How to: Redeploy More Candidates
Are you prepared for when your top talent finishes an assignment? In today’s competitive recruitment market, having a candidate redeployment strategy is essential for running a successful agency. Not only have you already sourced, screened, and built a relationship with this candidate, but they’ve demonstrated hireability and will save you time to onboard while eliminating the process of sourcing new candidates.
Creating a redeployment strategy isn’t easy, but the ability to ensure that you already have the next assignment lined up for your talent as soon as they finish their previous assignment is an effective way to deliver an incredible experience for your top talent and your top clients, and is a critical part of staying profitable and efficient, all while gaining a competitive edge. Here’s how you can build a successful redeployment strategy in three steps.
Understand your redeployment numbers in order to improve them
What is your agency’s current redeployment rate? In order to begin building a redeployment strategy, agencies must first understand their current data. According to research conducted by CareerBuilder, less than six percent of recruitment agencies actually measure redeployment rate, and of that percentage, agencies reported rates between 10 to 30 percent.
Imagine being a agency on the lower end of those rates, say 10 percent. These agencies are losing 90 percent of their operational efforts year over year on the talent that they fail to redeploy. If your agency isn’t already tracking this, it’s time to start. Measuring this baseline allows your agency to track progress as you continue to implement your strategy.
Find out which workers are ready for redeployment and how much they ultimately impact your margins. Redeployment is not just a numbers game. In order to improve on the bottom line, agencies need to assess which workers are their top talent and should then focus on them first.
To find out which workers in your database are the best for redeployment, make sure your agency is tracking the following:
Bill Rate:
The rate your agency charges the client for a worker’s work services
Pay Rate:
The rate your agency pays the worker for his/her work services
Margin:
A calculation of your worker’s bill rate minus their pay rate
Redeployments
The number of times a worker has been successfully placed
Once you’ve tracked enough data and have a good understanding of your redeployment rate, you can use this to set goals.
If you manage a team, consider building a redeployment strategy into your training program so that recruiters are fully equipped to make best practices from the moment they’re hired. It’s also worth considering tracking redeployment rates by each individual recruiter to see if a low rate may be a sign of a larger problem, such as continued poor candidate experience or failure to check in with placed workers. Once you’ve spotted the individual recruiters with the highest redeployment rates, reward them! Working redeployment into their evaluations or rewarding them is a great strategy to convert a higher redeployment rate across the board for your firm.
Candidate experience counts: Do workers enjoy working with your agency?
Redeploying isn’t just about having the next job lined up for your high-quality candidates–they have to want to work with you, again! Providing a positive candidate experience can make all the difference when it comes to having repeat business. Follow these useful tips and you’ll have workers coming back for more job reqs in no time.
It’s no secret that having good communication is key to the success of a recruiter. And candidates have spoken–sometimes recruiters stink at communicating. Bullhorn’s research has found that poor communication is actually the number one complaint from candidates about the application process, and a three out of five candidates feel better communication throughout and after the application process would make the most positive impact.
Getting back to candidates in a timely manner plays a critical in the likelihood that a candidate returns to you for their next position. Always reach out and check in with the worker even if you haven’t heard any news from the hiring manager. One of the most common mistakes is failing to reach out to your workers. Even if they have nothing new to share, reaching out will show them you haven’t forgotten about them and can keep you top of mind when they’re looking for their next role.
Make sure onboarding is as quick and easy as possible. A drawn-out and painful onboarding process is one of the fastest ways to assure your worker won’t be returning to you once their assignment is up. Remember, time spent during the onboarding period is time on the clock that worker won’t be getting paid, so it’s important your agency gets this right quickly and efficiently.
Lastly, it’s important to measure the satisfaction levels of your candidates. While this feels obvious, more agencies are failing to do so than you’d expect. Less than a third of recruitment agencies conduct interviews with candidates about their experience, with only two out of five measuring the satisfaction of their candidates. In order to begin improving your candidate experience, you need to first begin by understanding what is and isn’t working – so the next time you’re speaking with your candidate ask them to measure their satisfaction after each assignment so that you’re better prepared for redeployment in the future.
Leverage your recruitment technology to identify and rehire qualified workers
Do you know when and how to reach out to workers who are ripe for redeployment? If your recruitment technology doesn’t already assist with this it may be time for an upgrade. Having a solution that can identify which candidates will be ready for redeployment and how much they contribute to your business are two telltale signs you’ve found the right recruitment technology. Follow these tips to unlock the full potential of your redeployment efforts.
Knowing when to reach out to workers is critical in the redeployment process. Your candidates don’t want to wait for your call once they’ve finished up their assignment–by then they want the next one already lined up. The best recruitment technologies have automated “Starts and Ends” dashboards that can track this information so that it’s visible and top-of-mind for recruiters. This dashboard creates calendars for you to view who is starting and finishing up assignments so that you’ll never miss another redeployment opportunity.
With the right strategy in place, soon your agency will be seeing tremendous improvements to your redeployment rates. Implementing such a strategy is no easy task, but the long-term effects of being more profitable and efficient will give your agency the competitive advantage it needs redeployment more candidates in a constantly evolving recruitment landscape.
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