Hobson Associates: Their Best Tech Investment Ever?

Hobson Associates has been an executive “found” firm for over 40 years, sourcing candidate solutions in fields such as technology, life sciences and industrial/consumer, making Hobson one of the oldest and largest privately held search firms in the country. With an extensive client list and some of the best recruiters in the business on their workforce, Hobson generates a great deal of data. InsightSquared spoke to Vice President and Senior Partner Lisa Iannone about her experience and use of our business analytics software.

What was it like before InsightSquared?

When we were on the demo with your team…I said to myself ‘I will get this done.’

Hobson is and has always been a very numbers driven company. We were pulling data from [our Applicant Tracking System (ATS)], putting them into Excel spreadsheets, and doing analysis that way. We would literally hand papers to admins to type in. It was labor intensive, slow and cumbersome.

When we were on the demo with your team, I knew we had to get Dan [Cahill, President & Managing Partner] to sign off on it, but I said to myself “I will get this done.” It’s exactly what we needed. It is so cool that you guys have put a focus on the recruiting industry. Other systems aren’t as specific [to us].

How do you use InsightSquared?

Well not only does it save us mountains of time in analysis, it also gives us insight into the overall sales process that we never had before. What’s our average time to fill a search? We used to have to manually track it placement by placement and note when it was filled. A lot of it was gut feeling. Now we have it at our fingertips.

Another thing we use a lot is monitoring our pipeline. This is a powerful piece. For example, I can take a look and say to someone “I understand you have twenty open searches, but only two have momentum. Eighteen of them are stalled…so what’s going on here?” It helps people to take ownership of these searches. And everyone gets all the data.

Demo of Job Orders Dashboard

And how does that affect the culture, to have all that data available to everyone?

If we’re behind, the analytics explains why.It keeps us focused on the numbers for real reasons. It’ll lead to higher close ratios. Something’s that’s changed is more timely documentation of work; the visibility that everyone has makes people more accountable to get their data in. Like many sales groups, we have contests and competition, but it used to be just an orange chip on a board. Now we can check things easily.

We understand we have to look at these numbers for a reason, good or bad. The last twelve months can be a powerful motivational tool. Look how great we did! We know we can do it because everyone can see it. On the other hand, only X out of Y open searches have movement. Our average sales cycle is A long, our close rate is B percent. We’re predicting to bill P dollars in 90 days and we’re only 70% of goal. If we’re behind, the analytics explains why. I’m making you eat spinach and peas, but it’s important!

Demo of Sales Cycle Dashboard

Anything else?

The evolution of your product has been huge. Like your new Insight Feed with the little dashboards; that gives you a good peek right away. It’s like each time I log in, I say “oh look at that now!” Goals is another one. Candidate Source. That last one used to be manually tracked.

InsightSquared tells folks how to better spend their time. It helps them work more efficiently, showing them what they should be working on. InsightSquared is, selfishly and going out on a limb, the best technology we’ve ever invested in.

Strong words! Thanks Lisa! We’ll help you back them up.