With the ever-complex challenges facing today’s recruiting landscape, staffing and recruiting firms are under immense pressure to accelerate their digital transformation and automate processes. After all, recruiting process automation can help to lift productivity, get to the best candidates quicker, fill roles sooner and reduce hiring costs.

Automation and integration go hand-in-hand; it is impossible to automate things that aren’t connected. So is automation in your business being hindered by a lack of integration?

Advancements in technology have allowed recruiting firms the opportunity to use a variety of tools, but this can lead to challenges in getting them all to work cohesively, particularly if you have disparate software solutions performing different jobs but still have manual processes in between.

More tech vendors equals more integration issues, which leads to broken, convoluted recruiting processes which can negatively impact the efficiency of your business.

Sound familiar? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Many recruiting firms still have systems in place which are not suitable for their current or future business needs. If you still have manual processes and disparate systems, then you are restricting yourself in your ability to operate effectively and scale your business.

In addition to the benefits to your team, your clients and candidates have high expectations of how businesses engage with them today; the frustrations of disjointed systems and communications can provide a poor experience for them and ultimately be damaging for your brand.

The benefits of integration can’t be understated, so lets’ take a look at the key takeaways:

• With a fully integrated tech stack, you can automate and streamline tasks or workflows within the recruiting process that would previously have been done manually, thereby freeing up time for recruiters to focus on what matters – speaking to their clients and candidates.
• Integration helps to improve business efficiency. If your various tools and technology are well-integrated, then you prevent duplication of tasks or having to wait for staff to complete manual processes in order for data to be shared with all the relevant parties.
• By having all team members on one platform, you can unleash the power of information across your entire business: they’ll win more business, stay ahead of the competition & increase margins.
• An integrated tech stack removes the need for outdated, manual processes which are both time consuming and costly; you’ll just need more staff to complete those processes as you grow your business. Things can get missed, poor communication can negatively affect customers, staff and project delivery; not to mention the faff of switching between different systems. Manual processes do not support a scalable business model.
• The pandemic has brought to the forefront of many hiring businesses the ability for their staff to work from home effectively. With remote working likely to be a permanent fixture, it is essential to have the correct integrated technology in place which supports more productive and efficient working.
• Recruiting is the canary in the coal mine; it’s the first to feel the effects of a downturn and it’s the first to feel it when the market is returning to growth.  Many firms will need to consider if they are really best positioned to take advantage of that growth as it returns and if their tech stack is future proofed to support the business’ ambitions moving forward.
• Don’t run before you can walk. Many recruiting firms are excited by developments in AI (artificial intelligence) and how it can potentially benefit their business. But before you think about AI, you need to get your other AI right (automation and integration), otherwise you’ll simply have another piece of tech which isn’t delivering what it should.
• When thinking about integration of your tech stack, remember these 3 keys things: stability, security, scalability.

Having integrated systems is no longer a luxury for any business, it’s a basic requirement to enable staff to work to the best of their ability, provide a better experience for clients and candidates and ultimately increase profit margins and scale with your business. By future proofing your technology now so you have a truly integrated and automated solution in place, then your business can grow exponentially.

Ready for more detail on integrating your tech stack? Read our latest whitepaper ‘Integrations and the AppExchange’ here.

The post Why Recruiting Businesses need Integrated Rec Tech to Capitalize on a Returning Market appeared first on TargetRecruit.

The Covid-19 pandemic has created upheavals across industries and the year 2020 has seen unprecedented levels of unemployment. This means that hiring is becoming increasingly competitive due to the sheer volume of applicants, making the job of recruiters even more challenging. If at this time, your recruiters are busy doing their tasks manually, then most probably the goals that you would have laid out for your staffing firm this year are not going to be met or it would be challenging to meet them. Recruiters need to start thinking strategically for your firm to succeed in these times.

Technology is known for easing the challenges of any industry and staffing is no different. Irrespective of this global crisis, a strong recruitment software can empower your recruiters and ensure that they face the challenges of the industry head on.

