Productivity needs to be ingrained in organizations. Several departments, companies, and firms are trying to boost their productivity to produce greater and better outputs. Regardless of what we do, however, the hours of the day are simply not enough to manage a company’s day-to-day operations, especially in recruitment.
According to a Lumen Learning course on Operations Management, the concept is defined as “the management of processes that transform inputs into goods and services that add value for the customer.”
As one of the three strategic functions of an organization, it is a vital part of ensuring long-term survival. It has a firm foundation in two areas, namely supply chain management and logistics. This then makes collaboration very important among key stakeholders ay even among the most basic processes.
The Operations Manager
In RPOs, recruitment leaders almost always collaborate to ensure that they will be able to harness different kinds of information. In a global economy where rapid technological advancement is not new, the need to acquire talent consistently has been magnified.
New buzzwords in the industry such as ‘big data,’ ‘crowdsourcing,’ ‘customer experience,’ ‘passive candidate,’ and ‘gamification’ have risen well enough to blend with social media and mobile technology to step up the recruitment systems.
The timely role, then, of recruitment leaders, including operations managers is to oversee the integration of their systems while meeting the demands of hiring and recruitment.
“Because recruitment is centralized, information, and data flow through one channel. Brand, culture, products and services, even benefits are all communicated in one unified message,” says Corky Harris, the founder of Peer 2 Peer Collaborative Recruiting Network.
“Collaboration is key. Each peer has an equal responsibility to communicate data and information,” he adds. While everyone works in teams, the role of operations manager in RPOs can be both taxing and fulfilling at the end of the day.
In a general sense, however, the third-party RPO vendor is responsible for placing people into the organization successfully, thereby affecting the overall productivity of the firm.
According to Hudson RPO, “when managed well with a quality provider, RPOs can reduce time to hire by 40 percent and deliver cost savings of more than 50 percent”.
Of course, to make this happen, the manager needs to understand the necessary series of processes within a company, especially in terms of supply chains. Top MBA says that “excellent organizational ability is crucial in successfully enhancing efficiency and driving productivity as an operations manager.”
Online Productivity Tools that Improve Collaboration
While it is still impossible to add more hours in a day or to add more days in a week, we have applications and tools that would help us to use our time more efficiently and productively.
Let us take a look at some of the tools the Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association has listed for better workplace productivity, based on purpose.
Personalization Tools
Allows you to calibrate and adjust your approach to recruiting and improve your results
- Crystal
Crystal is a tool that allows you to reach out to candidates quicker. It uses a technology that identifies the distinctiveness of a candidate’s personality. It can give you a lot of insight to improve how you communicate with the candidate so that you will get better results. This tool will undeniably increase any recruiter’s response rate.
- Clearbit
The application gives fresh and accurate data by turning any email into a full profile for easy review. It has a ‘Reveal’ tool that helps you identify the characteristics of people looking at your site. This tool allows you to send more targeted content and find out the roles better suited for them.
It also has a ‘Connect’ option, something very similar to any advanced social media search tool that can let you connect with contacts and learn their location, social profile, and email address.
- Gender Decoder
As the name suggests, this application aims to increase gender diversity in the company. Ultimately, it helps pinpoint some gendered terms which, instead of encouraging applicants, only propagates inequality by inadvertently putting one sex over the other.
It is very simple to use. Simply paste your job post into the Decoder box and watch it parse your information into masculine and feminine-coded words. It does not limit you at all, as you can still modify your job post as you wish.
Recruitment Software
Provides you with a holistic approach and rich user interface for sourcing, recruitment marketing, candidate tracking, and candidate relationship management
- TalentLyft
This application has a clear and intuitive interface which makes it easy for everyone to use, even first-timers. It can largely improve your productivity and puts tweaks and improvements to the overall workflow of your process.
What’s better is that they have an excellent customer support team! This means that whenever you need software assistance, you can always expect to get it.
Project Management
Provides you with a broad spectrum of essential functions that allow multitasking
- Asana
The potential of this application is optimized when a team uses it since recruiters are shown to benefit more through collaboration and when everything is organized and productive.
As a work management platform, Asana helps you focus more on daily tasks at hand, effectively helping to grow the business and get more potential candidates. It prevents you from procrastinating or from spending too much time on one task by setting deadlines.
You can also use it to set priorities for a particular day. Since project management is definitely not the easiest thing to keep track of, this software does the trick.
Time Management
Allows you to track deadlines and how you spend your time to have you lead a productive professional life
- Toggl
Toggl is like a high-tech timesheet. It allows you to track how you are spending your time similar to an ordinary timesheet, only now it offers some insights and analytics. It measures what tasks you are wasting your time on, and which ones you are not paying attention to at all.
