7 Signs Your Search Software Isn’t Serving Your Business Needs

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Joseph McCool, the internationally-respected Executive Search authority, identifies the 7 Signs that your Search software isn’t serving your business needs.

Technology has come a long way in the last few years. Read these simple steps to see if you’re missing out on the opportunity to make your search team more productive.

The last time you looked at executive search software to manage your firm’s critical client, candidate and assignment records may have been several years ago.

Ever since, have you deferred any major shifts in your firm’s information sharing platform by simply agreeing to the patchwork of technical fixes and hyped-up version updates your search software provider convinced you to invest in?

At times, you may have been frustrated by the training required to get new members of your team up to speed on what some of your people describe as a clunky or awkward way of doing things. You also wonder why there are so many clicks and steps separating you from what you want to do.

Why isn’t your team capturing more online profiles or getting to the right information faster? And why are some of the people on your team avoiding your search software system altogether?

The truth is, technology and, specifically, executive search software, has come a long way over the past several years, especially if your firm uses Microsoft Outlook and Excel on a daily basis.

Your researchers and consultants are working at a faster pace than ever before with more information at their disposal and a desire to access important data anywhere, anytime and ‘on the go’. But if you haven’t considered alternatives to the search software that seemed like the best choice several years ago, you may just be impeding the business results you need now.

So where do you go from here? For starters, you have to understand that you have a problem on your hands – even if you woke up this morning feeling somewhat satisfied with your existing search software.

To learn whether you’re missing an opportunity to make your team productive and your access to information a lot easier, just pause and ask if you or your colleagues have recently experienced any of the following frustrations, which we term ‘The 7 Signs Your Search Software Isn’t Serving Your Business Needs’:

1. You’re on the road and you have to call your office for a candidate’s phone number or a client’s address

2. Your firm is spending hours every week preparing documentation for your weekly progress reports with your clients

3. You’re forced to copy and paste data from e-mails, resumes and online candidate profiles simply to add that information into your own database (that’s so 2004!)

4. Your custom-built or ‘off the shelf’ database system is getting old and lacking the searchspecific functionality your younger, tech-savvy colleagues expect

5. You’re jumping through hoops to get your existing executive search software to do what you need it to do for you

6. You’re losing productivity whenever someone new joins your team or your existing software provider releases a new update that requires hours of training to figure out

7. You’ve just realized that executive search software ought to be making your life easier

So what’s the bottom line? If you haven’t looked at new executive search software options in years, it’s time to make that a priority once again. You will be surprised by what you learn.