Dashboards – Are They Really The Secret To Recruitment Success?

Toby Conibear, European Business Development Director, Bond International Software:

Recruitment Agencies across the globe use software for a plethora of reasons; the main being to hold all of its core information in one place to ensure that all employees are following similar, if not the same, processes. First and foremost any application should bring added value to the end user or there is simply no point in asking them to use it. Recruitment organisations and agents alike require functionality which will work specifically for them – displaying appropriate information, prompts to outstanding actions within the candidate placement process and bringing an intuitive efficiency whilst streamlining the recruitment process.

One of the most important tools in a piece of recruitment software that a recruiter has available to them is the ability to manage their to-do list. At its most basic this is a simple task list whilst being relevant to the recruiter and enabling them to access records or run workflows around them.

Historically, in a system the user would run workflow and it would, if you’re lucky, set an automatic follow-up or reminder. From this reminder the user would need to manually navigate to the corresponding record in the database and run the required workflow then navigate back to the task list and manually remove the associated task.

Up to date technology can provide a much more proactive solution creating a task management system directly linked to outstanding workflow and work in progress that is relevant to the individual user or team. Recruiters and managers should be presented with an intuitive interface which can act as a prompt to ensure that actions, and indeed fees, are not missed.

In recruitment terms a user should be able to access all information required to complete a task or reminder from a single page in the application. This page will display a comprehensive summary of the user’s work in progress. The page should update in real time as to the status of each item, and also alert the user as to which item is about to become overdue.

For a busy consultant, once a critical mass of activity and information is underway it can be extremely difficult to keep track of it. The system that the consultant is using should be profile driven – meaning that the screen which a recruiter views is different to that of an administrator, thereby making the information more engaging, completely relevant and digestible to the individual. In short it is a piece of software that works for the user.

The dashboard may seem like a relatively simple tool – but its importance and how it can work for the end user in an intuitive way is vital. Being able to view a single page which presents all the relevant information, instead of moving between multiple screens, the end user is able to filter and sort tasks while having their workload managed for them. It is time that organisations make their software work for them and ensure that they use it to the best of its ability.

The Global Recruiter