Scenario:
You are seeking a new phone system for your recruitment agency, due to frustration from your clients receiving the engaged tone constantly! Your other issue may be that you feel that telephone enquiries are not always dealt with in the best way, so you would like to monitor and improve the way your employees interact with your clients.
Problem:
There are too many phone system options to choose from.
Solution:
Read this blog to gain an understanding of the different phone systems, and which will integrate best for your recruitment agency.
Different types of phone systems for recruitment agencies
For single-site recruitment agencies of less than 30 employees, a hosted phone system is a solid choice. A hosted phone system is cloud-based, which means you connect to it using an internet connection (IP technology) - but effectively you are renting the system rather than purchasing your own dedicated system. This type of phone system is a low-cost alternative to an IP/hybrid phone system because you don’t have significant upfront capital costs.
Multiple site recruitment agencies with more than 30 employees should consider an IP phone system unless your recruitment agency has existing infrastructure, in which case we recommend the Hybrid Phone System.
An IP Phone system can be hosted on-premise (or in a data centre) or you can have it hosted on your own private cloud. When you choose an IP Phone System, you purchase the phone system for your own use and you choose where to host it.
A hybrid phone system is a mixture of a digital phone system and an internet (VOIP) phone system. The system would be located in your recruitment agency office, and offers flexibility with the choice of cordless and fixed handsets.
A benefit of a hybrid phone system is that they offer more reliability than both VOIP and digital phone systems. If one type of line fails, it can automatically route calls in and out from a backup line. Hybrid phone systems offer a range of extremely useful features for your recruitment agency, namely:
- Call Waiting - Instead of an engaged tone, your phone system can greet callers automatically and keep them occupied
- Call Reporting - Allows you to track the performance of every call whether that call came through to an extension, geographical line or a marketing specific phone number.
- Call Recording - Make calling your recruitment company a positive experience, always, by improving and monitoring the way your staff speak to your clients.
- Call Logging - Never miss a call again, and have to deal with an upset client
Our Recommendations
For Hosted Phone Systems we predominately recommend Horizon and Wildix. Either of these phone systems would work well with your recruitment business. They both are easily scalable and have some great (and similar) features so ultimately, it would be down to user preference and cost. Typically, from a costing point of view, they aren’t vastly different but Horizon is usually the better costing option when there are 1-15 users, whereas Wildix is best when there is 15+ users.
For IP Phone Systems and Hybrid Phone Systems we recommend Wildix, Mitel and NEC.
Again, all of these phone systems have the right features for your recruitment agency however, some of them have slightly more advanced feature sets which would depend on whether your individual business would need them. The main difference between them would be cost and user compatibility.
We recommend a demo for these phone systems so you can see which is the best fit for your recruitment agency.
Other considerations
Depending on your business model, your recruitment agency may require a phone system which is able to manage multiple phone systems.
You may require specific voicemail features, such as transcribing calls into text in order to forward as emails.
There are a couple of articles we recommend for further reading on call reporting, which you can find here:
Broadband for your recruitment agency
Another hugely important service for a recruitment business is the internet! It’s a gateway to all businesses but we mention it alongside phone systems because with IP technology it is imperative that you have reliable broadband to have good voice quality for your calls.
Not to mention that video calls (particularly for candidate interviews) are also growing which you may be able to carry out using your new phone system, so to guarantee a good quality audio and video quality, again, you need reliable broadband with the right speeds.
To easily facilitate online access, we can offer different options for your business needs - dependent on location/ requirements and the budget available.