Changing
the Staffing and Recruiting Game:
The
Synchronized Front Office
This
month it is my pleasure to offer this contribution by Art Pappas, the esteemed
co-founder and CEO of Bullhorn, one of the leading ATS products available today.
Art has contributed to this column in the past and as always, we appreciate his
involvement. Here is what Art has to say:
By
Art Papas, co-founder and CEO, Bullhorn
Most
executives of staffing and recruiting firms will agree that about 90% of the
firm’s “assets,” its recruiting and sales teams, reside in the front
office. To maximize growth and
profits, staffing and recruiting firms must maximize efficiency from these
teams, which starts with collaboration between sales and recruiting or
synchronizing the front office to drive sourcing and placement.
As a result, staffing and recruiting companies are able to meet the
hiring demands of their customers in real-time, changing the game of beating
your competitors to placements, while increasing revenues and driving profits.
The
Synchronized Front Office
To
most staffing and recruiting executives, the term “collaboration” connotes
people working together to meet a vague business objective, at best.
However, changing the nature of the way people work can create huge
dividends that impact sales and profits. But
how do firms do that in a minimum amount of time and without a lot of cost and
complexity?
The
answer may not surprise you – it’s a combination of software, the Internet,
and mobile devices that transforms your front office from simple collaboration
to a highly connected and synchronized sales and recruiting team that is totally
focused on making placements. What
may surprise you, however, is how much technology has evolved to make the
implementation of the synchronized front office easy, flexible, powerful, and
cost effective.
With
the level of increased pressure to meet the hiring demands of clients, staffing
and recruiting firms must make technology decisions holistically.
No longer can firms afford to look at email, the applicant tracking
system, sales force automation, the Internet, and mobile devices separately.
Integration is the key to creating a synchronized front office to drive
the productivity of each of your employees.
An
Integrated Front Office is the Key to a Synchronized Front Office
Why
is integration critical?
Simply
put, the front office does not serve the individual within your firm; it drives
the business of your entire company through real-time communication that
requires every element of your technology solution to work in concert to connect
the sales and recruiting teams so they are “in sync” to make placements.
Remember
the negative connotation of collaboration – people working together to
accomplish vague business objectives? With
an integrated and synchronized front office system, every staffing and
recruiting professional, whether in recruiting, sales or support; on the road,
in the office, or at home; is working together leveraging the same information
to execute on a common goal – sourcing high quality candidates to make
placements ahead of your competitors.
Contrast
the integrated front office solution with the stove pipe approach of most
staffing and recruiting software vendors. Jumping
back and forth between open applications, which degrade performance, the users
of “Stove Pipe Software” work separately between their systems to find
candidates, track applicants, and generate new job orders.
Each function works well independently, but rather than filling the
volume of job orders available and scaling the company’s growth to maximize
revenue and profitability, the system instead breeds complexity.
The right candidates are not easily matched to job orders, and critical
documentation detailing client requests and feedback is missing.
Compounding the problem, sales and recruiting are wasting valuable time
toggling back and forth between email and calendaring and the applicant
tracking, job management, and sales force automation systems.
With
an integrated front office, the system creates a synchronized office, based on
connecting sales and recruiting, which enables a 360 degree view into every
relationship critical to the staffing and recruiting firm – contacts,
candidates, colleagues, and clients. Contacts
are leveraged and linked to candidates with detailed notes and assigned tasks
among the recruiters, even when someone is out of the office.
When sales generates new job orders, recruiters are instantly notified,
and candidates, already in the system, are quickly matched.
In fact, recruiters can see what job orders are forecasted by sales in
advance of the job order being created. And
once candidates are submitted, recruiters and sales have visibility into whether
candidates are being evaluated by clients, providing valuable feedback on the
most profitable clients. Communication
is seamless and fast throughout the entire company because of email,
calendaring, and instant messaging that is native to the integrated front office
system.
The
synchronized benefits of an integrated front office system also extend directly
to the management of the firm. With
an integrated system, reports can be created detailing every metric related to
the relationship side of the business. At
anytime, and from anyplace, the most productive employee and client
relationships can be identified.
On
Demand
The
real-time synchronization of the front office is enabled through a true On
Demand solution that eliminates the need to install and manage hardware,
software, and a complex network. Also
known as Software as a Service, On Demand software is licensed on a monthly
basis per user.
There
are many imposters of this type of solution, including those using terms like
application service provider (ASP) or Web hosting. What differentiates a true Web native or On Demand solution
from the ASP or Web hosted one? The
difference is subtle but critical to the growth of your business – the true On
Demand solution is easily configurable to your business and to your client’s
needs in real-time, both when implemented and as your business evolves.
For example, if medical staffing is increasingly becoming a larger
portion of your business, and your clients require specific changes to your
invoices, demand more detail on professional certifications, or need more
reporting on work history, then your quick response to satisfy that need is
critical to retaining those customers.
Configurability
in this case is much more meaningful than customization.
With configurability, you use the application’s functionality based on
the way your business runs in real-time, at anytime from anyplace.
In the ASP or Web hosted model, the staffing and recruiting firm is
typically providing traditional software that does not allow for rapid
configurability and overburdens the user with complexity and a lack of
integration.
As
a result, the real-time nature of On Demand, with specific configurability to
your business, becomes the perfect solution to synchronize your recruiting and
sales teams.
Real-time
Mobility
The
synchronized front office is limited without real-time wireless capabilities.
Real-time wireless is critical to leveraging the benefits of the
synchronized front office from anytime and anyplace.
With wireless mobility, staffing and recruiting professionals are
communicating and collaborating in real-time from any location, using the
convenience of devices like Smart phones and PDAs that enable information access
when a wired connection or a wireless computer network is not available.
