“Working with Kelly gave us the confidence we needed to automate our process using Zapier,” — Sam Hickman, Managing Director of Summerley Recruitment.
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Find information quickly on how we worked with Summerley Recruitment to swap stress for strategy-led successful automation, saving them £22,500 per year.
- Executive summary of case study
- Why move away from manual to automated processes
- Facing obstacles when setting up automation
- How Solvaa coached Summerley Recruitment to success
- How Summerley Recruitment saves £22,500 every year
- Specific automation actions Solvaa coached Summerley Recruitment to implement
- Find automation that works for you
- Free resources to help reduce your business operational costs
- Level up your process improvement and Zap building
- Reduce your overwhelm with our automation training programme
Finding the right solution for busy recruiters
We met Summerley Recruitment, a growing SME recruitment agency, as they were gearing up for one of their busiest times: event and festival season. Every year, they spend the winter months signing up students to work at major events and festivals throughout the summer.
Managing candidates, obtaining required referees, and completing the onboarding process can be extremely time-consuming. Getting sufficient, quality candidates through the recruitment process to meet seasonal demand, all against the clock, only added to the pressure and frustration their manual processes were causing.
These manual processes required countless hours, onerous amounts of admin and relied on their team to personally monitor follow-ups for approximately 500 candidates every season—a number that’s only expected to grow.
For every candidate, Summerley Recruitment require two references. Slow and ineffective manual processes risked narrowing its pool of desirable candidates. Not to mention, adding a whole load more stress to an already busy and deadline-pressured environment.
Summerley Recruitment required the right solution to find the right people for the right events. The company’s MD, Sam Hickman, wanted to see if strategic-led automation could help, which is where we came in.
Although Summerley Recruitment had dabbled in automation, their existing tools were not set up for success and they failed to talk to each other. This resulted in disparate systems, redundant tools, communication errors, productivity leaks—and a reliance, once again, on manual processes.
Summerley Recruitment came to Solvaa to identify why the automated processes it had implemented were not creating the results it hoped for and to help set the business up for success. Solvaa drew on their extensive expertise, experience with business process automation and strategy-led approach. After only an hour of coaching, Kelly, founder of Solvaa was able to troubleshoot their issues and advise them how to build workflow automations with minimal disruption and maximum results.
After an hour of coaching, Solvaa recommended building a comprehensive automation solution using no-code automation platform Zapier—which Sam was already using— creating the ideal solution for their candidate management, nurturing and onboarding process. We also recommended they use email automation to obtain references, taking the legwork out of follow-ups and making the whole onboarding process a lot quicker.
Teaming up with Solvaa and after only an hour of coaching, Summerley Recruitment’s automation has saved a full day a week in administration costs, totalling £22,500 per year.
“The automations for reference chasing make things much slicker for onboarding candidates and speed up the process, allowing them to work sooner thanks to a quicker vetting process,” Sam added.
Swapping manual for automated
Ahead of the summer events and festival season, Summerley Recruitment would be busy managing, nurturing and onboarding candidates. After getting leads from university job fairs and digital marketing, the recruitment agency nurture these candidate leads through onboarding, which includes getting two references.
Providing two referees is a requirement for each candidate, with them giving the Summerley team their names and email addresses. The administrators then request the information needed to progress the candidate’s application and onboard them, when successful.
Located in West Sussex, near the UK’s South Coast and not too far from London, the recruitment team had connections to some of the country’s much-loved calendar dates and personnel. Yet, as you can imagine, chasing referees could be extremely time-consuming. Even with their expertise and experience, serving multiple events and filling various positions up and down the country was not just a tall order when done manually—it was proving an impossible one!
Manual follow-ups for references were a constant drain on the recruitment team’s time. Based on their years of experience, the company’s MD, Sam Hickman, knew that in order to onboard sufficient successful candidates in time for the event and festival summer season, they needed to reach out to referees every five days.
That meant moving away from manual processes that were unable to keep up with the fast-paced recruitment landscape and the added busyness of events and festival season and turning to an alternative solution. Automating their business processes seemed the natural fit, but where to begin?
Uncovering the full potential of email automation
Summerley Recruitment’s Sam already used Zapier, an all-around no-code automation solution for some simple workflow automation. For example, he used Zapier to send the team an SMS when a candidate fills in a Cognito Forms input form. The team does this at university job fairs to confirm that a student’s data has been successfully received so they can move to the next stage of the recruitment process.
However, as is often the case with implementing new technology, its full capabilities were not yet obvious to Sam. Plus, the team found its existing tools, such as Microsoft Excel for managing the email-sending process and Microsoft Power Automate for connecting Excel and Outlook, difficult to use and often prone to being hit-and-miss. Without experts to support, efforts to automate also involved a lot of trial and error, resulting in up to ten emails going out to the same recipient on one occasion!
