Why Visitor Management is Important for Your Recruiting Firm

Compared to many organizations, recruiting firms see a large number of visitors for their headcount. Most of the people who walk through their doors of a recruiting agency are candidates for job opportunities. Having a visitor management system is essential to the proper functioning of an office that is continually inviting and receiving new people to meet with recruiters for fact-finding and screening.

Visitor management is also important to the candidates themselves. Minutes before a first interview, job seekers are often stressed, harried, paying extra attention to their look and attire, prepping themselves to answer interview questions, and reviewing various job specifications. It is unnecessary to burden them with additional challenges like trying to determine how to find the recruiter they are meeting with.

First, what is visitor management?

Visitor management is the process through which an organization efficiently greets, tracks and attends to every guest, whether they are interview candidates, clients seeking new employees, vendor or the postman. Some organizations never really think about how they handle guests. They just allow people to walk in and talk to whoever is seated closest to the door. Some have a receptionist to greet people and point them in the right direction. However, for those organizations who have large numbers of visitors – e.g. hotels, hospitals and recruiters - having a visitor management system in place is truly essential.

A visitor management system is a conscientious strategy and standard system for handling all the guests who visit your organization. This includes being prepared for visitors in any way possible, logging each visitor, and having detailed records of the visits. Since a recruiting office processes large numbers of possible candidates every day, it is vital to keep accurate records.

Using an electronic visitor sign in app offers a number of benefits that recruiters can use to their advantage.

Professional first impressions

When it comes to recruitment, some industries have a scarcity problem; there are far more open positions than there are qualified candidates. Since a recruiting office may very well be trying to woo a candidate away from an already comfortable position, it pays to build your employer brand. The image you project to candidates is the first – albeit indirect – impression that they get of their potential employer. Your clients are counting on you to be as professional and impressive as possible when searching for and interacting with candidates.

An electronic visitor management system can make that first impression a professional one.

• Modern technology: By allowing candidates to use a visitor sign-in app instead of pen and paper, it shows that you have entered the 21^st It is convenient and looks impressive.
• Accurate data: Checking themselves in, as opposed to checking in with a receptionist, assures a candidate that all their information is entered correctly.
• Confidence in notification: Digital check in also assures the candidate that the recruiter they are meeting with knows they have arrived. They aren’t relying on a busy receptionist to pass the message along.
• Preferred: Candidates are focused on the upcoming interview. Self check-in allows them to maintain their preparations as opposed to building a rapport with reception personnel.

This professional impression isn’t just for candidates; it’s for clients, too. They are hiring you to help them hire people.

When you have a client -- or a potential client -- visit your office, you want every single interaction to help ensure them you will use the most efficient tools to find the best possible candidates. When clients check in with your visitor check-in app they too will see the system work to immediately notify their host of their arrival. If they see the professional way in which candidates are handled in your business, they will have reason to be more confident in their choice to use your recruiting firm.

Fast

A digital check-in process is quite quick. And reception notifications are instantly sent via voice call, text message, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Hangouts. 

The result is candidates know their recruiter has been notified. And recruiters, regardless of where they are in (or out of) the office will receive the notification in real-time. 

Efficient applications

Tracking applicants and candidates is a primary goal of recruiters. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are the backbone of many recruiting firms. This software stores all the information about candidates, their resumes, their applications, and much more.

The very best visitor management systems can be used in conjunction with applicant tracking systems to make the check in and application process even more efficient. Imagine the following scenario:

• An applicant arrives at the office and is asked to sign in using a visitor check-in kiosk or an iPad receptionist.
• Upon completing their electronic check-in form, the final screen informs the candidate. “An email has been sent to [candidate email address] with information that will allow you to complete or review your application.” (This can also be done via text message.)
• When the candidate opens their inbox, they find an email that was automatically generated by the visitor management system. Inside the email is a link to the recruiting firm’s applicant tracking software.
• While sitting in the reception area, the candidate completes or reviews their application via their smartphone or laptop.

This sort of system shows the candidate that the firm values their time, allowing them to be active during their wait.