This can definitely step up your time management game. It offers various plans, all with different prices depending on the functions you want your app to perform. Aside from the pre-made packages, you can also customize it based on your needs.
- Rescue Time
This application really saves your time as it gives you a personal insight into your productivity. It shows how you can improve your time management skills and identify where you can cut the unnecessary time spent being unproductive.
The resulting analytics can be forwarded to a supervisor to let them know how efficient you can get things done and what areas you need more help on.
Social Media Management
Helps you save time and manage all of your social media in one place
- Hootsuite
Out of the three listed here, Hootsuite is probably the oldest and the most reputable. Its users can manage a wide range of social media platforms from Facebook to Instagram to LinkedIn.
One of the best features of this software is its dashboard – neatly organized, very malleable to suit the user’s taste – which you can organize into a series of columns for ease of planning.
- Buffer
Compared to Hootsuite, Buffer offers fewer features but focuses on a particular set of tasks. The creators of the app intended for it to focus more on scheduling posts and sharing, creating an intelligent and powerful assistant for those recruiting through social media.
It also gives you access to Pablo, a tool that could you with image and graphic design for all of your social media posts.
- Sprout Social
Sprout is another essential player in the social media management scene. It has many life functions that are designed to collect data about your presence online as you would find in the “Messages” tab.
Unlike Hootsuite, it neatly blends all social media together, creating an interface that lets you get an understanding of the bigger picture.
Email Streamlining
Organizes your email inbox into an organized area that makes more sense
- Sortd
This application is an add-on, meaning it is only a little tool on top of other applications. It transforms a chaotic email inbox to an organized set of lists.
Unlike other applications, this application was created with a version that is designed especially for recruitment. It now allows you to track, shortlist, and recruit candidates, giving you a faster hiring process.
It allows you to categorize your inbox messages into the following categories: Resume, Interview, and Hired, instead of rummaging through your email every single time. It also allows you to keep notes on every single candidate.
For example, the note can contain the stage the candidate is at, their target salary, and also know when they opened your emails.
Why Collaboration is Important
Aside from productivity, these tools can also promote collaboration in the workplace, yet many often dismiss the whole concept and assume it to be one with little to no tangible benefits.
Studies show, however, that working together allows companies to be more productive and actually drives higher returns for its investors and shareholders.
A recent study of 1,100 companies conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity and Professor Rob Cross of Babson College in Massachusetts found that among their respondents, those who promoted collaborative working were five times more likely to be high performing.
Indeed, collaboration is so much more than merely sharing documents and creating a common area for you to interact — the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) shares below how collaboration improves productivity within their team.
Use it to inspire innovation. Host quarterly team meetings that allow each team member to present an original idea to their team or their clients. This gives more opportunities for improvement and for everyone to pick an idea that they could put into action without thinking of any constraints such as budget, creative limitations, and to be able to work with all departments in the process.
Get individuals organized. While it may sound very counterproductive, having strong leadership in the organization improves collaboration.
One of the most effective ways of collaborating is to have a leader oversee the individual development of ideas. A leader can bring the group back together to develop intersecting paths while holding members accountable for their deadlines and tasks.
Understand your colleagues’ “whys.” More often than not, one of the necessary skills to have in the workplace is the ability to empathize with others. They need to know each other’s “whys” to allow them to know their stories and understand their journey.
After all, their work involves storytelling of a different kind. They are building stories other people would be looking at. Before doing this, however, understanding each other’s stories is also very important.
Effective task management. Having an effective system that manages tasks and projects includes a calendar, some documents, and chat functionality. The task management tools mentioned above could lead to significant improvements in communication and productivity, especially with remote workers.
It allows every member of the team to exist within the same framework and be guided on concepts and goals by keeping their employees on task and up-to-date.
Promote open communication. Given the countless ways to communicate nowadays, workplace relationships are expected to improve simply by taking advantage of the technical communication channels.
Slack, for example, keeps conversations going up until an agenda is made so that ideas are articulated well, and ideas are actually being worked on.
Align employee interests. Intrinsically, the best way to get people to work together is to get them to work together by understanding the value of each other’s work. A lot of this, however, has a lot to do with communication among the team members.
Clearing out the air for the deliverables, expectations, and responsibilities also help them see situations from different perspectives which could also contribute to the fulfillment of larger goals.
Expertise right at your hands!
At Sysgen RPO, we work directly with staffing organizations all over the world by providing offshore sourcing and offshore recruiting services.
Allow us to help improve and streamline your recruitment operations through full life cycle recruitment, resume sourcing, recruitment support, and remote staffing.
If you want to know more, contact us today!
