As the trend towards VMS adoption becomes increasingly popular, staffing firms are faced with mounting pressure to overcome the associated challenges. How can VMS support help them, and what strategies can they adopt to collaborate with their VMS support and further boost ROI?
Challenges of Implementing VMS
The challenges of implementing a Vendor Management System primarily stem from one key factor: the system limits the contact between the hiring manager and account manager. With this diminished relationship, the account manager and recruitment team end up with less information to work with in regards to the intangible qualities of the open position, work environment and company culture.
This limited comprehension can often result in mismatches between potential candidates and the client company. Consequently, this lower quality of candidate can lead to a reduced ratio of submission-to-hire, lower margins, and decreased ROI. These challenges combine to make yet another potential problem: hiring and training recruiters who are actually willing to work within VMS parameters.
If these challenges seem too numerous and troublesome to surmount, you’ll be relieved to hear that there is a solution.
How VMS Support Can Help
A VMS support partner can help you combine the economic advantages of a VMS with the competitive edge you need to stay successful in your industry. This is a support team that knows VMS processes inside out. The most important benefit is that they can scale efforts according to the evolving client demand. This is key to maximizing efficiency and achieving positive ROI.
Using a VMS support team will help overcome many of the challenges of implementing a VMS. Working round the clock, they can ensure improved turnaround time and optimized workflow processes – a combination that ensures a quality of candidate that aligns with your firm.
Ultimately, a support team allows you to improve metrics and scorecard performance in order to achieve preferred vendor status.
Strategies for further increasing ROI
That said, VMS support isn’t a magic solution. It takes setting some very specific, long-term goals to effectively integrate a support team.
For example, it can be tempting to cherry pick positions to send to your VMS support, but we’ve found that this is actually counterproductive. Instead, send all positions to the team, allowing them to sort and source candidates accordingly.
Another valuable practice is reevaluating the compensation structure of the recruitment team that works directly with your VMS support team. Incentivizing their VMS efforts in order to increase their productivity, efficiency, and, of course, motivation, is an excellent strategy to help overcome the potential strategy of attracting and retaining recruiters who are willing to work with VMS.
At the end of the day, you need to keep the big picture in mind, assuring a balance between both your VMS and non-VMS business. If handled strategically, the increasingly popular trend of Vendor Management Systems can give your staffing firm the competitive edge you need to stay ahead. If you’re interested in learning more about VMS support, just let us know. We’d love to help.
