Preparing for The Baby Boomer Vacuum:
Tips for Using the Internet to Handle Demand
and Ensure Top Quality Client Service
A treat for
all this month as guest Art Papas, Founder and CEO of Bullhorn, Inc., offers his
thoughts on the Internet success for the Fordyce readers. Bullhorn, Inc. is the
largest and fastest-growing On Demand service provider of customer relationship
management (CRM) software for the staffing and recruiting industry. Art’s
background includes more than a decade of Information Technology (IT) and
software experience. He is the
principal architect of the Bullhorn Development Platform (BDP) and has led the
charge for developing web-based applications that improve business processes,
promote collaboration and reduce inefficiencies. Here is his contribution.
The recent social
security debate has shown a spotlight on the 77 million baby-boomers who will
reach retirement age in the next 5 to 10 years. The Staffing and Recruiting
industry will be charged with filling the massive number of openings these
retirees will leave in their wake (the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates
there will be 29MM unfilled jobs in 2008), yet the industry’s stance is
currently flat-footed.
The information
technology (IT) industry’s boom in the 90’s and early 2000’s illustrates
the impact a brief labor shortage has on business.
As the demand for labor starts to out-strip supply, staffing firms raise
the prices for their services and profits fall to the bottom line. Firms add
sales and recruiting staff to respond to the demand and increase the top line
– the bottom line follows.
However,
IT staffing suppliers also experienced the bitter side of a labor shortage:
customer service woes.
As positions
become increasingly difficult to fill, they demand more attention and the time
and cost to fill these positions increases. A staffing supplier’s natural
inclination is to focus energy on the positions that are easiest to fill.
Customers begin to feel that their business is not valued and seek out firms who
will give them the attention they require. Over the long-haul, customer
frustration that leads to account churn creates real problems for staffing
firms.
In contrast to
the recent tech boom, the impending labor shortage presents an entirely
different situation. By 2008, almost every position will be hard to fill,
regardless of industry. Job seekers will be scarce and qualified candidates will
be entirely frustrated by the hail of unrelenting emails and phone calls from
recruiters eager to place them. Recruiters who seemed capable of finding and
convincing eager job seekers to take positions in 2005 will suddenly seem
inadequate to handle the job in a highly competitive, relationship-driven
recruiting market. Even staffing firms will struggle to hire capable staff and
will be desperate for solutions to help them maintain customer service.
The most
important decision a staffing and recruiting firm can make as labor demands
shift and the orders start to flood the system is in who they’ll hire. No
single factor will have such an impact on a firm’s ability to retain customers
through a tight labor market. After hiring, technology will be the most critical
component in determining a firm’s success. Good people can usually save an
account. But, good people with good systems can prevent accounts from needing to
be saved in the first place. There is a new imperative for staffing and
recruiting firms in the pending war for talent: arm your staff with the best
tools you can to keep happy customers.
Rule
# 1 – Use technology that conforms to your business processes
Anyone who’s
ever called a technical support line for a large computer manufacturer knows
that there is nothing more frustrating than having little or no continuity
between conversations. Each call is like starting your issue over from scratch
because no one has a record of the previous conversations. This doesn’t happen
because computer manufacturers don’t respect their customers. It happens
because the volume of service requests in that industry is incredibly high and
little focus has been placed on customer information sharing. Some firms issue
tracking numbers to help technicians retrieve documentation, but this puts a
burden on the customer. The best customer service organizations that handle high
volumes of requests don’t require customers to do anything other than remember
their name to ensure they receive good service. They train employees to provide
good service and leverage well-designed software systems to keep track of
customer data. Staffing and recruiting firms are about to be hit with
unprecedented customer order volumes. If they want to survive, they’ll have to
have systems that can keep the details straight and perform well under large
loads of information.
Having the
ability to store and retrieve information is only a small piece of the puzzle.
While most firms in business today have database systems for tracking customer
data, these systems seldom tell the whole story. The reasons abound: cumbersome
data entry screens, pages and pages of required fields, unintuitive interfaces
and limited functionality. In addition, a lack of internal process and support
from management lead to systems that collect dust. But perhaps the most common
reason that a staffing firm’s database system doesn’t have the most accurate
customer information is because almost all email communications happen outside
the system. So much communication in the industry happens over email – resumes
and job orders are almost exclusively sent over email. However, so few of
today’s software systems have the ability to track this information
automatically. Email plug-ins requiring commissioned employees to take extra
steps to document a critical email correspondence just don’t get the job done.
