Fast-Moving Temps: Handle the Curves and Stay on Track

Fast Moving TempsAs fast-moving temp recruiters, how do you take pole position and win repeat business? Oliver Perilli, Senior Sales Executive, Adapt, explains how dynamic technology can help you avoid the pit-stops…

Two very important factors in temp recruitment are how quickly you can react to new requirements and how quickly you can find suitable workers – and there are certainly challenges in succeeding on both fronts.

New assignments can come in at any time of day or night, especially in sectors such as nursing or teaching. You may be told in the early hours of the morning that a teacher is unable to work that day or a nurse is urgently required to cover a shift. On a fast-moving temp desk it can sometimes be about working 24/7, that’s how quickly opportunities can come and go.

Fire-up your CRM – whenever, wherever

You may not be in the office when you learn of a new requirement, you may still be in bed or having your breakfast. If that’s the case you need fast remote access to your recruitment CRM and this begins with the cloud and Software as a Service; being able to fire-up a web browser and access your CRM wherever you are – via your laptop, tablet, or the mobile phone you were holding when you took the call or read the email.

You need to find your contact’s record then input the details ASAP. As you know, client requests can range in complexity from ‘We need someone today, between these hours…’ to ‘we need someone for a varied range of shifts with different patterns, times of day and pay rates…’, so depending on your access and the level of your CRM’s usability, you may face challenges when inputting requirements.

If you’re a fast-moving temp recruiter, you need a fast-moving temp desk – a set of calendars, the ability to input different variables, rates, hours, days on, days off, overnight, compliance requirements, on-boarding checks – one place to manage everything. The ability to create complex shift patterns in a simple way is imperative.

Quickly find a solution

Once the clients’ requirements are in your recruitment CRM, that’s only the first step. The next step is finding a solution. In order to have information regarding suitable candidates ready at the click of a button, pre-requisites are needed – a key one being the candidate’s ability to easily specify their availability. You probably have access to a substantial candidate base and all those candidates should be able to say ‘I’m definitely available this day’ or ‘I’m definitely not available at this time’, or ‘I can’t work Friday afternoons because I’m looking after my kids.’ and all availability information needs to be compiled within a calendar for each individual to be used as part of the searching and matching criteria.

All the information should be easily added to the CRM and simply accessed and viewed by you – a one-click mechanism for full visibility. When you input a client requirement, your temp desk should be powerful enough to find suitable temps with the right availability, skills, location and pay. The solution presented to you should contain temps available and willing to work right now or when the requirement dictates. It should also contain details of who’s previously worked for that client and who you should never send back there.

Flexible booking and re-booking

But the challenges don’t end there because now you need to book workers into positions. If it’s one person working shift patterns, that should be a simple case of dragging and dropping them into shifts on your CRM calendar…but what if fifty people are needed, or a hundred people in a warehouse, all with complex dates and times? Your temp desk needs to display available workers and have a quick and easy way of booking them into jobs in one click or drag and drop, without the need to do everything individually because, well, time is money.

Your next challenge comes when the client calls and says ‘Those temps you booked in, I need them the following Thursday and Friday at specific times…’ – your temp desk must be able to extend and re-book all, or just a few, of those workers. Alternatively you may need to just carry forward the requirement so other temps can be sought to fill the gaps.

Compliant, booked and delivered

Your CRM also needs to take into consideration the compliance requirements. With fast-moving temps, it’s all about making sure checks are done upfront so when an assignment comes in, your list of suitable candidates are already compliant. Your temp desk should provide full visibility of the checks required for the role, including site and job specific ones, and display the candidate’s compliance details.

When it comes to travel, two temps in London for example could live the same distance from a clients’ location but, depending on the transport links available to them at that time of day, it could take one of them considerably longer than the other to arrive.

All these things need to be considered and easily visible to help you make the right decisions and quickly notify the client; giving them the comfort you’ve found the right people, they’re booked-in, they have the right skills and they’re compliant.

Dealing with fast-moving temps is complex and challenging, and these are just some of the tools your CRM temp desk should provide to ensure you remain effective, productive, competitive and profitable.

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