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
thepending 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.