In this blog, we have listed some of the tedious tasks that recruiters have to do while hiring and how they can be eased with the use of recruiting software.

Deal Sheets

Deal sheets, especially for healthcare staffing firms, require recruiters to perform the complex mathematical calculations and to determine rates and margins profitably. Deal sheets need to change on a client-by-client or job-by-job basis. This means changing burden types and rules for every single client or job.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Taxes need to be loaded in the calculation, orientation rates need to be set, overtime thresholds need to be set up, and more. Recruiters need to refer to the GSA database to populate lodging and per diem rates based on the location of the job.

If done manually this can be extremely complicated with a high risk of human error. An applicant tracking software that supports deal sheets configuration can be invaluable in such cases and can save a lot of time and improve productivity for recruiters.

How can TargetRecruit Help?

TargetRecruit’s Deal Sheets with Pay Packages feature helps recruiters dynamically confirm rates for both candidates and clients on the fly while adhering to contractual rates and maintaining margins. All the calculations are done on a deal sheets template, which can then be assigned to a client or a job. See this video and pdf to learn more.

To help close the loop, we offer the ability to send Pay Packages. Every time a job is created, including those from your VMS, and every time an applicant is created, including those from your website, you can automatically send formatted and personalized customized pay package emails to your candidates based on criteria you determine.

Emails

Most recruiters receive a huge volume of emails a day, from candidates or clients. In a scenario without the right technology in place, the recruiter will be moving back and forth between email and the ATS. So every time, a recruiter gets an email from a new contact or a candidate, he has to go to the ATS and create the profile manually. When a client sends a job order in an email, the job needs to be created in the ATS separately.

This may be manageable for smaller volumes but can easily tie up too much of a consultants time when the number of applicants increases, and can result in delays making candidates and jobs live, or result in only a selection of candidates making it into the ATS.

But, email is still the preferred communication channel for staffing firms, and it’s not going to change anytime soon.  The solution is an ATS with a fully integrated email solution, allowing seamless blending of data between the email client and the ATS database.  Candidate resumes and job briefs can be added in seconds and are immediately available for consultants to work on.

How can TargetRecruit Help?

With TargetRecruit Email Connector, TargetRecruit ATS can be integrated with Outlook or Gmail, you can view and access information about clients, candidates, and contacts directly from your inbox. Email integration will allow you to track all candidates and client emails automatically. You can quickly add a contact or a candidate from Outlook or Gmail, create job orders, parse resumes or add notes- all from your inbox. See this video and pdf to learn more.

Presentations

In our previous blog, we talked about how staffing firms can improve their speed-to-hire. But there is one step that slows the speed down more than any other – when you have finally found that perfect candidate, presenting that person to the hiring manager as quickly and professionally as possible usually decides your placement success and closure rate.

A good Candidate Presentation requires a lot of time. Recruiters need to select what data elements to include in the presentation including work history, education history, background checks, skill tests, on-boarding documents, etc. The Document needs to be clean, well-formatted, and branded as per client requirements, with the candidates contact details removed. Also, the same format needs to be maintained every time for a client, which means maintaining multiple formats of presentations depending on the client. This can be extremely laborious if done manually. What recruiters need is a Candidate Presentation Tool that can generate presentations automatically, depending on the client.

How can TargetRecruit Help?

With TargetRecruit’s Candidate Presentation feature, recruiters can create presentations in just a few minutes. They can choose which data elements to include, add branding elements of the company such as customized header, footer, and company logo, create multiple presentation types per candidate, and easily send the presentations to the clients. 

The post Top 3 Tedious Tasks of Recruiters and How to Ease Them appeared first on TargetRecruit.

