The COVID-19 pandemic caused millions to lose their jobs in a matter of weeks. While some industries like aviation and entertainment saw heavy layoffs, online-businesses, delivery agencies, as well as healthcare saw a large spike in hiring activities. Many of those who lost their jobs have tried their luck at various Job boards, agencies, and consultancies. Some studies suggest that job seekers find jobs almost 2.5 times faster when they work with professional outplacement agencies. Outplacement agencies or career transition services are service providers that are often used by employers to help separated employees find their next position faster.
The services offered by Outplacement Agencies stress personal branding and growth, due to which individuals can market themselves online. The focus isn’t just on coaching, but also includes career assessments, mock interview simulations, effective management of social media, salary research, and more.
But the crux of the matter remains the fact that an outplacement agency needs job posting automation to match job seekers against. Even with the best preparations, those seeking to find jobs would be left empty-handed if they are unable to find jobs suitable for their profile. This is where the need for a job-data feed comes in.
What Adds Up to a Successful Outplacement Agency?
1. Focus on Data
With a big team, and loads of manual effort, you may be able to create a successful outplacement agency. You may even achieve some short-term profits. But unless you focus on the data, and conduct job posting automation, your agency will not be able to grow. With more data, you will be able to calibrate and tweak your algorithms to obtain more accurate matches.
2. Upskilling Services
Most of the individuals who avail of the services of Outplacement Agencies, do so in times of crisis (due to a sudden job loss) or due to a missing element or disadvantage in their profile. Reskilling, or upskilling is an option in which Outplacement Agencies can guide job seekers. Having handled millions of job posts, these agencies can evaluate individual profiles and guide them on the best path forward.
Fig: How to Create a Successful Outplacement Agency
3. Custom Options
Since different types of individuals may approach these agencies, you need to be ready with different types of solutions. If you have a large and regularly updated job-feed at your disposal, you can use your filtering tools to provide your services to a larger crowd. For example, if you have a candidate who is hard of hearing, you could match him to a job role where such a disability would not cause any hindrance or even one that specifically prefers a person with minor disabilities.
4. Provide Add-on Services
Apart from providing counseling services to lead job seekers on the correct path, Outplacement Agencies may also need to provide other add-on services such as helping candidates shape their resumes or connecting them with NGOs to gain experience.
5. Use Insights from Old Data
As an outplacement agency, as you keep growing, you must have historical and real-time job data. Using this data to update your systems so that future results keep improving can prove to be the biggest hack. Your ability to leave behind your competition may depend on how well you can use this piece of information.
While most of the other points are good to have and can be optional, having a data-driven system is an absolute must. Without job posting automation and a continuously updated Job-Data Feed, Outplacement Agencies cannot go too far.
Where Can Outplacement Agencies Get Data From?
- Company Web Pages- In case you decide to get data from career pages of different companies, you will have to handle quite a few company websites. You can however target specific companies that offer job listings to the group of job seekers that you are trying to serve. Some companies provide preference to those with handicaps or women with breaks in their careers.
- Job Boards- While company web pages may help you gain access to some specific companies, they may not always be hiring. To get your hands on a continuous stream of job-data that would be updated all year round, you can target job boards. You can target job boards that cater to a specific niche, industry, or geography based on your customer requirements.
- Job Aggregators- You could choose to instead go for Job Aggregator websites where you would be able to gain access to a large number of job listings from different industries, from across the globe. The only problem that may arise is that prefiltering the job data so that your job matching algorithms perform well can be challenging.
- Alternative Options like LinkedIn- Social Media is being used for hiring and their piece of the pie has been growing steadily. You will need to use the latest tech like NLP and Data Mining if you want to use data scraped from such sources. However, you can end up finding some very relevant posts and match those with candidates who are a perfect fit.
Creating a Job Feed Workflow for Outplacement Agencies
A small but tech-driven team can help Outplacement Agencies make the most of the data at hand. An automated workflow can be the best solution. In this, multiple stages can be replaced by SaaS or DaaS services so that minimum maintenance and in-house infrastructure are required.
Fig: Automated Data Workflow For Outplacement Agencies
The workflow can begin with scraping data from different company websites. Job boards data can also help agencies keep up with the trending jobs. These would then need to be filtered to only get the jobs that are relevant for an Outplacement Agency. Next, the data would have to be cleaned, normalized, and tagged. The tags will help later on when you need to showcase jobs to candidates using specific criteria. Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning can also be used on top of the end data from this Job Feed, to ascertain the jobs that are the best fit for a particular candidate.
How JobsPikr Can Help Outplacement Agencies in Job Posting Automation
Our solution, JobsPikr was built while keeping in mind the requirements of new-age Job-Boards and Staffing and Outplacement Agencies. Our advanced search filters can help you fine-tune the results that you want so that you can match industries, titles, or even keywords. In case you are trying to find specific keywords in job descriptions that would help you match with particular candidate profiles, you could also add that in a configuration. The multi-level cleaning and data harvesting services would also help in making your job matching algorithms in providing better results.
On top of our add-on features, the easy to integrate approach and the custom pricing based on usage instead of a fixed subscription fee, make us the first choice for multiple Outplacement Agencies across the globe that are trying to help marginalized individuals in finding a job.
