February 28, 2019
Across industries, workers are using mobile devices to improve effectiveness. According to one recent study, employees see a 34 percent increase in efficiency by using smartphones at work, including significant upticks in work quality, collaboration, speed of innovation and productivity. At staffing agencies, perhaps even more than most businesses, speed of execution and decision-making is critical to success. For example, account managers and recruiters are constantly racing the competition to fill job requisitions. Of course, given that new requests from top clients don’t always wait until they’re conveniently seated at their desks, having mobile access to this information can help ensure a timely response. But historically, suppliers haven’t had access to a mobile app that would enable them to tackle such tasks. This is just one reason that PRO Unlimited built the Wand Mobile Supplier App, the industry’s first mobile app created specifically for account managers, recruiters, sourcers and billing specialists. (Read the official press release.) In this blog post, we’ll look at five ways that mobile helps suppliers increase their effectiveness. 1) Staying on top of tasks. Email is an essential work communication tool, but the reality is that the average worker receives more than 120 emails a day, roughly 50 percent of which are spam. As a result, open rates hover around 20 percent. In contrast, open rates for SMS messages stand at roughly 98 percent. In addition, it takes the average person 90 minutes to respond to an email, but only 90 seconds to respond to an SMS. Put another way, receiving mobile push notifications about important work tasks in addition to emails helps ensure that you see and respond to these items in a timely fashion. For staffing agency team members, this means having access to a native mobile app, where they can choose to receive push notifications regarding specific work tasks such as interview coordination, job requests and expense review. These notifications can help ensure they act quickly and ultimately increase productivity, especially if new requests are displayed immediately upon opening the app. 2) Scheduling candidate interviews. One recent study reported that the average employee spends more than one day a week in meetings. Another report stated that middle managers spend about 35 percent of an average day in meetings, while upper managers are in meetings more than 50 percent of the average day. With calendars already so booked, it’s easy to see how coordinating a candidate interview can be challenging, with availability shifting by the minute – and at all times of the day. This is why mobile access can be so helpful in enabling recruiters and sourcers to schedule interviews with just a few easy swipes and taps, helping ensure they’re getting candidates in front of clients as quickly as possible. 3) Tracking job requests. As outlined in the intro to this post, new and urgent job requests can hit suppliers’ desks at all hours. The ability to access these requests via mobile device anytime and anywhere helps ensure account managers are always