Blog by Bobby Bartlett on Payroll Solution within the ATS

I often speak to temp staffing companies that are frustrated with their current system because their technology is seemingly lagging behind the rest of the industry and it makes it difficult for them to progress their business in certain ways. Strong front office (sales, marketing, and recruiting) features often seem like an afterthought in these systems, and they really struggle with scalability due to the lack of API integrations, reporting functionality, and overall configurability. I believe that this is due to many vendors striving to be a jack of all trades instead of mastering one. Payroll is such a beast of a product for software companies to manage with all of the functionalities involved and ever-changing compliance, rates, etc. It becomes all-consuming and does not allow for the rest of the technology to progress. I simply do not believe that as it stands today, companies can have their cake and eat it, too. In other words, they can’t have payroll solution included with their staffing technology suite and still enjoy the most cutting edge technology features elsewhere within their tool.

An example of where the technology often suffers is with search technology and applicant workflow management. If your firm does 100% light industrial staffing and/or administrative staffing, you might only need to pre-board candidates, check availability, and send your employees to the next assignment. This is not usually the case though, as most temp staffing firms do a percentage of higher-margin contract engagements or permanent placements. Often I see these types of companies splitting this work into two different ATS tools—one meant for their lower-margin temp staffing and another meant for their higher margin staffing. Or they try to make their higher margin work fit into their ATS they use for temp staffing, and it becomes a problem because the system is not designed to handle both. With a highly flexible system and an integration to a 3rd-party payroll solution, you should be able to handle both! Below are the general strengths and weaknesses of some of these staffing software tools that specialize in high volume temporary staffing (i.e., systems that include payroll as part of their solution):

Weaknesses

Sales & Marketing

It is tough to grow revenue without strong sales and marketing functionality. Most temp staffing software provides the bare minimum of contact and task management with little else in mind for sales people. Having the ability to manage inbound leads, or forecast off of a sales pipeline is important for many firms. Also, marketing automation tools (like Hubspot or Marketo) can help create customized outreach campaigns to sales contacts and candidates alike, while using custom landing pages to help track where every lead is sourced from. What really sets TargetRecruit apart here is you can automate the majority of the heavy lifting salespeople do with tools like computer telephony integrations (CTI), integrations with data providers (like ZoomInfo), SMS messaging, or sales drip campaigns (Groove.co, Outreach.io).

Recruiting

Candidate search is important for all types of staffing companies. The stronger your search capabilities, the faster you will be able to find quality candidates, the happier clients will be, and the more revenue you will make. Companies outside of the temp software space tend to spend much more time enhancing search capabilities on their roadmap. Also, candidate workflow management tends to be much stronger in the non-payroll ATS space. This process tends to vary greatly from company to company so flexibility is really important here.

Reporting

In fairness, this tends to be a widespread weakness of other systems. Short of bolting on an expensive and hard to understand business intelligence (BI) tool, it is nearly impossible to get the information you need to run your business in one place. Having the ability to create reports from scratch as well as tweaking existing reports is one of the crucial pieces I see missing from systems in our space. Finding a tool with ad hoc reporting that can pull data from any table in your database is crucial. I talk to people every day that take information from 3-7 systems, export it to excel, doctor it, and try to make sense of the data that way, which can take hours, if not days, of time. Staffing technology should save time and provide a deeper level of insight for your business, not the opposite.

Configurability/Flexibility

By far the hardest to explain in one paragraph, but rigidity is the biggest drawback of systems in this space. The inability to make changes without having to pay professional services for customization kills the agility and speed of staffing organizations. Moreover, customizations break and disallow new system updates because they are not “backwards compatible.” Some examples are things we already covered, like changing candidate workflow or building ad hoc reports. Some other examples are:

1. Building custom objects (creating your own data tables to intermingle with existing data tables, like accounts, job orders, or candidates). A use case for this is one of our customers built their own custom assessments object that integrated with their candidate portal and other objects in TargetRecruit.
2. Limitations of record types, such as job types. For example, some companies want to have many different job types so they don’t have to pack too many fields into one record type (for ex. Temp-to-Hire or Perm), thus making the screens too busy and confusing.
3. Some staffing companies want to change the entire look and feel from one screen to another to fit their vision. Most staffing software providers have very little you can change about the layouts.

There are many more examples I could mention here but I just wanted to highlight a few common ones.