Although sending emails is a relatively simple automation requirement, sending them over a prescribed period and stopping them when specific criteria are met is often not as simple as it first seems. Without the right solution and strategy for your business, it becomes almost impossible and very frustrating
Summerley Recruitment’s team first performed some Google searches to find examples of automations they could implement to perform email follow-ups. As its team used Microsoft Office, they initially tried Microsoft Power Automate, which seemed like a sensible solution at the time as it works well with Microsoft products. They found some sample code on a website, which seemed to do the trick, but when the first follow-up was triggered, it sent multiple emails to each recipient. Some recipients received more than ten emails asking for the same information!
There was a bug in the code they’d configured, but it wasn’t easy to track. This led to a hefty amount of time spent on customer service, reaching out to these recipients to apologise and explain the error. So much for automation, it hadn’t saved time, money, or stress!
The problem with Microsoft Power Automate is that it’s more suited to people with a technical background—it’s not a no-code solution but, in fact, more like a ‘low-code’ platform. This is fine for developers, or experienced low-code users but Sam didn’t have the budget to hire one and wanted to devise a solution his team could easily maintain.
Same software, transformed with strategy and coaching creates an entirely different solution
MD Sam wondered if there was another way to bring automation into the business to manage, nurture and onboard candidates. One that took the positive features and tools it found effective—namely Zapier—and underpin it with a clear and robust strategy. An audible sigh of relief came when Solvaa confirmed, “Yes, absolutely! We can turn this business area from one that’s onerous and manual to intuitive and automated”.
Naturally apprehensive following his earlier experiences with automation, he also needed to ensure the same glitches wouldn’t happen again. Equipped with the knowledge that all of Solvaa’s business process automation implementations are underpinned by a tailored and comprehensive strategy, Sam knew he was in safe hands.
Kelly, Solvaa’s Chief Problem Solver, was delighted to support the recruitment agency with her expert approach to business process automation and extensive knowledge of Zapier. With just an hour of strategic assessment of the process and coaching on using Zapier for optimal business process optimisation, Solvaa helped Summerley Recruitment implement specific and tailored workflow automations to optimise the business.
As experts in business process automation and the Zapier solutions suite, we have extensive experience unlocking its full potential to make the lives of people in busy companies easier and more productive and help them reach their goals quicker. We worked with Summerley Recruitment to simplify and streamline their existing processes, integrate their business tools to make data transfer more efficient and automate manual tasks to increase productivity.
Saving £22,500, every year
Since working with Solvaa and implementing a strategic-led business process automation process, Summerley Recruitment have reported significant benefits. Solvaa’s solutions save a full day a week in administration costs, totalling £22,500 per year.
Sam was delighted with the outcome and appreciated Solvaa’s help automating email follow ups. “Working with Kelly gave us the confidence to automate our process using Zapier,” he said.
The busy recruitment agency remains as bustling as ever, only now it’s not due to unnecessary and admin-heavy manual follow-ups that delay the onboarding process. Time-consuming manual processes are no more! “It was so helpful having Kelly guide us, and our admin team is delighted that they don’t have to send these emails manually!”.
By implementing a comprehensive and consistent business process automation approach, recruitment agencies can increase productivity, improve candidate quality, speed up the onboarding process, meet seasonal demand and save big on costs. All without compromising on functionality, process efficiency, or simplicity. Now, Summerley Recruitment can also enjoy the events and festival season!
“We can’t wait to automate more of our processes using Zapier to save even more time in our day,” Sam added.
Turning automation tools from redundant to relevant
Here, we delve into how Solvaa worked with Summerley Recruitment to introduce business process automation, specifically with emails, to improve their overall candidate management, nurturing and onboarding process.
Summerley Recruitment worked with Kelly Goss, who is a no-code solutions architect, business process automation specialist and founder of Solvaa, throughout the project, providing a dedicated point-of-call from start to finish.
Balancing the needs of the recruitment agency and seasonal deadlines with avoiding spam-like annoyance from sending follow-ups was a critical consideration. Summerley Recruitment wanted their new email automation to send referees a follow-up every five days.
With Solvaa’s support, the implementation approach would ensure the solution stopped sending further follow-ups when the required information was received. There would be three follow-ups in total, after which the administrator would follow up with a phone call to try to get the reference.
Kelly recommended that the recruitment agency use a combination of Google Sheets and Google Calendar to trigger the emails as they play nicer with Zapier. Before working with Solvaa, Summerley Recruitment used Microsoft Excel to trigger emails in Microsoft Outlook but found them hit-and-miss.
Wanting to avoid any further inefficiencies and ineffective tools, Summerley Recruitment’s MD Sam was happy and comfortable changing to Google Sheets. Sam had previously used this tool in other Zapier-led business activities and found Zapier and Google Sheets worked well together to meet the recruitment agency’s needs.
