How to organise your agency’s data to get new business insights and gain competitive advantage

Get your agency’s data to work harder

The world of recruitment can be very cut and thrust. Agencies have a tendency to grow organically, and growth is often fast. And with so much focus on the economy, the jobs market, and the day to day running of agency operations, your days are full, leaving little bandwidth for thinking about strategic matters.

One area that doesn’t get as much thought as it might deserve is data. There is a mix of software and cloud apps in use in the recruitment sector. For each agency, we call this choice of technology the ‘software stack’. A lot of the time data is spread across different application silos such as webapps, or desktop applications, such as Excel.

Despite the fact that you may be able to link many of these software tools together to achieve specific goals, there is still an awful lot of data locked up from which you can’t extract meaningful insight. This means your agency has probably been missing out on important opportunities, such as spotting how to do things more efficiently, cutting costs or identifying trends. That was until now…

What is a data lake?

Technical breakthroughs in data science led to the development of the ‘Big Data’ branch of the IT industry. This essentially allows masses of data from different applications and data sources to be brought together as a ‘data lake’, a pool of raw unstructured data. This is a step forward, but a mass of unstructured data, is by definition, one that has no defined purpose and it can only be used by the data science community.

What is a data warehouse?

To make unstructured information usable by businesses, it’s purpose needs to be defined for a specific use. Big Data technologies are used to turn a data lake into a ‘data warehouse’, which refines and structures the information so that it can be analysed to extract meaning.

What can you do with a data lake?

Data lakes provide the raw information that can be manipulated by data scientists with special tools, allowing them to understand and translate it for specific business purposes. Typically, because it assembles data from different sources. You might not actually be able to compare the proverbial ‘apples and pears’, but you can bring together data that that you wouldn’t normally be able to, within a single report.

Introducing Caspian

Caspian is the latest innovation from the founders of ETZ, built on Big Data technology. Caspian is able to take your agency’s ETZ data, as well as all the other information sources from across your software stack, to create a centralised data lake which it then analyses and structures into a data warehouse. Caspian then provides reporting, allowing you to combine elements of data that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to look at.

Putting Caspian to work at getting more from your data

Caspian radically boosts the ability of agency’s that use ETZ to identify opportunities that would otherwise be missed, providing a powerful source of competitive advantage.

Caspian provides a dashboard that provides KPIs at a glance including figures for Gross Margin (cash amount and %), timesheet summary statistics and Gross Margin for each candidate.

Standard report templates include:

• Consultant Commission
• Invoice And Payment Summary
• Purchase Invoice Day Book
• Sales Invoice Day Book
• Split Margin
• Timesheet Chaser

And of course, you can also build custom reports to examine anything else you might want to look at.

Try it for free and UK Recruiter live webcast

ETZ customers can try Caspian right away. Simply visit Caspian and sign in using your ETZ username and password credentials, to see how it works for yourself.

You can find out more about Caspian on the UK Recruiter webcast with Louise Triance in conversation with Nick Woodward, CEO of ETZ. Broadcast as part of UK Recruiter’s Recruitment Smarts series, you can register to catch it live on Tuesday 26th October at 3PM BST.

Unleash the power of your data with ETZ and Caspian

Whether it’s software such as ATS, CRM, accounting or ETZ, Caspian centralises data and builds reports that let you see the performance of any data points that you wish to compare. With Caspian, you get the ability to analyse how your business is performing, identify trends and understand where to make improvements.

ETZ is the leading timesheet, invoicing and payment solution. To find out more about how we simplify the complexity of RecTech for agencies like yours, call us on +61 (0) 405 458 821 or book a demo.