Partner Ecosystem/API Capabilities

Many tools in the temp staffing software space have very weak API capabilities, if any, and very few partners to choose from. I often see somewhere between 20-40 partner integrations, and without a robust API, it is very difficult to integrate with new partners because it requires expensive development resources from both sides. Not to self-promote, but to provide a frame of reference, the TargetRecruit and Salesforce platforms provide for over 5,000 plug and play integrations. For us as well, plug and play literally means one click installation, just like when you download an app on your smartphone. 

Weak (or no) API capabilities also means you can’t take another technology provider you really like that isn’t already integrated and do so without expensive development.

Strengths

Payroll Solution

The main strength of temp staffing tools is their payroll solution. They are generally going to get the most attention from a research & development dollars standpoint, because compliance is not an option for temp staffing, it is a must. If you can’t effectively search, or you have to take the long road to get a report you want, the cost to your business is for the most part hidden and difficult to quantify. If you are not in compliance with payroll, Uncle Sam WILL find you and make you pay. Thus, a payroll solution needs to be airtight, and with most temp staffing software providers, this is the case. I’ve found the payroll technologies here to be for the most part impressive.

Payroll Agility

If you control your payroll and your payroll is not outsourced, you can cut a check on the spot if a mistake is made, which they will be.

Cost (Managed vs. In-House)

General consensus is that managed providers (ADP & Paychex) are more costly than handling payroll in house, and it’s hard to argue this sentiment. For example: ABC Staffing has 25 internal employees (sales, recruiters, operations, management, etc.) and pays 500 temp employees per week and 650 employees per month (PEPM) due to 30% turnover. Let’s assume in an equal world that an ATS for all three scenarios will be a wash from a cost standpoint.

Scenario 1 – Handing Payroll In-House with an ATS that Includes Payroll: First there is the human capital cost. Let’s say ABC staffing has 2 FTEs that cost roughly $45,000/year full burdened. Those two employees spend Monday and Tuesday of every week just handling payroll, so ⅖ of their job, or $18,000/year each. This totals about $36,000 of cost in human capital. Plus there are other costs like paying for Greenshades, managing ACA compliance and worker’s comp that come into consideration as well.

Scenario 2 – Paying for Managed Payroll: Let’s guesstimate that the full service payroll provider charges $6 PEPM. That comes out to $46,800 per year. Pretty simple math!

Scenario 3 – The Hybrid “Best in Breed” Approach: In this scenario, you would buy a front to back system (sales, recruiting, onboarding, timekeeping, invoicing, etc.) and integrate it with a payroll software solution. This software solution manages your ACA compliance, worker’s comp, and all of your tax tables for you. You run your own payroll, but they charge $1/check. If you’re paying on average 500 employees per week at $1/check, that will come out to $26,000/year. You will still need to pay at least one to two people to run payroll each week for 2 days, costing $18,000-$36,000 year. In theory, there should be less work here.

Conclusion

In the end, there are pros and cons for using an ATS with or without a payroll solution. Scenario 1, the scenario your firm is probably using today, is the cheapest and seemingly cleanest, but there could be consequences to your firm’s growth by going this route. Scenario 2 largely depends on the PEPM price you negotiate, but if that rate is low, it can make a lot of sense for staffing firms to just outsource payroll altogether. Scenario 3 is the scenario I predict will become more popular in the future, because staffing companies realize how much that maintaining a payroll product weighs the rest of their staffing solution down, yet they still prefer to handle payroll in-house for multiple reasons.

Decisions are often made based on the bottom line, just be careful not to prioritize cheapest over best value. Your system should never dictate what your business can do. It should help mold to whatever your future needs or opportunities might be. It should also have a strong focus on front office features, since they are what drives revenue, especially in sales and marketing.

If you’d like to connect to discuss, send me an invite here.

The post Should My Staffing ATS Include a Payroll Solution or Not? appeared first on TargetRecruit.

Revenue of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software companies grew by 63.1% in 2018 to $846 Million. According to Gartner, this made RPA the fastest-growing enterprise software market. 

