Links Recruitment: Beyond the Basics

Links RecuitmentLinks Recruitment was founded in 1999 and headquartered in Hong Kong with offices in Shanghai, Singapore and Macau. They provide recruitment services as well as business services. For recruitment, they offer Permanent solutions and also Temporary & Contract solutions, with teams specializing in HR & Administration, Sales, Marketing & Retail and Banking, Finance & Accounting.

We spoke to John Eyres, Managing Director at the Hong Kong office, about their experience with InsightSquared so far.

What needs did InsightSquared fulfill from the start?

[blockquote align=”right”][InsightSquared] minimized board reporting time, cutting an entire day from the process.[/blockquote]We initially got you guys as a tool for reporting on the management side. We were pulling reports for the board, and they were difficult to pull from our [Applicant Tracking System]. We had two huge Excel files and they were just hard to manage, hard to get decent reports, especially financials at the board level.


Once we got set up with InsightSquared, it was what we needed. It shows the overlying story in these reports. Anyone can understand this, how it’s presented. It minimized board reporting time, cutting an entire day from the process. We used to spend half an hour a week, every week, pulling these reports. Multiply that out and that’s a huge amount of time saved just on the reporting side. Some people who use these reports don’t come from the recruiting background, so it helps to see things in this easy to understand, visual way.

You said that’s what InsightSquared was initially used for. Has that evolved?

[blockquote align=”right”]You begin to know the activities of certain teams, and it doesn’t really drive competition for us; it drives collaboration.[/blockquote]Historically, we haven’t been too statistics driven, but that’s beginning to change. Your screens make the numbers so easy to understand, we thought “why not show the whole office?” So we set up monitors to show some important screens to everyone in the office. You can see the awareness spreading across employees. You start to know certain clients’ stories. You begin to know the activities of certain teams, and it doesn’t really drive competition for us; it drives collaboration. Teams see the activity of another team and they speak to each other. They talk and transfer knowledge.

Conversion Rate is a big one. Everyone gravitates to it, wants to see it. As soon as these screens went up, people started to get more engaged. GMs are starting to use InsightSquared now, and they are understanding more and more of the data, and the language of Recruiting overall. We also look at Job Orders, as a pipeline indicator, Placement by start date, and Activities.

What have you learned about your company’s process so far using InsightSquared?

One big thing we’re learning is to use our ATS better. We really see that if it’s crap data in, it’s crap data out. So we ask ourselves, “how can I help drive this?” and we’re taking an active role in making our data better. You can see our Data Quality screen that our score has been climbing since we started.

Everyone sees it, and they know that if you don’t get your data in right, your activities won’t show, your success won’t show. If you’re a top biller, and you’re data’s not right, you’re not showing up on the big screen. You won’t get the credit. So we’re seeing people take better care of inputting data in the right fields.

Anything else you’d like to add about your experience with us?

Two things. One, a comment from our IT person that you guys were just incredibly easy to set up. Very quick, zero configuration. We honestly have like .5 of an IT person, we don’t even have a full time IT. With this tool, you don’t need one.

Second, we really like your Labs, where you guys put beta features for us to try. It’s pretty amazing: we want something, and within a week you’ve got a trial version happening in the Labs. That kind of quick turn around and creativity is awesome, and you even have stuff we haven’t even thought of that we wanted.

Thanks very much, John! We appreciate the feedback.

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