Bizinta News & Trends
If you are like most consulting or professional service companies you probably have a mix of FTE consultants, heavily used contractors, and a variety of specialists with a niche skill set that you rely on to complete your projects. When given a new project opportunity, you might think in your head, I got the perfect team for this, I just need to see who’s available. Sound familiar? While this process may work if you are only doing a few small projects, it will not fly as your company grows. Eventually, you’ll need more staff with a different set of skills to continue to win more business.
This is why it’s crucial to keep a recruiting pipeline to track of all of the candidates you talk to. As you interact with them, you move them along from the initial contact all the way to being hired or maybe disqualified. Having a software solution is the most convenient place to track all these interactions, as well as related files such as resumes and bios. The different parts of your pipeline should be completely customizable, so the system will match your current recruiting workflow. Hence, why just doing this on a spreadsheet is not ideal.
Of course, now that you have a solid database to manage your recruiting efforts, you’ll need a skills checklist to complement your system. The skills checklist should be a completely customizable and organized list of skills and experiences where you can track every employee and candidate you talk to. The best use of this feature is to make it part of your recruiting process, and to continually update it as your employees/contractors gain new experience and skill sets.
The value of any consulting and professional services company is not only the skills of who they employ, but also the skills of who they know. This information makes the firm a hub in their market space. Being able to put people in touch is powerful, whether that is a revenue source or not. It is worthwhile to have skill profiles on every contractor you know, even if they are not a fit for your company, as they could potentially be a fit as a hire for one of your clients.
If you are thinking to yourself, yes, I should be running my recruiting efforts as described above, then it’s probably time to check out Bizinta. The biggest advantage of doing this within Bizinta, is the integration. Once a person is hired and made active, their scheduling and time sheet access is automatically turned on. When they leave the company and are no longer active, their access is automatically revoked. You also have a complete record of their work history in one place. It’s organized, up-to-date and user-friendly. Which results in you focusing on winning more business rather than being bogged down in back office processes.
