Mon, 18 Aug 2014 | By James Passingham, technical director, Foehn With the UK employment market on the way back up, recruiters will be exploring how modern communications technology can help them compete effectively – attracting employers and good candidates whilst enhancing the productivity of their consultants.

Technology has advanced significantly during recent recessionary times and telephony systems are light years from what their historical counterparts could offer back in 2008. With a modern set up, recruitment agencies can now answer questions such as:

- Just how productive are my recruitment consultants?  

- Could they operate even faster and more efficiently, given the right telephony tools?

- Can I get visibility of our telephony activity with accurate and timely call logging and reporting – on a daily, weekly, monthly basis?

Cloud computing has had a major impact on modern IT infrastructure services, facilitated by affordable access circuits enabling companies to connect at high speed to the internet. Many of the issues associated with traditional infrastructures have been removed and this means businesses can manage technical operations without specialist skills in-house.  

The same is true of telephony because the cloud removes many of the traditional logistical challenges associated with building and managing telecoms infrastructure.

The major differences between modern telephony and what companies might have invested in previously are cost, flexibility and a host of new features.

Employment up, costs coming down

Hosted telephony requires no capital outlay which means minimal upfront expenditure as there is no need to invest in an onsite telephone system.

Because hosted systems scale up and down, recruitment agencies need not build in capacity for growth or try to predict business needs to protect their investment. If fewer extensions are needed, costs come down. If an agency is growing the system can be scaled up.

Easy, flexible and reliable

Unlike traditional systems, hosted telephony is easy to set up. Extensions and fully featured systems are deployable in just minutes – not days or weeks – reducing lead times. Furthermore, a hosted deployment is less likely to experience implementation issues as the system is already built.

Inherent flexibility also means that businesses can adapt to changing circumstances. For example, if something happens, like an office flood that would incapacitate a traditional system, consultants continue to operate because there is no dependence on a physical PBX.

Integrate, log, report and save time

With modern telephony systems, feature richness often comes as standard and a good hosted system will provide all the features of ‘on premise’ systems which will also come with a far lower cost. Such features provide recruitment agencies with a plethora of communications tools that they can use to good effect.

• Accurate and Timely Call Logging and Reporting

Complete visibility of detailed reports of telephony activity with an easy to use management portal that can be accessed from any location. Foehn’s telephony solution, for example, has comprehensive monitoring with 150 metrics available for issue identification. Run reports by single queues, or by user-created queue groups, with activity statistics and duration by call stage, with daily, hourly (or shorter), weekly breakdowns. This helps you measure business targets and your consultants’ effectiveness.

• Call logging for transparency and data control

Timely and accurate call logging and reporting provides complete visibility of each consultant’s telephony activity – daily, weekly and monthly. This is possible through an easy to use management portal that may be accessed from any location.

• Cross platform integration to increase consultants’ productivity

By integrating telephony with other desktop applications and systems, such as CRM, an agency can have a better view of its candidates and prospects rather than using a static database.  

• Click to Dial

Consultants spend less time entering phone numbers, instead clicking to dial numbers from their desktop to reach candidates faster.

• Record calls and instantly retrieve them any time

Record calls securely with instant retrieval, enabling consultants to keep accurate records of enquiries and preliminary interviews with candidates.

• Call recording to save time

Hosted call recording relieves the need for note-taking and inputting information because calls may be securely recorded and instantly retrievable from corresponding support tickets.

Time to employ new IP telephony?

Statistics issued by the Office for National Statistics show that the number of people out of work fell by 161,000 to 2.16m, bringing unemployment down to 6.6%. The number of people in work rose by a record 345,000 to 30.5m, most of which are in full-time employment.  

These welcome trends are set to continue as September and October are the next busy months for recruitment agencies. The time could be right to review new communications technologies to help them to gain share, empower consultants and improve the performance of their business.

James Passingham, technical director of communication systems integrator, Foehn.

• Foehn provides a range of IP telephony solutions to recruitment companies. For further information please visit: www.foehn.co.uk/recruitment
Telephone: +44 (20) 3199 7165
Email: [email protected]