Automation: Your Competitive Advantage When it Comes to Staffing

The nature of staffing has completely transformed in a matter of months. 

2020 saw a rise in demand for experienced talent and even higher rates of job-seeking applicants, and this trend will continue in 2021 and beyond. Uber-competitive industry practices have emerged as a result, but a large number of staffing organizations are unprepared to handle a mass influx of applicants. 

By automating your staffing operations, your organization could reap major benefits and focus its efforts on hiring the best talent, faster. Here are a few ways how. 

4 benefits of automation for staffing organizations

1. Hire talent faster

The hiring process can be long and drawn-out. According to Glassdoor, it takes companies an average of nearly 24 days to hire a candidate and begin the onboarding process – sometimes longer. This wait time is usually attributed to staffing agencies interviewing, placing and filtering talent out, but not always. 

Because the majority of staffing agencies have yet to automate their systems, employees spend a large bulk of this time doing repetitive tasks. This includes sending follow-up  emails, manually filling out forms and tracking leads down to amend or finish signing documents. 

The following automation features make sifting through tedious documents a thing of the past. 

Offer Letter Automation
Offer letter automation is designed to speed up the time to hire, while also personalizing your offer letter process. Staffing agencies can create custom templates, track workflows and collect digital signatures with ease. 

Each candidate will likely be in various job situations – whether leaving another job, considering another offer or making a career jump. Offer letter automation enables companies to personalize and customize offer letters, route to the candidate for signature custom templates, customize the offer, and route to the candidate for digital signature, all while tracking the offer’s progress.

Digital Signing
With digital signing, your agency and clients can both enjoy a quicker turnaround for getting important documents signed, meaning your team can place candidates quicker. Reducing risk for unauthorized document changes, digital signing also ensures that the signature obtained is verified and legally binding.

2. Retain more employees for your clients

In the long run, automation moves everything forward. 

Automation saves staffing agents from repeating the same tasks – like filling out forms, faxing documents, tracing down signatures and manually storing sensitive information. But it also empowers these professionals to redirect their efforts toward nurturing, attracting and retaining talent. 

Ultimately, people-first hiring practices will create an air of appeal around your organization, while also attracting potential employees and retaining long-standing ones. 

Here are some automation tools that will keep your organization at a competitive advantage, especially when it comes to recruiting and hiring.

Form Automation
Form automation makes life easier for both job seekers and employers. With digital job application forms, more candidates can quickly fill out the necessary information for employer review and consideration. And, easy-to-fill applications increase the chances of form completion—increasing your potential candidate pool.

Best of all, staffing agencies can easily track and access digital applications at any time. When it comes down to making that hiring decision, you’ll have everything you need, in one place. With innovations to conditional logic rules, you can quickly filter out applicants and get down to the best candidates.  

All you need to do is create your form, share an embedded link on your website, social pages, in email or via text message. With required fields and document uploads for resumes, CVs, cover letters and samples, you can ensure applicants are filling out pertinent information, tailored to your job. 

Contract Automation
Contract automation allows you to drive revenue and onboard candidates faster. By getting rid of paper documents and minimizing back-and-forth emails, contract automation allows you to get those offer letters signed with ease and efficiency. 

You can remind applicants to take action without going back and forth through email, and have confidence that you’re always working with the most up-to-date version. Once a contract is finalized, digital signing enables you to close deals from any device at any time. 

Better yet – contract automation also reduces the opportunity for errors in filling out and sending the contracts. This means that you can keep your business moving forward, while also meeting your clients’ goals. 

3. Save time and money

Deloitte research found that “87% of organizations cite culture and engagement as one of their top challenges.” This means that the majority of  staffing organizations need to focus more on adding a personal touch when it comes to recruiting, and less on filing paperwork. 

Document Automation
Document automation is designed to take tedious tasks off of recruiters’ plates, allowing them to collect applicant information faster. Reducing these human touch points on documents also lowers the risk of easily made errors.

Additionally, you can store all data on a secure platform with backups in place, saving physical space and making it easy to find the documents you need, when you need them.. Don’t get hung up on where a document is located or if you’ve sent it to the proper party.

Digital Process Automation
Digital process automation reduces risk and saves staffing agencies time. This allows you to easily streamline and standardize the generation and execution of sales contracts, terms and conditions, staffing agreements and worksite evaluations. 

This also helps to improve the client’s experience by reducing manual collaboration – saving everyone time, from agency staff to clients.  Digital process automation enables staffing agencies to attract potential candidates, drive new business and ensure that employees aren’t having to waste time on manual tasks.

In the midst of the 2020 pandemic, TalentBoost, a high-velocity staffing agency, needed to cut down on paper process to streamline hiring and onboarding for not just their clients, but for TalentBoost itself. 

“We needed 25 different templates for every different position,” TalentBoost CTO Saurabh Gupta said. “Once I built out the workflows, Docubee reduced our 25 templates down to two. We were able to build everything we need into two templates and two links, and it enabled us to get simplified reporting.”

With an offer acceptance rate of 91% within 48 hours, TalentBoost’s new automation integration system hopes to continue down this path of streamlined hiring practices. Currently, TalentBoost uses Docubee’s easily accessible onboarding functions, and is considering adding more functionality to its software.

4. Focus on people, not paperwork  

It’s no lie that placing talent involves a lot of documents — background checks, education verification, and employment – just to name a few. Administrative tasks like filling out paperwork and tracking down documents typically don’t generate revenue for your business, but too many valuable employees are left dedicating too much time to these tasks. 

Ultimately, going paperless saves time and money. By eliminating repetitive tasks like organizing printing and scanning documents, automation also reduces back-and forth emails, faxes and phone calls. And, instead of frantically searching for valuable documents, your organization can always be ready to place candidates with your clients. 

Experience the future of staffing. Start a 14-day free trial at Docubee and discover where we can take your organization, together.