic passing by at that exact moment in time. Even if you increase your advertising spend to reach multiple job boards or keep your job posting active, you are still unable to find and engage high-quality talent that resides in many other channels. Using the billboard analogy, you are excluding anybody who takes the train or prefers backroads to highways.

Job boards are most effective for advertising to candidates within a particular location, but they shouldn’t be considered a one-stop shop. To maximize job board effectiveness, make sure you leverage location-based posting settings and the ability to post to multiple different job boards from one source.

Getting too many Under-qualified and/or Unqualified Candidates

Getting candidates is one problem but qualifying them is an entirely different one. Unfortunately, thanks to ‘Easy Apply’ buttons candidates have been given a major tool that has shifted the landscape towards an employee-dominated labor market.

The word "qualified" implies that someone or something has decided on the candidate’s ability to perform the job duties which they are applying for. So those "pay per click" or "pay per applicant" models that are supposed to be more cost-efficient - well, there’s no guarantee on the quality of the candidate—and while you may get twice the number of resumes or candidates to work with, it may double your recruiter workload, often resulting in recruiter fatigue and/or the need for more recruiters required to do the job. Since there is a very real chance that a legitimate, qualified candidate sits somewhere within that large stack of resumes (likely impatiently waiting for a prompt response from a Recruiter), tools that help you easily identify best-fit candidates before they enter your Applicant Tracking System are a must-have here.

Losing Candidates Due to the Inability to Engage and Nurture Them Quickly and at Scale

Assuming qualified candidates apply to more than one position or company at a given time, recruiters are now being put in an arms-race scenario where they need to engage and convert candidates into employees before their competition does. Combine this with the fact that most of the Gen-Z workforce (generally young, cheap, and smart talent) has grown up in an instant-gratification environment expecting instant responses. Factor in the "Easy Apply" issue—and recruiters may quickly find themselves in a complex situation. A term we are starting to hear in this area, "winning the war on talent" really starts to look that way, all things considered. For these reasons, it is critical to arm your recruiters with services that provide automated and personalized messaging with email and texting communication features.

No Way of Understanding Where Candidates are Coming From (or Where They’re at)

Believe it or not, candidates don’t just magically show up in your ATS (shocking, I know). The trick to finding where they came from is putting measures in place to track how they get there in the first place. Often times we see companies shepherd everyone to apply via LinkedIn or Indeed since they’ve already gone through the pain of getting that connected to their ATS. The problem is that the only thing your ATS captures is whether it came from LinkedIn or Indeed. Recruiters—here’s a quick Marketing 101 tip: traffic source is incredibly valuable.

How Leadline will Help you Grow your Business by Addressing These Problems

Leadline was specifically built to improve recruiter productivity, accelerate time to hire, reduce your cost to hire and improve corporate culture. Moreover, we started this business with the big picture at the forefront of every organization in mind—you need to show continuous growth.

If your revenue grows but you are budgeting an ongoing percentage of forecasted revenue towards talent acquisition efforts, your growth can create enormous, unnecessary hidden costs. Consider a 10% figure in the example below:

So it might be time to ask yourself—am I maximizing my profitability to the fullest potential? Where is most of that spend allocated? Am I spending on job boards that are underperforming on returning qualified candidates? Is there an increased overhead due to more recruiters needed to qualify and screen the increased number of candidates? (Check out our blog post on the 10 Questions You Should Be Asking Yourself to Evaluate Your Talent Acquisition Strategy).

With Leadline, you can solve all of the above challenges and much more. We give recruiters the tools they need to:

• Advertise to the right channels from a single source
• Track the return on investment and candidate activity across each advertisement channel
• Qualify and sort candidates as they are entered into a personalized role-based, access-controlled candidate database
• Message candidates via email and text to facilitate candidate engagements and nurture use cases at scale.

And the best part? You can scale up as needed with our per-user, monthly pricing model. Oh, and we are also giving you 14 days free to try it out (valid until 12/31), including a complimentary 60-minute onboarding and training session hosted by our customer success team. What have you got to lose by trying it out?