How many documents does an employment agency collect per year?

Following our study performed in Belgium, one of our leading markets, we concluded that an employment agency with a healthy activity level receives up to 700,000 candidates and CVs per year. The vast majority comes online via their own website or partner websites such as vdab, reference, jobat and the like.

These candidates must be screened and a selection is made of which profiles are accepted for a potential placement. The number of selected profiles depends on the strictness of the selection and on whether the employment agency is active in a niche sector or operates more generally. On average we can see that about 20% flows through and is accepted. In the above case, this means 140,000 accepted candidates.

And then it all starts: of each of these 140,000 candidates, between 6 and 12 documents need to be requested and delivered each time (in some specific sectors additional special documents, such as sector-specific certificates, may allow additional documents). This means that between 840,000 and 1,680,000 documents (such as identity cards, driving licenses, certificates of good conduct, diplomas, admission certificates, etc.) must be collected from these candidates.

In addition, a number of contracts or other documents needs to be signed and possibly policies, statements or codes of conduct need to be read and accepted. If we assume that this concerns an average of 3 documents for signing or acceptance, then we have in total between 1,260,000 and 2,100,000 documents that need to be processed.

There are already sufficient software solutions for screening and selection and most temporary employment agencies already have this in-house.

But what happens with collecting the 2 million documents? Often people don’t have a software or digital solution for that. Documents are requested by telephone or email. Then delivered by email, post or by a visit to the employment agency, often after multiple calls and emailing again to remind people that they have not yet delivered everything. The documents must then also be validated. Is an identity card that came in by e-mail indeed an identity card? Is this the card of the right person? Is text and photo clear enough? Is the document still valid? If it is no longer valid, another reminder must be sent or a call needs to be made.

If everything is finally correct and valid, the scanning can begin, with of course also saving it in a uniform format and giving all documents a uniform naming. Certain information from these documents must also be (re-)typed into the temporary employment agency’s system. Hopefully this always happen without errors.

We described a very long and difficult process that we sometimes have not really thought about. Can’t this be done more efficiently? Can this not be a more pleasant experience for the candidate temporary worker? Instead of receiving countless different emails and phone calls, sometimes with an extra visit needed to the employment agency …

It is actually possible. For more information on how to automate these tasks, click here.