How PRS Recruitment Used Ebsta’s Relationship Intelligence to Quickly Bounce Back Post-COVID-19

Established in 1999, PRS Recruitment has grown into a leading recruitment partner for businesses in the retail, healthcare, sports and entertainment, education, government and banking services. PRS Recruitment’s leadership team use Ebsta to track their best-performing relationships and prioritize their pipeline.

With complete visibility of relationships and the strength of engagement, PRS Recruitment were able to quickly bounce back from the impact of COVID-19 and achieve:

• Increase revenue growth by 50%
• Close jobs 34% quicker
• Increase revenue per consultant by 15%
• Increase job pipeline per consultant by 10%

With more than 250 clients worldwide, PRS Recruitment was successfully placing thousands of candidates in temporary and permanent roles each year. But when COVID-19 forced a global shutdown in March 2020, much of the UK recruitment market came to a grinding halt.

Determined to weather the storm and ensure PRS Recruitment emerged stronger, PRS Recruitment’s leadership team turned to Ebsta to help uncover missing relationships, increase engagement with their market of candidates and clients, and prioritize the very best jobs.

In this case study, you’ll learn how PRS Recruitment was able to leverage Ebsta to quickly adapt to the challenges presented by COVID-19 and bounce back with much-improved consultant performance and increased revenue.

Overcoming the Challenge of Poor CRM Data Quality

Before COVID-19, PRS Recruitment made the conscious decision to future-proof their business and invest further in technology. They moved their CRM to Salesforce, but were immediately met with challenges faced with having poor data quality. Richard Snarey, Co-Founder and Director at PRS Recruitment, acknowledged, “We made the move to Salesforce, but inherited so much bad data from our legacy CRM system. As soon as we made the move we realised how poor the data was. Our salespeople were just not updating anything.” Salesforce was now missing contacts, contact details, emails and meetings.

As a result, Richard and his team were struggling to make quick and effective decisions. “The data was really difficult to interrogate in order to make better business decisions. Everything was being done outside of Salesforce.”

That’s where Richard initially discovered Ebsta. “We wanted an easy-to-use solution that would automatically capture every contact, email and calendar event into our custom set-up of Salesforce.” Within a few hours, PRS Recruitment had complete visibility of every contact and activity in Salesforce. “It was like magic. We suddenly had 100% visibility into everything that was going on against every candidate, client and job – all without the consultants having to worry about manually updating records”, Richard added. With Ebsta’s advanced configuration, PRS Recruitment were also able to recover thousands of historical contacts and activities. “Everyone was able to share their relationships internally, leading to better introductions and putting a stop to any possible overlap with clients or candidates.”

“Three months after introducing the Relationship Score, we have seen a material change in the level of engagement the recruiters had with their prospects and Key accounts.”

 

 

Driving High-Quality Engagement with Candidates and Hiring Managers at Key Accounts

With better visibility, Richard quickly explored ways to leverage Ebsta’s analysis of relationships. “As a recruitment company, we trade on our relationships. It’s more important than ever to build and maintain relationships in our market to provide the very best service and keep ahead of our competition. When a client is ready to hire, or a candidate wants a job, PRS Recruitment must be front of mind. The Relationship Score gave us a way to quickly quantify the strength of every relationship and prioritise areas of opportunity.”

PRS Recruitment introduced the Relationship Score to track engagement between consultants and candidates, clients and jobs. “We wanted to understand where our consultants were spending their time and, more importantly, identify where they should be spending more time to close more jobs.”

By reviewing engagement with clients and previously placed jobs, Richard was able to quickly identify a benchmark for engagement. “We were able to track engagement with our best clients, the ones that convert well – one CV, one interview, one placement.” Having that insight helped PRS Recruitment rethink their strategy for developing business by proactively following-up with the right individuals. “We were able to help our consultants focus on increasing engagement with the best-performing clients, whilst “failing fast” and moving on from clients who were getting a lot of attention but weren’t necessarily ready to place a candidate. Traditionally, it would be a topic of debate. Now, we had the data, and the consultants were encouraged by knowing where to double-down on their efforts.”

 

Leveraging Relationships & Engagement to Close More Deals Faster

When COVID-19 struck, PRS Recruitment had to quickly adapt to a new way of working. “Ebsta came into its own. Whilst everyone was remote, they were able to really see the benefit of understanding what was really going on. A recruitment company’s greatest asset is its network of candidates and clients. Ebsta was able to surface every relationship and ensure we kept engagement levels high.”

 

By tracking engagement levels against the best-performing clients, PRS Recruitment were able to quickly switch their attention to high-growth areas. “Thankfully, we’ve been able to bounce back really effectively, really quickly. Ebsta has not only helped us adapt to remote working and keep productivity levels high, it’s empowered us to spot the best opportunities faster.” Richard touched on one specific campaign, “We managed to identify over 600 key relationships that would’ve otherwise been lost through lockdown. With that information, we were able to be laser-focused on developing highly-effective reach-outs that avoided cold-calls and leveraged warm introductions.” Within a single quarter, PRS Recruitment was able to increase the number of highly-engaged clients by 45%.

The Results

As a result, the focus on using Ebsta to increase engagement with the right clients paid off. PRS Recruitment was able to increase revenue growth by more than 50%. Better still, it came without a need to increase the size of the team, as they achieved a 15% increase in revenue per consultant, a 10% increase in jobs per consultant, and an increase in sales velocity of 34%.