When
combined with the power and real-time nature of an On Demand, integrated front
office solution, wireless mobility allows staffing and recruiting professionals
to create a truly synchronized front office that gives them instantaneous access
to candidates, appointments, tasks, email, and file attachments.
The
Synchronized Front Office: Change is a Simple Evolution
Proven,
battle-tested solutions are available today to transform your sales and
recruiting teams into a synchronized front office within a few short weeks.
The data and security associated with your firm’s extensive
relationships are critical and need to be migrated to a secure, reliable, and
scalable On Demand system that is configurable to the unique needs of your
business.
Easing
the migration is an integrated front office solution that promotes communication
and collaboration through a single user interface and database to simplify the
use and management of the system throughout all levels of the organization.
The single user interface and database’s benefits are easily extended
when used with the world’s most popular devices to create real-time wireless
synchronization.
The
staffing and recruiting industry finds itself at a key inflection point – a
large hiring demand is driving exciting opportunities while a shortage of
qualified applicants is creating a significant business challenge.
Those firms poised to maximize their growth potential will be flexible
enough to embrace the business and technological benefits of the synchronized
front office by adopting an On Demand, fully integrated front office system that
can be accessed at anytime and from anyplace.
Job
Pulse by Broadlook
We have seen
plenty of products out on the market these days offering us a myriad of methods
and technologies to seek out passive candidates on the Internet. But...what
about job order or marketing leads? Here is a fairly new offering from Broadlook
Technologies, whom we have written about a number of times in this column, that
gives the user leads galore, by typing in a few key words, a location, and
clicking the start button.
What I like about this Broadlook product is its sheer simplicity. Very little to
learn here. Click the New Search button, add the keywords of your choice, add a
city and state if you like, then click the Start This Search button. Job Pulse
spiders many jobs sites on one fell swoop and returns your results in an
easy-to-read queue. The interface also has a mini-browser built in so you do not
have to leave the program to view a result.
I used java as a keyword and decided to look in the St. Louis, Missouri area. I
filled out the information as described above and ran my search. I received 321
results and noticed the program had culled results from Yahoo/HotJobs, Dice,
Monster, ComputerJobs, Software Guild, Careers2000, and dozens of smaller career
sites and corporate web sites. The results came back with the date the job was
posted, the job title, company, exact location, contact name and email (if
available) and source of the result. Job Pulse is not limited to job boards but
combines the results of 1000's of Job Boards and over 200,000 corporate web
sites. The product worked very fast returning all my results in a matter of a
couple of minutes.
When you double-click on an entry the original posting appears in the built-in
mini-browser. If you notice any "junk" results at all, which I did
not, they also offer a way to exclude keywords from your results.
Job Pulse is a desktop tool, so the job posting data is stored on your computer.
This allows the user to store an archive of searched jobs over weeks months or
years. The user can, at any time, do a search on previous results.
This is a high value for any recruiter focusing on a specific niche, vertical
market or geography. If you have data saved over a period of time,
this would allow you to perform analysis on market trends within a market as
well as archiving potential companies to source from.
Overall, one of the most valuable ROI's in using Job Pulse is in skill marketing
a hot candidate. It is becoming more and more of a candidate driven market
every day. The ability to effectively and efficiently know about multiple
openings in which to present your candidate is critical to skill marketing your
candidate to multiple sources.
That is all there is to it as far as I could see. Couldn't be simpler. Find job
postings, analyze a potential market, archive companies to recruit
from, skill market a top candidate...FAST.
Job Pulse retails for $2495. Worth every penny. Anyone with any interest in
locating quality job order leads from the Internet should definitely give this
new product a look. You can contact Andy Theimer, Creative Director at Broadlook
Technologies, who I want to thank for his help with this article, via email at
atheimer@broadlook.com or via voice at 262-754-8080 x210. You can also visit the
Broadlook Technologies website at www.broadlook.com
.
Online
Recruitment Magazine
Want
a great free resource to enhance your online recruiting experience, sign up for
the free online magazine, Online Recruitment. Besides the magazine they have a
monthly newsletter they can email to you. This online publication features news
and other items of interest to any recruiter that uses the Internet in any way.
Read the top stories of the day, search recruitment suppliers and sites,
participate in recruiter forums, sign up for other free newsletters, and a
myriad of other features and benefits. Online Recruitment is based in the UK but
is making the USA presence known. Anyone with any interest in this type of
resource should visit the website at www.onrec.com
or you can go directly to the magazine sign-up page at www.onrec.com/us/.
Recruiting
Cosmetologists??
Yes,
there are sites that specialize in resume and job posting for the cosmetology
industry. Anyone with any interest can visit the following sites: BehindtheChair.com;
HairTalent.com; BeautyPeople.com; SkinPeople.com.
I know nothing about these site and are listed here for your convenience.
We have all
heard of Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Alta Vista search engines but have you heard of
the meta search engines? We have mentioned these search engines in this column
in the past but not in quite some time. Since they can be such an asset to the
Internet recruiter here is an update. Meta search engines are tools that pass
queries on to many other search engines and/or directories and then summarize
all the results for you. They have their good points and bad points. One great
aspect to their use is a huge savings in time. Instead of going to many
different search individually and typing in the same search parameters over and
over again, with a meta search engine you type in your search string once and it
searches many different sources simultaneously. The downside is that since each
search engine often uses slightly different commands you often do not have the
search flexibility that you have when you search directly. Having said that I
think it should be worth a try for anyone interested in locating free resumes of
qualified candidates on the Internet. Here is a short list you can look at. You
can also type in the phrase “meta search engine” into Google and get more
sites to try.
www.webmetasearch.com
www.metacrawler.com
For anyone interested in a more thorough explanation with a detailed listing of these engines, including their plusses and minuses, visit www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html. The University of Berkeley Library has done a great job in preparing some great information on this resource.