Hello and welcome to the AW2020 edition of the Hiring Hub product update!
August was a hot one. We all debated the purchase of air conditioners for the ‘5 days a year we have hot weather’. Just as we were getting close to buying them, it rained. A lot. Homeostasis has, once again, been reached. Autumn is now upon us, marked by the multicolored confetti adorning every street. Some keen beans have decided to put their Christmas decorations up – well, 2020 has been a strange year. In for a penny, in for a pound..
Super secret project
In July, we alluded to the super secret project we’d been working on, and we’re delighted to say that we have some more details for you.
What?
Our Manhattan project is a new product offering, called Portal.
Portal is for enterprise customers – employers who are seeking to route all of their third-party recruitment activity through one platform, giving them greater control and visibility of recruitment metrics, agency usage, spend and compliance, while simplifying payment through one vendor.
An employer will add their preferred supplier list (PSL) to Portal, managing it through the platform for enhanced data and insights while continuing to recruit as they always have. The only change is it’s all consolidated onto one digital platform, which can integrate into their other systems (ATS, payments, etc).
Employers can select the specific agencies they would like to work on the role, just as they would outside of Portal. Agencies on the PSL are still subject to the terms and conditions already agreed upon with the employer.
If the employer would like to open up their vacancy to Hiring Hub’s marketplace, they can push a job onto the marketplace for our existing agencies to work on and (hopefully) fill.
As vacancies are filled, data and insights will be available to the employers so they can better understand their recruitment process. They can see how long each step of the process is taking, to optimise their candidate experience. They can see who are their top performing agencies. They can see the gender diversity of their candidates, and make changes to their processes accordingly.
Who?
Portal is an offering for employers who are trying to improve compliance, reduce spend, simplify invoicing and better understand agency performance and usage.
Why?
Because the market came to us.
Employers with higher volumes of vacancies that are filled by recruitment agencies on their PSL were looking for a way to manage spend, ensure supplier compliance across the company, consolidate invoicing, gain insights into their recruitment process and improve the productivity of their internal recruitment teams.
That can all be achieved by routing recruitment agency hiring through one online platform, helping lighten the load for our employers’ internal teams.
When?
Portal is available for new and existing employer users now!
After conducting research into the key problems to be solved, we designed a lean minimum viable product (MVP). This involved making some changes to the existing HH platform to allow new types of users, and specific rules for those users such as branding etc. Now, you’re wondering what we’ve built for Portal? Let me share with you some highlights…
Firstly, we began work on a new sign up form for PSL agencies. We wanted to make their introduction to Hiring Hub the best experience possible. We created a new form with new branding and messaging to help PSL agencies understand more about Portal and what it can do for them. Here is what it looks like:
This form enables easy sign up and set up on the HH system, so the PSL agencies don’t need to think about complex sign up processes.
Once roles had been added, we moved onto, what we call, the ‘audience’ function of Portal. This allows Portal employers to select specific PSL agencies to view and work on their roles.
Now, our Portal employers can select as many or as few PSL agencies as they desire, to work on their role. They can even choose to post it to the HH marketplace if they would like to cast a wider net. If they change their mind, they can alter the audience and post to the HH marketplace at any time.
In time, our Portal employers will be able to organise and curate their PSL lists to suit them. If they have a Sales list, they can create a Sales PSL within their account and add the entire list to their audience.
Finally, we focussed on the analytics for Portal employers. Our research told us that performance data on agencies was an important problem to solve.
When building the analytics for Portal employers, our aim was to highlight the performance differences between their PSL and marketplace agencies, so Portal employers can decide which supplier group should work on their roles.
As a starting point, we worked on some simple metrics to calculate the number of jobs filled by PSL agencies and marketplace agencies, and their success rate at filling them, or their fill rate. Below, you can see a design of the initial widgets with some dummy data.
During the design phase, we asked ourselves “how will we know who is better? PSL or marketplace?”. It was in asking this question, that we settled upon the ‘League Table’.
Taking inspiration from football, we build the league table to rank agencies from all groups (PSL and marketplace) based on the number of placements they have made for the Portal employer, then number of engagements, then interview rate. You can see it for yourself…
This feature gave us the opportunity to add some new technology to our system, namely starting to use Typescript and moving towards an events-based architecture. Win!
So how do you sign up? If you’re an employer or you know of an employer who may be interested, our account managers are ready and waiting to help you get the most out of your recruitment. If you have any questions or thoughts on Portal or how to improve it, we would love to hear from you. Our VP of Sales, Daniel, is all ears.
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