6 Bad Admin Habits Costing Recruiters Big Bucks

6 Bad Admin Habits Costing Recruiters Big Bucks Its pretty amazing what  CRM systems are capable of. Instead of having to maintain our own labour-intensive filing systems, a few quick clicks of the mouse are  sometimes all it takes to  manage your business. Thanks to tailored software systems used in recruitment agencies, you  create profiles for all the candidates and clients youve met, and store all relevant information in one place. While computers  harness the  ability to store and analyse information  in ways we could never  even come close to rivalling, the benefit you get will only ever be as good as your own input. Admin got you all, no thanks? Youre not alone. Note-taking and updating virtual resources can be extremely time consuming, but its the recruiter who doesnt slip into sloppy habits who  reaps the rewards. Coming out of a meeting or off of  a call and telling yourself youll do the admin later is a massive warning sign. Why? Because you wont do it later, and if you do, you would have forgotten half of the juicy  details  anyway so it will be way less effective. Put simply, bad admin equals wasted time and money. Here are some of the worst habits to avoid: 1.  Leaving out contact details Youre having a conversation with someone over email. You set up a time to talk, and they call you. Instead of saving the number right away, you leave it as a random number in your phone. You dont save it to their profile in your CRM system, either. Next time you need to speak with that person, you  find yourself  fishing through your call history to match up the time you spoke and length of call, with their potential number. Its a tedious, time-wasting task. Almost as tedious as reading back through an email chain  from 2014 to find a number   it has to be here somewhere!! The same goes for when you receive CVs and business cards always transfer the contact details straight away because youll end up losing  the original document, and if you havent saved the information youll be catapulted back to square one if you ever want to talk to that person again. Wasting time searching for information you once had at your finger tips is a a complete waste of time. If your agency operates on a client ownership / shared candidate model, failing to record contact details not only wastes your time, but probably your colleagues too. Be a champion for best practice! Ensuring the contact details are in one central directory  is better for everyone. 2.  Terrible tracking Youve met someone, and sat on a million calls with them, but according to the CRM system notes, youve only ever exchanged  two emails, and it was more than six months ago. Its extremely important to record your meetings, calls and emails (within reason), so you constantly pick up where you left off with candidates and clients, instead of accidentally going over old ground and making a fool of yourself. Its easy to feel like youll remember every piece of correspondence youve had with someone, but when youve had hundreds of similar meetings, everything can blur into one giant relationship and the specifics are lost. People will remember talking to you,  as youre offering them a special service;  candidates dont deal with a hundred recruiters in the same way that recruiters deal with hundreds of candidates. If you dont remember them in return, youre likely to disgruntle them and potentially lose their business, because of failing to build a genuine rapport. 3.  Spelling errors Writing down names incorrectly is risky always check this carefully! Computer software systems may be excellent at storing and sorting information, but they are not forgiving of grammatical errors! Bad spelling means your searches wont return the correct results, and you will lose people inside your CRM system.  Failing to correctly take down information also puts you at risk of submitting a candidate to a role under an incorrectly spelt name, or letting those errors seep through into letters, contracts and emails, which can make absolute mountains out of molehills, and waste you serious time. 4.  Failing to update When you find out a piece of information about someone or something, regardless of whether  its a new piece of contact information, a status update on a process, a change of job or a change of last name, updating the admin  should happen immediately.  Failing to keep information up to date means youll miss things, and slowly lose control of your network and whats going on around you. Youll always be a few steps behind everybody else, and youll waste time by covering your old ground because youve forgotten youve already been there and done that! 5.  Clueless coding CRM systems are built with excellent algorithms which allow specific search terms to sift through hundreds of thousands of profiles, and bring about the people who are  best  suited for whatever it is you need. If you dont fill in all of the fields when uploading a new contact, leaving locations, salary brackets, company or job titles blank your searches will be extremely ineffective and you will no doubt miss out on placements because of it. The people you really should be speaking to will slip through the cracks because they wont appear in any of your searches they might as well not even be in your system! 6. Rubbish  reminders Just because a contact, candidate or client isnt of use to you right now, doesnt mean they wont make you money in the future. Leaving a note with not interested next to someones name in the system without a task to follow up with them at some stage in the future is as ineffective as using a dead fish to paint your nails. The key to good admin is to do it THEN AND THERE! If you dont do it quickly, itll never happen and youll lose time and money as a result. Happy admin-ing! Image: Shutterstock