How User Permissions Can Help You Grow Your Recruiting Business

The recruiting industry has been steadily growing over the last decade. More and more, recruiting companies are splitting responsibilities between their employees and creating a variety of specific roles. This is especially true for recruitment firms that plan on expanding and adding more roles in the coming years. Whether those roles be sourcing, sales, recruiting itself, or a top level decision maker, each job has its own specific needs. A common way to facilitate this growth and break up responsibilities is to utilize access levels.

What are Access Levels?

Access Levels are used as a way for a software administrator to set user permissions and give or limit access to specific functions or data in the software.

Why are Access Levels Important?

Access levels can impact your recruiting business in a variety of ways. They can help facilitate growth by segmenting responsibilities in a straightforward manner, they can improve productivity by eliminating distractions and presenting employees with only pertinent information, and they can protect valuable data. By effectively setting up access levels, you can reap these benefits and, ultimately, increase your bottom line.

Delineate Roles

As you grow as a company, you’ll inevitably need to adjust certain roles to account for newer, more specialized roles. An employee’s responsibilities might need to change as you take on more clients and candidates. Access levels allow you to clearly delineate responsibilities into defined jobs, and having clear roles and responsibilities enables you to more effectively manage your recruiting company.

Improve Productivity

It’s likely that your ATS has a variety of features for different aspects of the recruitment process. That’s fantastic, but without effective utilization of access levels, every employee in your company will be exposed to every feature and data item your ATS has to offer. By implementing access levels, you can eliminate digital clutter such as superfluous features and specific profile information from the view of those in roles who don’t need it. When there’s too much on the screen, people are more easily distracted, and productivity can take a hit. Access levels remedy that problem by eliminating all the extra things getting in the way.

Increase Security

Your ATS houses a considerable amount of data on a variety of different candidates and clients. This data fuels your recruiting. Access levels can help you protect that information, and in an increasingly competitive market, data security is paramount. These user permissions restrict access to certain information from lower-level employees. They keep the need-to-know information on a need-to-know basis, so you can protect the foundation of your business and avoid the recruiting horror stories of disgruntled recruiters exporting entire candidate databases and absconding with client sheets.

How Should You Use Access Levels?

The first step in utilizing access levels is defining the roles in your company on concrete terms. Presently, how many different roles are there in your company? Talk to your employees and have them take you through a day to day of their workflow. What features do they need to use? What do they never touch? What information do they require? Then, give them a title. Traditionally, built-out recruitment companies have sourcers, recruiters, sales representatives, and administrators, but every firm is different.

Once you’ve defined roles, you can move on to building the permission levels within your ATS. Of course, none of this is possible without access levels, so check to see if your ATS has acess levels to begin with. Ideally, you should be able to create access levels for certain roles within your organization and control what they can and can’t see and do.

Implementation

Take note before you read ahead: administrators will have access to everything. Your admin should be the owner, president, CEO of your business, or at the very least, the person you trust most with your company’s data. Administrators oversee your ATS and need total access because they act as the last line of defense for taken actions. If anything needs to be deleted or any data needs to be exported, it should fall on the administrator to do so. 

Candidate actions are generally reserved for sourcers and recruiters. They should be able to view, add, and edit all candidates. Sales doesn’t need access to candidates.

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Job order permissions should generally go to the recruiter who owns them. A recruiter’s job starts with the creation of a job order and ends with the closure of that job order. They should have control of everything in between. Sales should be able to view, add, and edit job orders that they own. Give sourcers the ability to view and add candidates to pipelines.

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Companies should be designated to sales. To protect company data you’ll leave sourcers out. If your ATS allows it, you’ll want to let your recruiters view and edit company data they are currently working with. This way, they can change information if something comes up during an open job order.

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Most recruitment software automatically logs activities. Everyone should be able to view, add, and edit their own activities, but only an administrator should be allowed to delete activities.

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Administrators should be the only ones able to view reports and export data.

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Growth is Facilitated by Access Levels

Finding ways to increase the bottom line is something recruiters should always be concerned with, and the recruiting industry is only going to get more competitive in the future. As your company grows, you should be utilizing access levels. By spending the time to delineate roles and have people working with only the information they need, you can boost productivity, achieve better office flow, and increase data security. All it takes is the right ATS and a little effort.