If a staffing agency wants to provide good customer service and know their
customers when they call, they can’t store critical information in Microsoft
Outlook.
Rule
# 2 – Offer self-service tools
Bank ATMs are
proof-positive that self-service can be a huge competitive advantage. ATMs offer
customers the convenience of banking almost any where in the world at any time.
A handful of customers prefer working directly with a live teller, but an
overwhelming majority prefers the speed of self-service to lengthy waits in
line. In contrast to the banking market of 20 years ago, any bank that doesn’t
offer ATM service is at a massive competitive disadvantage.
Within the
staffing industry, tools for customer self-service will be a critical factor in
customer retention during a prolonged labor shortage. Some staffing executives
fear that self-service technologies push too much work back onto the customer
and are a recipe for poor service. However, there is already a growing number of
hiring managers and corporate recruiters who prefer to save time entering and
managing orders online. It allows them to have a clearer picture of the state of
their account and greater visibility into their hiring process. Once impending
labor shortages take hold, staffing firms will need to offer customers ways to
manage the scores of open orders. Salespeople and recruiters will be tied up on
the phone with other customers and self-service tools present an alternative to
hold-times or voice mail.
Staffing
self-service applications will be deployed over the Internet. There’s no
better medium for this type of service. Customers won’t install special
software on their PCs because it requires too much effort and cooperation from
their IT departments, nor will they jump through technical hurdles to connect to
a staffing firm’s local network to manage job orders. Rather, they’ll use an
Internet browser to enter orders, review candidates, make hiring decisions,
review performance and log complaints. If a staffing firm’s customer database
isn’t accessible via the Internet, customers will likely take their business
to a competitor who boasts such an offering. In the next 5 years, self-service
applications will be as important to staffing customers as ATMs are to banking
customers.
Rule
# 3 – Target outbound marketing efforts
Effectively
marketing to pools of qualified candidates will become one of the most important
business functions a staffing firm can perform. As jobs become increasingly hard
to fill, firms will have to compete with greater skill and accuracy in order to
reach the best candidates and earn their trust. Email blasts to thousands of
people are not only ineffective -- they’re also illegal. Unless a firm has
spent significant time building an opt-in email marketing process, almost any
mass marketing email could potentially be in violation of the CAN-SPAM act.
Rather, firms will need to focus on highly-targeted outbound marketing efforts.
Email campaigns, online and offline advertising, and especially outbound phone
calls, must be highly targeted if firms want to reach the right candidate before
the competition.
A targeted
marketing campaign can’t start in a vacuum. It starts with knowing the
customer and having a system that is flexible and can track important data
without becoming cumbersome. Staffing firms invest billions of dollars in
recruiting salaries every year contacting candidates to build internal resume
databases. However, remarkably little effort is spent in capturing the
person’s interests, personality characteristics, or other critical information
that will aid marketers in creating an effective marketing message to sell an
opportunity. Retailers invest millions in gathering and purchasing information
about their customers. This data helps them make plan their advertising spend.
Staffing firms have much more personal interactions with people every day –
they need to maximize the value of these opportunities now if they hope to
effectively market to these customers in the future.
Capturing the
right data is a critically important task. Marketing is not an exact science.
Much is done by trial and error. One common approach is to build databases that track every imaginable piece of
information about a customer. This leads to tedious data entry processes and low
user adoption. Not only is the cost of building these systems high, but if it
the system simply collects dust, the entire effort is a waste. Information
tracking is a process of constant refinement. Staffing firms need a system that
can be changed easily, without costly software customizations. Adding fields,
making certain data required, eliminating useless data capture are all critical
tasks that allow marketers to gather the data they need from their field staff
without adversely affecting productivity. On-Demand or internet-based systems
that can be configured without changes to the underlying software are the only
systems that give customers this level of flexibility. Firms without such a
system are likely to suffer in one of three categories: high software
development costs, productivity loss, or high advertising and marketing costs
due to lack of customer data.
