A Tale of Two Turnarounds — #1 — Making Your Recruitment Workable

Some problems are easier than others to solve. That was certainly the case for the two tales you are about to hear. In this two-part series, we will be discussing two real case studies of companies facing recruiting challenges. We’ll highlight their situation, the approach we took and the results. Turns out, while both companies were using the same initial recruiting product, that was about the only commonality they shared. Each tale will reveal the vastly different solutions we leveraged. Recruiting is nuanced, it’s a big reason why so many providers exist. Sometimes it’s hard to identify the right approach. There is no Swiss Army knife for recruiting, but if you have a good handle on your problem, there are solutions that when used properly make all the difference.

Tale #1: The Overwhelmed Consulting Firm

The Problem:

It was late spring of 2018 when this CEO called me in need of help. “I know you know recruiting systems, and my team’s in trouble. When can you get here?” The team had several projects that were about to plunge over a cliff if the company did not find the talent they needed to staff key projects. Their team was drowning in logistics and suffering from a lack in clarity. For this consulting firm of 30 employees, they were paying well over $10K annually for a particular product that was supposed to be their one recruiting solution. Unfortunately, since they also had website leads, referrals, and more than a few postings here and there on different job boards too, the information was a logistical mess. The team was overwhelmed, confused, lacking access to talent, and about to quit in frustration.

The Solution:

In this case, their troubles were easily alleviated with Workable. For a small company with traditional professional openings (program manager, designer, copywriter etc…), Workable’s offering was a huge save. At a third of the cost of their prior solution, we pulled those projects back from the edge of the cliff and got them moving full speed ahead. Better yet, Workable was up and running within a week of me making it on site to observe their challenges. It literally took an afternoon to get basic operations up and running. Fortunately this team was eager to learn a new approach and ready to make the change. Adoption was not a problem. The team loves their intuitive user interface which supports logical workflows, outlook integration, and integrated emails supporting attachments. But truly the most winning aspect was that Workable automatically posts to 18 key job boards (for free); this includes organic listings on Zip Recruiter, Indeed, LinkedIn, and Google.

The Results:

It’s almost a year later and the company has had no need to add additional staff; they have a process the team states is definitely workable, and they have spare change in their pocket. Today there are plenty of applicants in a central system with a core process, ready to fuel their growth. The company has doubled it’s employee count. And yes, I got to look like a hero. Thanks Workable!

Side-note:

In a future post in the coming weeks, you will hear me rant on about source tracking, but please know that it only applies when you have to pay for postings. In this case, the client needs zero budget for recruitment advertising. They get plenty of applicant flow with the native setup that Workable offers. Given the changes in the job advertising landscape today. In fact, Workable does a fine job tracking the sources of those 18 job boards, not that it really matters.

Click here to continue onto the second tale in this series.