Recruitment and the excel spreadsheet
There is always one person in the office who, when a conversation about excel is happening, pipes up, ‘I love excel spreadsheets, they’re so much fun.’ It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, or what kind of office you’re in, there is always that one person. You’re then left muttering under your breath while doing your best to ignore them and oddly enough, when you do ask them for help with your excel spreadsheet there’s always some bug or ‘never seen before’ error that prevents them being actually helpful.
We’re pretty sure that this has been the story in recruitment agencies across the land for decades. The recruitment industry has had a long love affair with the spreadsheet and, despite new technology, has clung on to excel with a stubborn resilience. If your agency is still using spreadsheets, it’s good to understand how it might be holding your business back, and why it’s not a long term solution.
How excel spreadsheets might be holding back your recruitment business
1. Static data
You can spend hours labouring over the most beautiful spreadsheet, but the minute you’ve finished creating it the information is old. It’s a static collection of data that is only ever updated manually, and therefore relies on humans to remember (which is always a mistake). In an industry that moves quickly, and staff that move jobs even quicker, your spreadsheets are set up to fail the minute the moderator walks out the door, or the client or candidate changes their mind.
2. Upkeep
Let’s say you do truly love spreadsheets, it’s still an incredibly labourious job and maintaining the right data is hard work. Ultimately it will fall on one person as they’re not designed for multiple users. As such it’s time consuming, especially considering the sheer volume of data that sits beneath a recruitment agency.
If your finance teams, consultants, legal and payroll employees are working off various spreadsheets that’s a lot of manpower dedicated to inputting and managing data that realistically should be automated. Nothing stands still, and starting a recruitment agency in the UK now relies on being organised to keep you efficient so you can focus on developing relationships, for example.
3. Now, now, now
Everything that happens within the world of recruitment should have happened yesterday and everyone wants things now or five minutes ago. That includes reports that need to be pulled and analysed within the space of the morning before decisions are made that afternoon.
Working off various spreadsheets limits your reporting capabilities and therefore your ability to make the right decisions for your agency. You should instead be working with a recruitment database and applicant tracking systems that are able to generate analytics, reports, metrics and every bit of information about margins, candidates, clients and revenue. Access Recruitment CRM is designed to get you information needed, within the hour. Even the most beautiful spreadsheet won’t give you that.
4. Your people
The majority of your people don’t like spreadsheets, excel or staring at rows and columns for hours on end. Don’t let that one enthusiastic excel lover fool you. Spreadsheets are mostly frustrating and the majority of people aren’t trained properly to use them, which makes them even more frustrating. The last thing you need is red-faced employees throwing laptops out of the office windows. (It’s been known to happen).
5. Scalability
As your recruitment agency grows, you’re going to need to grow everything with it. Your processes and back office need to be able to handle your evolution and if your systems don’t scale up they’re pretty much dead in the water.
The value of a recruitment company is partially defined by its ability to show continuous growth and punching numbers into spreadsheets won’t support the bigger vision you had for your business. Access Recruitment CRM allows agencies to integrate front and back office functions to create a connected way of working that breaks down silos and facilitates growth.
This isn’t to say that spreadsheets aren’t useful and helpful for certain things, of course they are, but to hang your recruitment agencies success on processes that involve spreadsheets is in fact setting yourself up for failure.
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