How can recruiters use tech to improve compliance and upscale their business?

By Tom Cooksey, MD of Elements

In today's competitive recruitment landscape, harnessing the power of technology is essential for ensuring regulatory adherence and driving business growth, it therefore has become a paramount strategy for forward-thinking recruiters.

Whilst recruitment is undoubtedly a sales-driven environment, with the front-office receiving significant attention and resources, as recruitment business scales, a well-functioning back-office process becomes crucial for sustained growth. Compliance, document tracking, and background checks are handled by dedicated compliance teams, often using a mismatch of manual outdated tools like Excel and email. Modernising this process with fit-for-purpose technology will deliver significant improvements in compliance, efficiency, and ultimately more money in everyone’s pockets.

Enhancing Compliance and Reducing Costs

The compliance process in recruitment is often people-reliant, involving manual tasks that are time-consuming and costly. Even if you outsource compliance to external firms, this may still result in inefficiencies and lack of brand dedication. Instead, by automating these tasks, your highly skilled compliance managers can focus on more strategic aspects of their role. Automation (and AI) will optimise the back-office team, leading to cost reductions, greater efficiency, and a more streamlined compliance process.

Ultimately, embracing technology empowers the in-house team to achieve better outcomes while driving significant cost savings.

Analyse Onboarding Data will improve business performance

Modern recruitment software enables the collection and analysis of onboarding data, providing valuable insights into individual performance and overall trends. By identifying weak spots and bottlenecks in the onboarding process, businesses can take the right action to accelerate candidate placements. For example, understanding that the average time from placement to revenue is four working days can help predict revenue more accurately. Reducing delays in onboarding ensures candidates are not lost to competitors and enables faster placements, enhancing client satisfaction and boosting revenue.

Embrace Sophistication for Scalability, Flexibility and Saleability

Scaling a recruitment business requires more than just growth; it demands efficient processes fuelled by modern software. Relying too much on manual-tasks leaves the business unprepared to handle a substantial surge in placements. This leaves staff under pressure to deliver more, and this often leads to staff stress-related illness and/or increased risk of error. Resulting in lost revenue, lost reputation and even compliance-related fines.
Whilst additional personnel can be recruited to cope with this short-term demand, this can result in people being let go when there’s a downturn. However, using the right technology and processes will significantly cut manual tasks allowing staff to continue focusing on what they’re best at even if placements fluctuate. This puts the business in a much stronger financial position.

Modernising your back-office system, it not only enhances a business's potential, but it also significantly increases its appeal to potential buyers.

Conclusion

By investing in recruitment onboarding technology, businesses can mitigate the risk of errors arising from administrative burdens and hasty shortcuts prompted by mounting pressure to place workers quickly. Data-driven insights help drive intelligent decision-making and future strategies. Technological advancements in automation and AI can streamline operations and boost efficiency to reduce costs and allow compliance teams to concentrate on more satisfying effective work.

Ultimately, technology improves employee satisfaction and delivers a competitive edge for sustained success and business growth.

Tom started work as a software engineer for brands such as EA Games, The National Lottery and Sky. He went on to build a successful software consultancy with clients including British Horse Racing Authority and Nationwide Building Society. After exiting he went on to found IR35.io which was acquired by The Kingsbridge Group – Tom now heads up Elements, building on this previous success. For more information, please visit www.getelements.co.uk