Not even the most successful recruiting company can hide from every possible disaster. Severe weather disasters alone cost the United States more than $80 billion each year on average, with 30 percent of the small businesses affected failing to reopen. That statistic doesn’t include the many other businesses that face work stoppage due to fire, power outages, drive meltdowns or equipment failure.
Your staffing firm needs strategic tools to ensure that the data in your recruiting software is regularly backed-up, physically secure, and perhaps even quickly accessible from a remote location; so that if disaster strikes,your company can recover with minimum downtime and disruption.
For staffing businesses, information is essential to function. From client data to orders, employee information to payroll and billing data, the information that your company uses every day needs to be accessible in order for your company to operate. Here are some factors that you and your management team should consider so you’ll be able to overcome any type of disruption – man-made or natural – that your recruiting firm might face.
Create a disaster recovery plan. Although you hope your recruiting firm never uses its disaster recovery plan, if you need it you’ll be grateful you have a plan in place. Create a recovery team that includes an IT team member and determine what actions you’ll each complete. Know how you would communicate with your recruiting staff members and what level of backup you would need for your data.
For example, does your company require that your staffing information is securely housed in a physically well-protected data service facility? Or would you prefer to have a parallel system in place that, if needed, remotely syncs to your data, which automatically updates daily changes to a remote server? After your disaster plan has been created, test it and check for any gaps so you can modify as necessary.
According to one disaster recovery resource, “Unfortunately, the randomness of some of these disasters lulls some organizations into a sense of false security. … Organizations that take the time to implement disaster recovery plans ahead of time often ride out catastrophes with minimal or no loss of data, hardware, or business revenue. This in turn allows them to maintain the faith and confidence of their customers.”
PREMIUM CONTENT: Companies looking to acquire staffing firms
Prioritize how you save your business-critical information. Saving your recruiting company’s information on a secondary backup drive might make you believe you’re safe in case a disaster strikes. However, enterprise applications are vulnerable. Some computer viruses actually infect attached storage locations when they’re connected to your system.
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that data backups are the same thing as disaster recovery (they’re not),” writes journalist Pam Baker in Small Business Disaster Recovery in the Cloud. She recommends using cloud-hosted software and prioritizing the data you’ll need immediately to do business. “If you opt to speedily download business-critical files and leisurely download remaining data later … your recovery [will be] much faster than downloading everything at once.”
Consider Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. Cloud-hosted software is popular because it allows your recruiting team to access the information they need anytime, anywhere. But as Baker mentioned, it also performs as backup for your staffing data in case of a disaster. Cloud backup applications are typically less prone to malware. You may consider saving your recruiting data at regularly scheduled points in time, so that if a recent backup is compromised and syncs with your system, you still have an older version to use.
Some recruitment software companies offer nightly data backups as an extra layer of data protection, taking the task off your plate, giving you peace of mind and offering your company extra data security.
As a manager, it’s your responsibility to make sure that your company is positioned to recover quickly and efficiently from disasters, whether natural or man-made. Unprepared staffing agencies could lose clients, candidates and suffer a loss of reputation.
“Make sure your employees are prepared and your customers know how to contact you in case of emergency,” says writer Ryan Galloway in a Forbes article. “A good plan can be the difference between business survival or not.”
Learn from the regrettable failure of other businesses that were not adequately prepared for disasters. Instead, utilize the tools at hand, such as SaaS, so your recruiting firm will be back up and running quickly if disaster strikes.
MORE: Does your disaster recovery plan include contingents
