Thinking about starting your own recruitment company? You’re in good hands – every year, thousands of experienced recruiters take the leap out of paid employment to venture on a journey of entrepreneurship, building their own businesses and taking command of their financial destiny. And along with hopes, dreams and (ideally) a solid business plan, every start-up needs recruitment software to support its growth. How to choose recruitment software for start-ups?
If you’re getting ready to launch a recruitment venture, keep these pointers in mind.
What you need to know about recruitment software for start-ups
The CRM system that powers your recruitment business is among the most important components of your new business.
“Isn’t it just a glorified spreadsheet? Can’t I just get started with Excel?”
Well, yes… if you want to:
- Lose valuable hours to offline admin and manual data entry
- Let thousands in fees slip through your fingers
- Build your company on foundations of sand
A professional CRM platform is far more than a data storage system – it’s the technology heart of your business, and one that can make a huge pro-active difference to your top and bottom-line growth.
The right recruitment software for start-ups creates workflow efficiencies, frees up time to sell and place candidates, as well as providing a resource that helps new hires bill and generate revenue faster.
Don’t buy twice
Your business is just getting started – does it really matter which tools you use?
You can always upgrade later, right?
CRM systems and recruitment software occupy such a central and prominent position in your agency’s workflow that it pays to get them right from the start.
Used properly, your tech platform will drive recruiter behaviour, structure data, create automated workflow steps and plug into other areas of your front and back office.
It’s far more than a ‘place to store CVs’, and should be a resource continually adding value to your business.
With this in mind, getting started on the wrong platform and migrating data, workflows and systems across to a new provider creates distracting and unnecessary work.
Pick the right tool first time around and go all in on making it work for you.
Get references
Choosing any software can be challenging, but you don’t have to do it alone. The recruitment industry has thousands of agencies of all shapes, sizes and ages, and any CRM provider should be confident to offer you a host of customer references to explore.
After all, whose word do you want to take – the sales rep’s, or the advice of a fellow business owner facing the same challenges as you?
Doing your homework isn’t just about comparing feature lists, it’s about hearing what actual customers have to say about the product, the support, the customer service and the experience.
Budget doesn’t mean cheap
Technically speaking, recruitment CRM software isn’t a cost – it’s an investment.
This means you shouldn’t be looking for the lowest-priced tool, but rather the one that provides the best ROI to your business.
Sure, price plays into this – it’s part of the ROI calculation.
But when it comes to shopping for recruitment software and technology, the question you should be asking is how the investment in the tool will repay itself in efficiency and opportunity to create more revenue.
If you focus solely on price and don’t calculate ROI, you’re soon back into Excel territory again.
Buy for success, not for failure
If you’re committing time, energy, money and – more than likely – a chunk of your career to building a business, chances are you think it will succeed.
Launching any company is a big risk, but with the right planning and effort, hundreds of new recruitment agencies succeed every year.
This raises a key question – if you think you’ll succeed, why choose your software as though you won’t?
Buying a basic CRM tool that only gets your business to square one is a false economy – you’ll soon outgrow it and have to go back through the vetting and testing process all over again.
As the primary tech platform for your company, it’s best to buy with confidence – investing in a system that can accelerate and support your growth from start-up to thriving agency, growing and expanding your business without migrating from your original tech setup.
Voyager Infinity and Voyager Mid-Office are software solutions that make Recruiters’ lives easier. Voyager Infinity is a CRM used by thousands of recruiters globally to source, nurture and maintain the relationships with their clients and candidates, and Mid-Office manages the entire Pay and Bill process (IR35 ready).
