Get More Done: Top 5 Productivity Hacks For Recruitment Agencies

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. In today's video, I'm going to be sharing with you the top five productivity hacks to use in your recruitment agents. Your business is a machine and like any machine, things start to slow down, clog up and really start to shut down unexpectedly. When the machine starts to get like less efficient, we put action into place to get things back to complete operational efficiency within our business. We'll start to feel like burnt out, distracted. Not necessarily for any particular reason, but we'll start by outputting less efficiency in each day. If time is money, then this only means one thing. The problem is costing you money. This video is filled with 5 quick win productivity tools to get you back on track and help you maximize your workload each day. And each of these tools are completely free Chrome extensions. Two of them have paid options, but you actually don't need them. And I'm going to actually keep my top recommendation for last. So when you combine all five of these tools, you'll start to see a real impact on your workflow, productivity and the amount of time that you're going to save every day. So keep watching to the end. So you see my top tip. Now, the first of these tools is a tool called Gramly. Gramly is a free spell checking and grammar checking extension for Chrome. They're also built like their own like online word processor, but like Google Docs. But the full tool is already built in. So this is a great tool to use because the extension pretty much works everywhere. So like if you're typing, whether it's on like LinkedIn, Facebook, Gmail, etc. An old Google Doc Grammarly is a real savior, particularly for me because I actually can't really spell. I'm not very good at English while I am in terms of language, but in terms of like typing up, I always make mistakes because I'm always typing so fast in in terms of saving time, it's just a lot easier just to click Grammarly. Like word predictors, like predicts like all of the actual words. And when you're not 100% on the ball, pick up like little copyright and mistakes may look unprofessional or maybe damage your brand as well. Particularly when you start sending emails to like clients or candidates. And also at the end, like if you're typing up a document or email, it's got like this little icon in the right bottom of the document or email and then you can just quickly whiz through the spelling mistakes so it' saves even if you're saving 10, 20, 60 seconds on sending an email that over time compounded in one week, one month and one year and three years buys a lot of time back. Next we have Newsfeed Eradicator. And for those of you that watch my new YouTube videos before, you might have seen that like I don't watch tv, don't listen to the news and media. And for a lot of you, like it's a big distraction, like especially online when you've got different news things popping up all of the time, you can also suddenly take you from one state into a different one. I know there's like plenty of people that like, first thing you open the laptop, you might be straight on Facebook or YouTube feed or Instagram or whatever. Sometimes it can be very demotivating. It can also be big blocker for procrastination. One thing being said is better have this blocked out because even though we tell ourselves I'm just going to go on it for 10 minutes just before I start the day, we get into that rabbit hole of reels and news articles and before we know it's 20, 30 minutes into the day and we can really kick ourselves for wasting our time to get started. If you do this like two, three, even four times a day, that's nearly 25% of your work gone because you got distracted. Well, Newsfee Eradicator actually completely blocks on all of that from like social media to the newsfeed platforms and it really, actually replaces it with motivational quotes. So it's actually really cool. You can't waste time scrolling something you actually can't see. Unfortunately it doesn't actually work on your actual site, say mobile phone, it's more for your laptop. One thing for sure is making sure that when you've got the laptop, make sure you've got that on because that'll help. Obviously the phone hack, an extra hack that I do is I actually bought. It's like an iPhone, like little safe thing and it's actually got a timer on there. So I can put my phone. If I want some core work done, say for two, three hours and I want to blast on some work, I actually put my phone in there and lock it and then it's a timer and it doesn't let you open the safe until two or three hours is up. And it's very surprising like how much you actually think about your phone and how many times a day you check your phone. I'm guilty of this because I run a lot my business on the phone while it's slack communication with the team. Or WhatsApp. But when you actually get it locked away for even an hour, it's man, it's a long time. So it's a good way to discipline yourself, to keep yourself focused. The third app you must download is an app called Forest App. It's a sort of like gamification type of productivity tool. So when you actually boot open the app, it asks you like how long you actually work, want to work for in that day. And then basically you like set a timer and you get started with work and then you basically keep working until your time's done. And basically what you do is you get a notification like sort of like you've grown a tree so you can like grow forests in this game. All of this like productivity, it's really small, but I thought it was quite cool. If you fail, nothing bad happens. But as you start to grow your forest, you don't want any dead trees. So when you set different time limits, you'll then grow different like trees and prettier trees, encouraging you to grow more and keep focus more. And this app really like breeds in if you're struggling with self discipline and focus, this is very good because it makes you not procrastinate because you don't want any dead trees. It