1. Getting started with automated email follow-ups
A Zap is an automated workflow in Zapier with a trigger starting the workflow and consequent actions steps. To maximise effectiveness, Summerley Recruitment’s automation solution triggered the Zap when a new row was added in the Google Sheet. The next step in the Zap was to create a Google Calendar event in five days’ time, when the first follow-up needed to be sent.
The information needed for this part of the process includes the ID from the row in the spreadsheet. That way, the correct row can be identified in future steps to ensure it sends the correct follow-up to the correct recipient.
A series of Zaps was configured for the specific action steps. Each follow-up was one action step, and the triggers for each one were identified by the start of the Google Calendar event.
For Follow-up 1, when the Google Calendar event starts, the Zap first checks that the row still exists in the spreadsheet (using the ID). If it doesn’t exist, a filter stops the follow-up email from being sent. If the row does exist, an email is sent via Microsoft Outlook, and the next Google Calendar event is scheduled for five days from now.
Follow-ups 2 and 3 follow the same logic and are configured as separate Zaps, one per follow-up.
A final Zap is configured to send the administrator an email after a final five-day period, prompting them to call the referee and ask for the reference by phone.
2. Testing the Zaps to create email chasers
Configuring the process in separate Zaps made testing each follow-up in isolation much easier.
The team could adjust the five days between follow-ups to just a few minutes to check that their approach worked. Once they were happy it was effective, they could set the cadence of follow-ups to their desired time period. This is an essential step in the process, and it reduces the risk of issues arising in a long and complex workflow that can be difficult to debug.
3. Using Delay After Queue to prevent bottlenecks
Inputting a lot of data risks creating a bottleneck in automation implementations such as these. Kelly advised Sam’s team that adding a lot of rows to the Google Sheet at once might cause a bottleneck, and Zapier might stop processing data (Zapier has a fail-safe mechanism that prevents mass amounts of data from being processed to prevent tasks being used if this was accidental).
To avoid this, Kelly suggested using a Delay After Queue step using the Delay by Zapier built-in app, creating an enforced gap between each. As it turned out, Sam’s admin team wouldn’t be adding dozens of rows at a time, so the delay step wasn’t necessary, but it was good to have up their sleeve if numbers increase in the future.
With Solvaa’s expert strategy and support, Summerley Recruitment was able to meet all of its business needs with one simple yet dynamic and comprehensive solution: Zapier. The no-code automation solution provided the recruitment agency with complete transparency. Whether top-level data or an in-depth dive, managers have a clear picture of their candidate management, nurturing and onboarding process.
Contact us today to find out how Solvaa can use strategic-led business process automation to help your recruitment agency. We can simplify, improve and automate all aspects of your business, reducing costs, saving time and keeping you agile as you grow
Free resources to help save you save time, reduce costs and stay agile with automation
We also have plenty of free resources:
- Our free e-book is the perfect introduction to business automation.
- A free checklist to help you justify an automation budget.
- Our Zapier functions cheat sheet delves into the powerful inbuilt helper apps which can supercharge your automations in your Zaps.
- Read more about how our team of certified experts can help you use workflow automations with Zapier to simplify processes and increase efficiency.
Level up your process improvement and Zap building with Kelly’s book
Our founder, Chief Problem Solver and Chief Automator Kelly Goss’ books Automate It with Zapier (first edition) and Automate It with Zapier and Generative AI (second edition), are available on Amazon, and are the most comprehensive Zapier guides on the market. They will get you up and running to the stage where you can build and debug advanced automations.
Solvaa: Strategy, Solutions, Support, Education
UK-based Solvaa® is a systems, process and automation consultancy specialising in improving business workflows. Solvaa® works with SMEs worldwide to implement digital tools, better processes, use business process automation and generative AI to boost productivity, enhance lead management, and remove unnecessary time, costs and hassles from stretched business owners’ days.
We help you simplify and streamline existing processes, integrate your business tools to make data transfer more efficient, and automate manual tasks. Our business process automation specialists have extensive experience using multiple cloud-based business tools, including Zapier, Pipedrive CRM, SmartSuite, Xero, Google Suite, ClickUp, Asana, Airtable, Hubspot, Active Campaign, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Quickbooks and many more. We are Zapier Certified Experts, SmartSuite Certified Partners, Pipedrive Certified Partners and Xero Certified Advisors. We also educate teams about using AI in their daily roles, mindset, governance and strategy in our Solvaa AI Academy.
Solvaa® was founded in 2016 by Kelly Goss, a no-code solutions architect, business process automation specialist and author of Automate It with Zapier (first edition) and Automate It with Zapier and Generative AI (second edition).
A thought leader on business process automation and digital adoption, Kelly attended an invite-only Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the UK government at No.10 Downing Street, providing insights and recommendations on how SMEs can benefit from productivity gains by using digital technologies, automation and AI. She has also been invited to speak at the House of Lords and at many other events.
Contact us today to find out how Solvaa can help your business make big savings on operational costs and time, and significantly increase productivity.
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