Working in the recruitment sector, one of the most important things you do every day is interact with people who connect with your business in a manner of different ways. Recruiting is a job sphere that is all about people, and being able to man your relationships effectively can make all the difference between being organised, efficient and ultimately a big success, and feeling overwhelmed and potentially letting people down.

Working with Your Clients
While many of the people you speak to daily are applicants for the jobs your clients need to fill, it can be the relationships with those clients themselves that require the most attention. Each new role requires you to keep track of all of the specification documentation, the candidates you have put forward, and the scheduling of selection phases and interviews. This is why having portals you and your clients can use to communicate and track things between you can make everything simpler and more transparent, and streamline how you do the most frequent tasks related to each client.

What Are Client Portals
A client or customer portal is effectively a website that is solely used by your client to access information and functionality within your own business, and to interact with you. Just as you may have portals for applicants where they can view the jobs you are recruiting, submit their CV, or schedule a call, you can extend portal functionality to clients and allow them to do things you commonly do together in an easier and more organised way.

Whether it is adding new roles for you to hunt down candidates for, giving feedback on each stage of interview for a given role, or working with you on things like contracts, you can give them an easy to access way to deal with you that doesn't require lots of emails and phone calls, or you having to enter data into an internal system that they've sent over. The technology can be configured to work with your processes – and your clients' – and you can support customisation for different key organisations you work with. Using something like a SAP B2B portal, you can also feed data from your portal area to other systems you use within the business, making your general processes even more automated and efficient.

Professional and Branded
Functionally speaking then, there are lots of things a portal can do for you when it comes to your clients. However, there are some more subtle benefits you may not have considered. By having a branded web portal, you can appear extremely professional and boost your brand identity with your clients – a helpful thing whether you are just starting out as a solo recruitment venture, or are a well established recruitment company. Make it look and feel consistent with your candidate portals or external websites, and you'll have a cohesive brand on the web that your clients will remember.

Client portals can be a real asset in the competitive world of recruitment, so if you don't have them yet, they are well worth investigating.