Back to school for temp agencies with the resource to chase changing availability.
Education Recruitment Agencies starting the academic year have the ongoing overhead of chasing workers latest availability.
Temp agencies that don’t automate this core process waste more than 20% of their resource. Calling, emailing, chasing, recording, changing availability directly into their CRM, to find when needed, the worker is no longer available.
Availability of workers in the temporary sectors is a must have. But managing it manually is painfully expensive and completely futile; by definition availability changes..
Schools Academic Year
The start of each new academic year typically puts schools into mild shock with children actually turning up at the school gate.
The summer break for schools to get ready goes too quickly. With new and existing staff “up for it”, but within the week beginning to feel the dark shadow of the coming stress each new academic year imposes.
Education agencies in the first few weeks of each new term often get short shrift from schools dealing with the influx. Education agencies use the first week back rushing around to get the workers ready to fill future vacancies.
Supply Teachers and Teaching assistants
For supply teacher and the ever-increasing number of teaching assistants the first few weeks of the term is uncomfortable, unless lucky enough to have already been assigned to schools.
Contact from agencies early in each new term is very important for that “check in” and reassurance that things always pick up.
Good agencies contact their temp workers for genuinely beneficial conversations, about preparation for the term, expectations, work type, long-term, short-term, day-to-day supply ambitions.
Agencies ringing or email just for availability, boarders on rude. If an agency is representing a supply teacher then a detailed meaningful conversation about expectations is the standard; not “are you available next Wednesday afternoon?”
Technology to remove futile availability harvesting
Good education agencies see value in supporting their consultants and their temp staff with greater flexibility, choice, and control through systems that make it easy to instantly share availability. Giving workers the ability to chat directly with their agency contacts, apply to offers, see timesheets, see daily, weekly pay, share skills and qualifications help everybody.
One of our education agencies had over 9,000 availabiltiy changes from their workers in the week before the new term started. With a similar number in the first week of the new term. Manually recording that into the CRM takes 2 minutes per change – easy to see how expensive that is. Actual cost: £0.00
Removing the costly pain for agencies
Having a simply free to use service that benefits workers with functionality that genuinely supports them to earn more, benefits workers to regularly share their latest availability with their preferred agencies.
Education agencies that introduce open free tools enabling choice, remove the pain and costs other less competitive agencies are obliged to incur recording changing availability.
That’s a 20%+ saving for recruiters, who spend more & better time with their clients and candidates with fee earning high value core activities, and not admin.
Demand pattern
The education sector has very clear pattern 3 terms over the academic year, 13 weeks of holiday with demand from schools steadily increasing week on week from September through to May when demand flattens and starts to reduce towards the summer holiday.
It’s the same every year, other than demand for unqualified teachers increasing significantly. Along with demand from school employees for greater flexible working increasing too.
Education sector agencies know these patterns well. Preparing workers for each new term & half term where consultants must know who is available. Agencies implementing easy to use beneficial apps, don’t have the cost or worry of availability as it is pulled directly into their CRM system.
The option to directly pull availability into any CRM or to access it via dynamic reporting or view it live via the stand alone portal. Regardless of the route to see the availabilty of contacts it always includes when that availability was last updated. Know when the data was most recently updated give confidence to recruitment consultants with the CRM data.
More confidence with the data in the CRM system means more bookings filled quicker, happier clients, candidates and recruiters who simply earn more.
Back to school
“Automating what you can” makes sense for all temp agency who want to remain competative. Be that in education, care, hospitality sectors with workers who regularly change their availability. GCSE recruitment requires thinking about how an agency invests resource and to actively remove the pain of harvesting changing availability. Foundation activity, easily automated for a competative edge, take a look at Updatedge