The retiring baby
boomers will quickly force change upon the Staffing and Recruiting industry –
an industry still recovering from a recession and its 4-year job drought. Supply
and demand will flip before people even take note that half of the American
workforce is retiring. Some firms will struggle to react and wonder why their
customers, clients and candidates with whom they’ve had long-standing
relationship, simply aren’t interested in doing business the way it’s been
done for so many years. Others will innovate, thrive and experience explosive
growth. One certainty is that the there will be new faces in both the top and
the bottom of the market.
cBizOne
Update
I
have reviewed cBizOne by cBizSoft in this column before but not in a while and I
wanted to mention a number of new features. I need to say I use this system
personally, in my day job, and am happy to be able to write about these updates
for you. Anyone seeking an ATS solution should give this company a look. Release
2.5.0 offers the users a number of new and useful features and makes all their
users lives a lot easier. Some of the more important updates include:
Google-like
Boolean search capability in the Advanced Find, allowing users
to create Boolean search strings without having to be an expert in creating
strings. It is also convenient to editing searches to broaden or narrow
results. Users can also save the search criteria if they are going to be
doing similar searches in the future.
CBizSoft
has added Static Views (sometimes called tear sheets), which
are custom lists of related information that users can create. While
dynamic views are rules based (ex.- daily call list only shows records with
calls scheduled for that day and will change day-to-day), static views can carry
any data a user decides to put in that grouping. A static view may be jobs
with a fee over 25%, hot candidates, golf buddies, whatever. The records
aren't actually moved in the database, only displayed together.
For
managers and administrators, they have added extensive permissions to cBizOne
Pro. As necessary, you can control the use of cBizOne by user, department,
geography, etc. and cBizSoft gave users over 60 settings per user account name
to do so.
They
have added additional dynamic views for each folder (or entity) such as
pipeline/ status reports, recently added records, etc.
Implemented
in-house hosting solution for those clients seeking a third-party hosting
solution.
Look
out for Outlook Calendar synching in the next release, available now as a patch.
The Outlook synch used to be only client and candidate data but now also
includes tasks and calendar entries.
I
have used this product day-to-day for a couple of years now and have to admit I
am completely satisfied with its usability, features and performance. Although I
am not a power user and do not use all the features available the very few
problems I have had have been handled immediately and professionally by their
knowledgeable support staff, a bright point in their organization.
I want to thank
Bob Nelson, Director of Marketing with cBizSoft, Inc. for his help with this
article. I would encourage anyone with any questions or comments about cBizOne
to contact Bob via voice at 972-713-3888 x 24 or via email at bob@cbizsoft.com. You can also visit the cBizOne
website at www.cbizsoft.com.
Eliyon
Changes Name to Zoom Information
I
know there is a lot of interest in Eliyon among the Fordyce readers so wanted to
include this recent email from them. As follows:
Welcome
to Zoom Information Inc. (www.zoominfo.com)
Our company name is changing, but our mission is not. Zoom Information Inc. -
formerly Eliyon Technologies Corporation - remains focused on developing and
delivering people information solutions that are at the forefront of technology
innovation and that meet our customers' needs.
ZoomInfo is a unique summarization search engine that finds, understands,
extracts and summarizes information about people on the Web. Currently, ZoomInfo
features more than 25 million people and 1.5 million company summaries.
Hundreds of companies - including more than 20% of the Fortune 500 - use
ZoomInfo to streamline their recruiting efforts, compile sales leads, enhance
competitive intelligence efforts, and more. Our commitment to continued
excellence in the recruiting, sales intelligence and financial services markets
is firm. Our new branding better reflects our overall strategy and focus of
summarizing people information on the Web.
For
a demonstration of ZoomInfo and complimentary trial access you can visit the www.zoominfo.com
website or call them at 866.904.ZOOM (9666).
FYI
- .jobs Coming Soon
A
new Internet extension of possible interest to our industry will be appearing
soon. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers today approved a
petition by HR managers to create a new Internet extension, .jobs (www.xxx.jobs),
for the sole purpose of posting corporate jobs. Keep on the lookout.
TIP
The
tip this month is an easy one but one everyone can make use of from time to
time. The “define” command is used to find out the meaning/definition of a
term or acronym. Go to Google at www.google.com
and type in:
define:MVS
You
will be presented with a page with links to numerous web pages with a definition
of the computer operating system, MVS. Substitute MVS with the acronym or other
word of your choice and you can have any definition you need at anytime.