1. Baseline: Audit your current hours

To reclaim time, you must know where it's going. The typical trap is underestimating how much “management overhead” creeps in. Before you attempt to eliminate or automate, you must understand where your time is leaking.

Here are the things you should do:

• Time audit (2–4 weeks): Record all hours spent in non-delivery tasks such as internal coordination like meetings, status updates, chasing feedback. Then there are the recurring administrative tasks which are reporting and invoicing. You also spend time on tool switching and status consolidation, such as gathering updates from multiple sources.

• Tag by function / process area: Label activities under categories (e.g. client reviews, operations, reporting, billing). This surfaces which domains are the biggest drains.

• Benchmark & compare: If your audit shows 25–50 hours weekly lost to non-billable management tasks, you now have a clear target.

• Map micro-flows for top drains: For the largest buckets, decompose them step by step — who does what, what triggers, what wait times, where rework happens.
  
  

  Once you have that diagnostic clarity, you’ll know exactly where your interventions should go. If your audit shows 30–50 hours/week eaten by management overhead, you now have a target.

2. Workflow decomposition & bottleneck mapping

Once you know how much time is being lost, it’s time to dig deeper into your workflows. Start by breaking down major management processes into smaller steps — for example: client kickoffs, internal briefings, role assignments, drafts, feedback cycles, revisions, approvals, and handoff to delivery. 

Map out the inputs, outputs, handoffs, decision points, and rework paths for each step, and estimate how long each takes, how often it occurs, and how many people are involved.

Next, identify bottlenecks and friction points. Look for delays waiting on feedback, manual consolidation across spreadsheets, unclear ownership that causes repeated back-and-forth, scattered notifications, and rework loops. Studies show that agencies can spend over half their day on repetitive work that could be automated or streamlined. 

By mapping your workflows and spotting these time drains, you can target the areas that offer the biggest opportunity for efficiency improvements.

3. Process redesign & standardization frameworks

Before automating anything, redesign the process. Automating a broken process often just speeds up waste. Use these principles:

Eliminate, Simplify, Automate

• Eliminate steps that don’t add value

• Simplify tasks and reduce decision points

• Automate what remains

Use “template + exceptions” approach

Rather than reinventing processes each time:

• Create process templates (standard deliverable flows, handoff routines, approval gates)

• For unique cases or exceptions, route those through an "exception handling" subflow

4. Automation strategies and tools

With an optimised workflow in place, automation becomes both feasible and impactful.

Automation takes the repetitive, time-consuming work off your plate, giving your team more hours to focus on strategic hiring, agency collaboration, and business growth. Tasks like sending updates, chasing approvals, or consolidating reports no longer have to eat into your week — they can run automatically, reliably, and without human error.

HirePort makes this effortless by centralising agency management in one platform. It automates updates, notifications, and submissions, keeps all data synchronized across your ATS, and reduces the back-and-forth with agencies. With HirePort, your team spends less time on admin and more time on the work that actually drives results.

Reclaim time and gain control with HirePort

Our customers tell us that with HirePort seamlessly integrated within their ATS, agency admin is cut by up to 50% and costs reduced by as much as 20%. By reclaiming this time and simplifying agency management, your team can focus on faster hiring, better candidate experiences, and higher-quality results.

Effective agency management doesn’t start or end with spreadsheets— it starts with visibility and ends with control. HirePort puts both at your fingertips, right where your recruitment happens.