RecTech Video: Using Tech to Grow

There are many ways in which you can apply technology to facilitate growth within your business. There are plenty of ways of applying technology and failing to achieve that as well. You have to be careful about what you do and how you do it.

A lot of it depends upon what your business is currently doing. What kind of friction is in your business by way of perhaps carrying out processes manually, doing repetitive tasks, using human resources rather than electronic resources. Repeating the same tasks over and over. Those sorts of things. You can analyze your business. You can do some sort of business analysis to work out what it is that you’re doing, perhaps not so well in your business. Then identify how technology can perhaps be brought to bear to improve things. For example, technology may well be employed within a recruitment business to undertake repetitive tasks rather than expecting a human to do it. Somebody has to come in and perhaps upload a document 200 times a day. Clearly, that is not going to be a sensible thing for a human to be doing, because it’s just repetitive, repetitive work that doesn’t make the best use of a human’s tenacity and abilities.

If you’ve got workflow processes that you undertake that are perhaps quite complex. If those aren’t being managed by a workflow management system within your industry, within your business rather, then you’re probably missing a trick there as well. Because you spend a lot of time designing a workflow process to make sure that your business runs smoothly and effectively, and over time people stray from it. They’re not following that process. They’re not to doing all the checks and balances that might be built into that process carefully, then that business process starts to become less and less watertight than perhaps it was.

Then also, you can use technology to improve communication within your industry. You may be talking about automated emails that go out from systems so that when you do something within a computer system, you don’t have to remember to email all the people involved, it just does it for you. Small things like that.

But also implementing things like chatbots, so that people can interact with your IT landscape, your IT ecosystem capably and easily. Using chatbot technologies, which people are increasingly comfortable with, and the system can make sure that those communications that are being undertaken by people are answered, not just quickly, but also are repeatable. You’re not getting a human, one person answering one way and another person answering a different manner.

Those sorts of approaches to applying technology are great ways to assist with growth and also to assist with productivity. Because if you’re freeing up staff, which are very expensive resources for a business, to do more effective things with their time, then that’s going to increase your productivity. If you are managing workflow processes more effectively and more carefully and more reliably, then that’s going to increase your productivity. If you’re improving communication between yourself and candidates and other interested parties, then you’re going to increase your productivity likewise.

I think the key to achieving growth through the application of technology, isn’t just a pile in with a load of technology. It’s to take a step back. It’s to analyze your business. To analyze the processes that you undertake, and the things that could perhaps be done better. Work out where those friction points are and identify how technology can be applied to those, to smooth things out, speed things up, and then you’ll be on the road to success.