Your recruiters benefit too! Instead of scanning a resume in front of the candidate, they have all of the job seeker's relevant information already in the ATS when the candidates steps in the room. The data is in easy-to-ready digital form. Down the road, recruiters can easily see which candidates have been interviewed, who interviewed them and when.

Handling walk-ins

One of the unique benefits of a visitor management system is that it handles walk-in candidates incredibly well. Such candidates are a blank slate for recruiting firms, and gathering all the pertinent information from them is important to do right away.

With electronic visitor registration, walk-ins will immediately be asked to check in. If your system is designed like the one described above, they would immediately get a link that would encourage them to sign in and complete their application. This ensures that you have them in your system from the start, instead of having to ask them to complete the application at a later time. This information increases your candidate pool when a job description matches their experience and skill set. 

Not only would their information be in the system, but a member of your team would be notified of their arrival so they wouldn’t fall through the cracks.

Candidate Visit Preregistration

Some modern visitor management systems have the capability of sending preregistration information to the candidate. When the recruiters in your office know a particular candidate is going to be arriving, preregistration provides an opportunity to jump-start the whole process and make sure the candidates know what to expect.

• Advanced applications: Just as mentioned above, an email could be sent in advance to candidates with a link directing them to your applicant tracking software. They can begin the process of completing your applications long before they arrive on site.
  This is incredibly useful to candidates. They might appreciate the ability to take their time completing these important documents, especially if they have any form of writing anxiety. Crafting the right response or looking up work history takes time, and being able to do it in the comfort of their own homes without anyone looking over their shoulders is preferable to doing it when they arrive at the office.
• Deliver important information: Along with links to your software, an advance preregistration email can include other important information that the candidate would need to know before arriving at your location. Some things that might be included are:
  • Directions to the office
  • Location of parking
  • Which entrance to use
  • Check-in procedures
  • Name of the recruiter with whom they’ll be meeting
  • What kind of paperwork or identification they need to bring
  • Any other information that will make the visit go smoothly for all parties

Useful data collection

Visitor management is about more than the visitor experience. The data your firm can collect by using a digital visitor log can be incredibly useful. Since the information is collected in a database, the data can be sliced in a number of ways to provide insight into what is happening in the office.

When checking in to a visitor management system, the candidate could be asked to provide the following information, useful for later analysis.

• Who: Not only is the candidate entering their own contact information, but they can be asked with whom they are meeting.
• Type of Job: Candidates applying for electrical jobs can quickly be sorted from those applying for general construction, or any other type of job.
• When: An electronic sign-in app automatically logs the time and date of check-in.

All this information taken together creates a record of who was in the office on any given date, with whom they met, and about what. Used in conjunction with the applicant tracking software, this data can be incredibly valuable.

• You could search for a particular candidate, find out who met with them and what their impressions were.
• You could see if a candidate has been repeatedly recruited but hasn’t been hired or hasn’t accepted a position. Depending on the situation, you could talk to clients about why the candidate hasn’t been a good fit. Vice versa, you could ask the candidate what an employer would need to have in order to secure them as an employee. This could allow you to streamline the type of jobs and/or employers you sent to this candidate.
• Searching or sorting by type of job could show you what has the most or fewest candidates applying and where you need to concentrate efforts to fill certain jobs. If you have far too many candidates for some types and not nearly enough for others, you know you’ll need to work harder to draw more candidates for the latter.
• With the date and time stamps, you can analyze the average number of candidates the office processes in a day. You could even see if a particular recruiter is handling significantly more or fewer candidates than others. The ability to see your total candidate throughput over time gives you the ability to measure something that may previously have been much harder to measure.

Conclusion: Take the Advantage to Win

Utilizing visitor management as a part of your recruiting strategy is simply smart. Between the superior data collection and analytical capabilities and the ability to make a great impression on your job candidates – and your clients – having a system in place offers multiple advantages.

Plus, most visitor registration software systems are designed to make your job easier and to bring efficiency to your recruiting firm. Used in tandem with your current reception strategies, an electronic visitor registration system can allow your employees to focus more time and attention on the people they bring in, instead of all the record-keeping that goes along with them.