The top 10 management tools for recruiters

“This Teams meeting could have been an email”. How many times have we all felt that through lockdown? Or, worse still, getting a phone call from a panicked colleague “did you get my email?”. The truth is, that although remote working has definite perks (shorter commute, kitchen on hand for endless snacking, ability to switch laundry loads over in between meetings), it has also put a strain on the working relationships of many teams.

Without office banter and those usual touchpoints of face-to-face catch-ups, lines of communication are slower, more impersonal and less efficient. In turn, this can lead to losses and mistakes: missed emails, taking too long to get back to clients or dropping the ball on paperwork.

Even as lockdown easing continues, we’ll likely all be working from home to some degree or another for some time yet. So, you need to find new ways to make it work. Using a management tool can help recruitment teams keep on top of all their placements, see where engagements are at with their clients and assign tasks easily throughout the team.

You can keep all your communication in one place, so nothing slips through the net. Here is Kingsbridge’s list of the top 10 management tools for recruiters, and what they can do for your staffing business.

Asana

If you’re forever emailing spreadsheets to your colleagues, not quite sure which is the latest version, then Asana is for you. This smart project management tool gives you a base where everything can be contained together: workflows, messages and key documents. Its team tools are amazing – you can assign each person a role so that it’s clear who has responsibility for what.

Its Account Tracking features are especially useful for recruiters; you can see clearly what stage you’re at with each client, and quickly identify any relationships that are at risk for immediate attention.

Monday.com

Monday’s project management platform is used by some big names like Unilever, Uber and Adobe, so they must be doing something right. It has a huge suite of tools to handle multiple and complex projects, but it’s flexible enough to be scaled back if you just need it to handle simple, predictable workflows.

This is an especially useful tool if you line manage people, as it enables you to see the workload of everyone in your team, so you can notice if someone’s overburdened, or where the crunch points will be across a month.

Trello

Collaboration is Trello’s strong point, so it’s an excellent option for when you have multiple staff members working on one account, or for project-based work like marketing strategies or your IR35 implementation plan. It acts like an online noticeboard so it’s good for keeping everyone in the loop and on track, with things like checklists and task assignment.

ClickUp

ClickUp’s interface is streamlined and user-friendly. Unlike some of the other tools, it’s pretty intuitive and doesn’t take long to get the hang of. The real joy of ClickUp is seeing all the things that you would usually need separate apps to do – emails, text documents, spreadsheets, calendars and time tracking all in one place.

If team relations have got a bit frosty over lockdown, ClickUp can help with transparency and accountability by showing everyone what each team member is working on, and what they’ve got lined up next.

Scoro

Scoro is one of our top options for recruitment teams as it integrates your CRM and billing tools with the rest of your workflows. It offers real support for the day-to-day, business-as-usual operations, as well as the flashier project management tools.

It’s specially tailored to the needs of service businesses, making it easy to track things like sales, leads and revenue across days, weeks or months. Definitely check this one out.

Plan.io

There’s a real focus in Planio on information – gathering it, storing it, sharing it – so that it can be accessed at the click of a button – ideal for recruitment businesses, where developing an understanding of the client and their needs (or the contractor and their skills) is so key.

We especially love the Wiki function, which enables your team to build, document and store their knowledge as it’s accumulated, creating easy reference guides and meaning that nothing is lost if someone is on holiday or moves on to a new position.

There’s also a mobile app that can be handy for checking in if you’re out and about visiting clients.

Flow

With big-hitters like Apple, Shopify and Red Bull on their client list, Flow has caught the attention of the cool kids, despite being a relatively new player in this market. Testimonials shout out about their “lighter”, more human approach to a management tool.

As with other tools, it offers a one-stop integration of project timelines, team workloads and communications, but it’s designed to be flexible and to not overburden users with tools that they don’t need – perfect for smaller teams.

We love its smart prioritisation tools that mean we never have to worry about missing a deadline again.

Dropbox Paper

Dropbox Paper is a free management tool from the people who brought you “backing up your documents to the cloud without having to think about it”. It’s great for when you need to work together on documents, noting down the action points from meetings, or for planning collaboratively how to win client accounts.

While it might not have the full suite of project management tools of the likes of Trello, it’s great if your needs are a bit simpler and you just want something to make it easier to work together when you’re not all in the office.

Jira

Originally developed to help teams track issues and bugs in software, Jira has now developed into a mammoth player in the project management app scene. Jira can handle multiple projects and streams with ease, and for workflow management, you can use one of the out-of-the-box templates or create your own.

For the needs of most recruiters, it’s probably a little too much, but worth investigating if your company is growing fast or you have a lot of big projects on the horizon.

Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-like tool, so if you are a fan of Excel, this could be the tool for your recruitment company. You can start a sheet from scratch, from a template or import the information directly.

Once you’ve got your projects in, tasks can then be assigned to your team and your team members can choose how they view it – whether that’s with a visual graph or in a calendar view. If you do a lot of reporting, Smartsheet also has a strong reporting functionality.

We’re not promising that any one of these will make working-from-home a breeze, but with the right tool for your team, you can increase communication, cut down on time wastage and ensure that you keep all those plates spinning. We’re big fans of finding the right tool for the job, and we know that it can take some time to find the thing that’s right for you.

If you’re still looking for a solution to support your IR35 compliance and processes, the Kingsbridge Status Tool might be for you. Unlike other automated tools or pricey consultancy solutions, the Kingsbridge Status Tool is the happy medium between the two – a smart, tailored questionnaire to give a clear answer in most cases, and an expert team of experienced legal advisors to take a closer look at anything borderline.

Sign up here for a free demo to see how the Kingsbridge Status Tool can support your recruitment business now that IR35 is business as usual.

This is not a sponsored article and neither Kingsbridge nor our staff has received any kind of promotional gifts or payment for featuring the above products or services.