Your staffing company’s most important asset is data. It drives your daily operations, including placing candidates with clients and monitoring their progress. However, what happens if you have to transfer all of that important data to a different system? That’s where data migration comes in, and it poses its own set of challenges.
Getting Ready to Move Data
A number of situations necessitate data transfer, including updating to a more sophisticated ATS, merging databases following mergers, switching to cloud solutions, or adjusting to new data rules. Consider the following preparation steps to ensure successful data migration.
Data Assessment
Effective data migration guidelines start with a comprehensive data assessment. Identify all data sources and repositories within your organization, such as databases, applications, spreadsheets, and other locations that store critical data.
After that, evaluate the quality of the data to determine its present status. Be vigilant for issues like missing data, discrepancies, and duplicates. Tools for data profiling can be helpful in learning more about the correctness, completeness, and structure of your data.
By addressing data integrity issues as soon as they emerge, you can prevent them before or after a transfer.
Data Cleaning and Transformation
It’s crucial to clean and standardize data before transferring it to a new system. Data cleansing for staffing firms entails finding and eliminating unnecessary job ads, outdated customer contacts, and duplicate candidate profiles.
If you need to transform data during migration, such as changing date formats, make sure to clearly document these transformations. For example, converting a date from “MM/DD/YYYY” to “YYYY-MM-DD” should be explicitly defined in your mapping rules.
Using a comprehensive applicant tracking system (ATS) like Bullhorn and customer relationship management (CRM) platform like HubSpot can help streamline data cleansing and transformation, saving time and minimizing the risk of human error.
Backup and Disaster Recovery Plans
One of the most important resources in staffing is data, such as placement history, customer information, and candidate profiles. During data migration, the risk of losing this crucial information is high. That is why creating a full back up before transferring data is critical.
Along with backups, having a disaster recovery plan is essential. The migration strategy should outline specific actions to take in the event of an issue, such as alerting your IT staff, reversing the transfer, and making sure team members, such as managers and recruiters, are aware of their responsibilities during recovery.
If possible, keep any offline files on shared external drives as another backup step. You may also encrypt these files for an additional security layer.
Read More: Data Warehousing: A Home for Your Information
Best Approach for Your Data Migration
It is important to assess which data migration method best suits your objectives, as this decision is based on a number of aspects, including complexity, scalability, and speed. Look into these possible methods:
ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)
ETL is a popular technique for data migration, especially in big staffing companies with intricate data sets. Three basic phases make up the ETL process: removing data from the source system, formatting it appropriately, and then loading it into the target system.
By extracting different sorts of data, you can move from an antiquated ATS to a more sophisticated one. During the transformation step, you can standardize candidate or client data by, for instance, ensuring consistent formatting of all phone numbers or converting various job titles into a single format.
After conversion, the new ATS receives the data. Following the migration, you can quickly look for applicants with qualifications, see their most recent contact details, and follow the progress of their applications—all of which improve the efficiency of the hiring process.
Real-Time Data Integration
This is ideal for staffing agencies that rely on accurate and timely information across their different systems. Every operation relies on data, so don’t keep it “in progress” for too long.
Real-time monitoring is a must to make sure that you can also troubleshoot and fix issues in real-time.
Data Mapping
Data mapping is a key step to guide your seamless data migration. It links data fields from the source to the target systems. For instance, you need to map fields like employee name, salary, location, and skill qualification between the old and new systems to enable users to quickly match candidates with clients.
Define mapping rules clearly so each data element from the source corresponds to the elements in the target. For instance, if the source has a “Candidate Name” field, map it to “Name” in the target system.
Testing and Validation
To ensure the system performs as expected, start by developing a test plan that includes both functional and performance testing (to see how the system manages data under various scenarios). Verify that the data in the destination system corresponds to the original data in the source system as well.
Validation of data is equally crucial. After the migration, run validation checks to ensure all data is in the intended database. This will also help you organize your data for later sorting. You can start validating your rules by testing them in smaller subsets of your data.
Maintaining Workflow: Preventing Downtime and Disruptions in Operations
Data migration may impact business operations, particularly during the transfer stage. To minimize downtime and ensure a seamless transition:
Schedule migrations during off-peak hours.
Deliberate scheduling ensures minimal disruption to users, allowing the IT team to closely monitor the migration process and address any potential issues without the burden of high user demand. Weekends and late evenings may be the best times to carry out the relocation if your company normally experiences less activity during these periods, guaranteeing a more seamless transition for all parties.
Keep stakeholders informed.
Frequent communication guarantees a seamless transition by establishing clear expectations and transparency. You must inform employees of system maintenance schedules in advance.
Establish a rollback plan for migration.
If unexpected difficulties arise during the migration in a staffing setting, having a rollback plan in place is crucial. If they are migrating from the candidate management system to a new platform and encounter critical issues like data loss or system downtime, a rollback plan would enable them to return to the previous system.
This strategy would specify how to fix the outdated system, get in touch with hiring managers and recruiters, and restore candidate data. By preparing for potential setbacks, you can address problems, ensuring that recruitment processes continue without significant disruption and maintaining both data integrity and user productivity.
Once the migration is complete, ask or retrain employees to use the new system. Get feedback if the systems work and if the data input is correct.
How to Start Data Migration?
Expert guidance is crucial during significant transitions like data migration. Newbury Partners aims to transfer your data without significantly disrupting your business operations. As Bullhorn’s most experienced implementation partner, and HubSpot partner, we assist our companies in successfully transferring their data.
With more than 125 ATS migrations and more than 350 Bullhorn automation integrations, you can be sure that our guide to seamless data migration will be essential to your long-term success.
Make Newbury Partners Your Guide to Seamless Data Migration
At Newbury Partners, we start with an in-depth consultation and review of your current platforms and systems before we can execute the best course of action.
Our goal is to simplify the process while preserving data accuracy and integrity. Trust Newbury Partners to handle your migration with care and expertise. Contact us today!