Robotic Process Automation has been gaining a lot of traction in recruiting. For staffing firms who are looking to optimize their business operations, RPA software can help achieve efficient, accurate and unbiased recruiting processes.  

What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

Robotic process automation (RPA) utilizes technology to replicate human actions for mundane and time-consuming tasks. It can easily collect data, trigger responses and even communicate with other systems. For platforms like Salesforce, RPA is integrated within the software and for other business systems, the RPA system can be easily added as an enhancement. 

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) & Recruiting

RPA technology can be utilized for recruiting to automate high-level repetitive tasks such as resume screening, candidate management, engagement, etc. This will give recruiters more time to establish a consultative relationship with clients. Here are a few tasks which can be automated using RPA software:

• Sending automated communication like replying to emails, sending messages to candidates and more
• Updating and organizing candidate information in ATS
• Candidate sourcing and screening
• Automating recruitment marketing campaigns 
• Interview Scheduling with real-time calendar visibility 
• Video interviewing with automated emails containing links and instructions on how to complete the interview
• Generate emails soliciting feedback from candidates to monitor candidate experience at each stage

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Automation can definitely help improve the candidate and client experience with staffing companies, but not every component of the recruiting process should be automated. Recruiters need to remember that humans can make a real impact when it comes to engagement.

TargetRecruit offers automation tools, backed by its platform Salesforce, which can be used across various functions of a staffing agency including recruiting, back office, finance, sales and more.

Download our PDF on Automation from TargetRecruit

The post The Recruiting Case of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Adoption appeared first on TargetRecruit.

Recently, there is a lot being talked about automation, robotics, artificial intelligence and how it is going to impact the future of recruiting. Estimates suggest that the number of jobs lost to automation in the next decade could be around 1 million just in the US. But seldom is there a discussion on the new job opportunities it will create.  Advocates of automation say that the number of positions created by these technological advancements will outweigh the number of lost jobs.

The staffing industry is at the epicenter of the automation disruption. Many employers are using automation to speed up the recruitment process. This not only will free up the time of recruiters but will also eliminate human biases in the hiring process. 

According to a 2017 study from global recruitment firm Randstad, 91% of U.S. job applicants believed that technology has made applying to jobs easier and efficient. They even mentioned that they felt more respected and engaged in the process when they receive automated updates and emails.

Many staffing firms are benefitting from Salesforce to find the perfect match for employers and job seekers. Salesforce workflows can be leveraged to automate almost every hiring process and achieve greater efficiency. Salesforce workflows allow you to automatically send alerts, assign leads or candidates, update data, and schedule outbound messages – all from your fingertips.

In addition to automating screening, interviewing and engagement, there are hundreds of things that can be automated by staffing firms.

• New Applicants: Send follow up emails to all new applicants and even update the status field from passive to active
• Candidate Status Update: Automatically send emails to candidates as they go through the process
• Rejection Emails:  Improve candidate experience and automatically send rejection emails to candidates with other similar jobs
• Interview Reminders: Send email/ text reminders to candidates or hiring managers for upcoming interviews
• Data Maintenance: Identify candidates or contacts in your ATS that don’t have phone numbers and archive them
• Email Sequence for Leads: Build a sequence of calls/ emails for follow up with leads, which is sent over a period of time
• Surveys:  Send out NPS surveys, feedback questionnaires, post-interview surveys to gather feedback from clients, candidates or contractors
• Webpage View Alert: Send a notification to recruiters when a top candidate or a prospect visits the website
• Gather Credentials: Start email sequences to candidates 30 days before the expiry date of credentials
• Communicate with New Hires: Start sending position specific emails to new hires 7 days before their joining date
• Send Relevant Jobs: Send emails to candidates containing jobs that match their profile
• Add Tasks Automatically: Add a task to candidate or prospect, like automatically add a task to call the candidate 1 day after their start date to see how their day went

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TargetRectuit is built on Salesforce and all of its automation tools are baked into the TargetRecruit ATS.  Increase productivity, eliminate errors and fully automate the workforce management process with TargetRecruit’s automation tools.