also does have a section in the app where you can block specific websites that can't be accessed whilst the timer is on. So that's really powerful as well. Even for example that you wanted to be out of LinkedIn for a couple of hours, you could block that off. I know it's a silly thing, but it can have a big impact on your productivity. So give it a try, test it for 30 days, see if it's helped a little bit with your productivity. I think it will. There will be like a mobile app that's going to be available soon, but I found it like really cool to help me get back on track when there's times that I thought I wasn't productive, especially when I'm traveling all over the time. It keeps me on track even if I'm doing like a solid two, three hours a day, like core work. Check that tool out. The fourth one is a cool one and it's a real quick one. It's a tool that is really going to be a big time saver and that's called Mail Track. So it's MailTrack IO. It's a free extension that really hooks up to your G Suite account and it basically tracks like in your inbox, like every time you send an email it gives you Like a read receipt. So you know like a bit like you got iMessage or WhatsApp. Actually when you're sending an email, it tells you the exact time that that client or candidate opens the email and how many times they open the email. The cool thing about this is you can actually see so as soon as you see a client open an email, you know the looking at that. Same with the candidate, like when they're sending you a message back or you've sent them a job spec or normally what would happen long term, which is quite a cool hack and we've won a lot of fees from this, is when your candidate is sends a cv you they normally put like CV in their subject line. So then next time, say in a year's time when they're looking again, they're going to dig out the email they send to you with their CV on. So sometimes our recruiters are getting messages from a candidate that maybe opened the email recently from a CV they sent a year ago. That means they're probably actively looking again and they're trying to dig out their CV to update it to send it out. So it's a cool hack for you to spot if any candidates are on the move. And also with clients as well. When you've sent a client maybe a CV of a candidate, maybe even six months ago or nine months ago, and you've got like 12 months like ownership rights of that candidate, what happens when a client actually opens that email say nine months down the line? It's Joe blogs that you sent across, you know you're going to reach out to that client, hey, are you still looking to fill this role? Are you still interested in Joe? It gives you a little trigger point to think that client's maybe looking again. For the small amount of cost, it can really make you a lot more money in terms of save fees but also potential future fees with candidates. And finally, the most helpful tool that's literally going to save you thousands of hours of time if anything like me and you like watching YouTube or learning or watching videos and really like looking at different areas of your life to improve. The number one top productivity app isn't recruitment related. It's actually video speed controller. So it lets you speed up and down any video online and it's particularly useful when you're watching videos of someone that's speaking really slow. But now you'll start to learn that you can maybe watch these videos. I watch YouTube videos like say 1.5 times speed. So if you think you're watching at 1.5 times speed, you're improving that by like 50%, so you're saving 50% of time. So if it was an hour, you're going to get food a lot quicker because you're going to get through it in pretty much like 30, 40 minutes. The video speed controller is one that you should watch and it also helps you increase your rate of speed of learning because the more your subconscious level is actually listening at a higher speed, it's speeding up your brain power to be able to take in more information quicker. It's the same like when you listen to say audiobooks and audible, you can listen at 1.5 times speed. And especially for info junkies or people like me, like I watch a lot because I'm always trying to learning and trying to find an edge in everything that I do within my businesses. So when I'm learning at 1.5 times speed, I'm learning a lot quicker than my competition. So say if you watched a video for like a single hour, let's say 1.5 times speed, you would save 20 minutes every day of your life. Multiply that with 30 days, say in a month, and you were doing an hour a day. Because really if you're not doing a narrow day of personal self development, you're never going to grow to 7, 8 figures in your business. It's impossible. You should always be looking to grow and self improve. So if you did that over a 30 day period, that is 10 hours of your life that you've saved in that month, that's 120 hours every single year. And that's freed up by one single extension from having one training session each day. And then when you add other videos on top that you might be watching, it starts to really multiply and compound. This extension, it pretty much changed my life in terms of how quickly I can learn and how much time I can save. And as your agency grows, I recommend that like having everyone in your team installing these five extensions, that's going to help systemize your productivity a little bit and it could save your business hundreds, if not thousands of billable hours per year. And it's like really through these like small details and little hacks that you're going to see your productivity increase with you and your team. And by keeping your productivity high with your team, you're going to really push through that 10 to 20k a month barrier. And that's where the real moves are made towards like 100k months. So I hope you enjoyed this video. Now go ahead, install those five extensions. And please like and give me a subscribe if you want to see more of my content. My name is James Blackwell, and I'll see you on the next video.