Download the PDF on Automation from TargetRecruit

The post The Future of Recruiting is here appeared first on TargetRecruit.

In part one of the recruiting automation blog series, benefits of automation were outlined and automated screening was discussed in detail. Recruiting automation is not just limited to screening and can automate most of the hiring processes- one of them being interviewing. Automated interviews differ drastically from traditional methods because everything happens virtually. Not only does this save time and effort, but it also reduces the cost of hiring.

Why automated interviews

Scheduling automated interview is extremely flexible and considers the availability of the candidates. With automated interviews, applicants from all over the world can be included in the process without having them travel to a specific location.

Organizations are switching to automated interviews due to several benefits. It does not compromise on the quality of the recruitment process and with the right automation platform, one can hire the best talent. Automated interviewing is not just a replacement for traditional methods, rather it is a new avatar of interviews- a complete digital overhaul.

How does it work?

The structure is the key to an automated interview process, which is followed by applicant tracking systems or staffing software. Here is how it works:

Step 1:

When a candidate expresses interest in a job opening, the candidate is sent an invitation for the interview. Automated emails are sent out to all of the interested applicants and candidates can select a suitable time slot, using the scheduling feature.

Step 2:

On a predetermined date, the candidates are required to record the answers using video interviews platform support by the ATS. Most of these products are customizable and can be used by recruiters to set the questions required for the job. They can even set multiple stages of the interviewing process.

Step 3:

The video interview is initiated with an automated email sent out to the candidates with a link to submit the response. Recruiters can even include guidelines in the email for the applicants. The video is recorded and candidates can even do retakes.

Step 4:

All of the video interviewing responses can be analysed by the recruiting team to select the best candidates. This saves a lot of time and is done much more quickly and efficiently. Further automation can be also done by using artificial intelligence to analyse video responses of the candidates and automatically select the best from the group and email them as well upon selection.

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Read about TargetRecruit’s automation tools to transform complex hiring processes into powerful workflows. TargetRecruit includes many built-in rules that simplify business processes and secure data. Download the PDF here.

In the next blog of this series, we will discuss the future of automation. Stay tuned!

The post Automated Interviews is Changing Recruiting Forever appeared first on TargetRecruit.

Increasing demand for talent creates intense pressure on staffing companies to constantly look for better ways to hire.  Staffing leaders agree that the most challenging part is identifying the right candidate from a large pool of candidates as quickly as possible. Many staffing companies are currently doing this and other mundane tasks manually.

Thanks to new technologies that prove effective in streamlining some of the complex and repetitive recruiting efforts, automation helps recruiters become more efficient and increase the speed-to-hire.  A recruiting solution like TargetRecruit, built on Salesforce, enables recruiting and staffing firms to leverage automation in hundreds of ways.

Automated Screening

Being able to automate candidate screening is powerful and can reduce costs as well as save time. Most staffing companies have thousands of resumes in their ATS and most of these resumes stay ignored and unengaged. But with recruiting automation, this becomes easy.

How will it work?

Step 1: Use candidate scoring or matching capabilities of your ATS

ATS’ like TargetRecruit have Auto Match capabilities and can easily find suitable candidates from a pool of resumes against a job. This feature can automatically suggest candidates when a job is created, by looking at education, work experience, skill set, etc.

Step 2: Engage with matched candidates

With candidate screening automated, emails can be sent out to all the resumes selected by the ATS to engage them. Even initial screening questions can be sent out for candidates to respond.

Step 3: Select responsive candidates

Recruiting Automation can help take the candidates that respond to screening questions forward in the process. You can even set weightage to initial screening questions and those candidates who meet a minimum screening score can be pushed forward through the hiring process.

With automated screening, you can ensure that no resume in your database is ignored and there is continuous communication to candidates who apply to jobs, whether they are selected or rejected.  In part two of this blog, we will explore how interview scheduling can be automated in hiring and its key benefits.

Download the PDF– Automation from TargetRecruit

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