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.

The job of a staffing firm doesn’t end with hiring against job orders. As a staffing firm, you will be taking care of your client’s workers once they are placed, and ensuring that they are looked after will help retain your best candidates . An efficient timekeeping software solution can ensure that employees you hired for your clients aren’t underpaid or overpaid, which is vital as they rely on its accuracy for their income. The timesheet solution will also ensure that there all relevant compliance is adhered to, avoiding the risk of penalties or complaints. For these reasons the needs of staffing and recruiting firms are unique when it comes to timesheet solutions. Here we have listed the must-have features for any timesheet solution to help staffing firms choose the right one for their business.

Easy Entry and Corrections

Your timesheet solution has to be really simple for any user to add their time and expense, with minimal user interaction or navigation. The solution needs to be fully accessible from mobile devices since most of the people using the solution are usually on the move.  Ideally, the time booked should be populated by default so the candidate just has to approve or amend, reducing the risk of human error.

Even corrections need to be easy and simple, so look for a solution that allows users to just find the timesheet and make the necessary corrections. The solution needs to maintain a full audit trail as well for reconciliation purposes.

The system should also prevent common errors, such as entering 80 hours instead of 8, again to reduce the incidence of refused approvals and corrections.

Configurable Approval System

Managers should receive an email every time a timesheet is submitted for approval, or be able to choose daily consolidated updates for larger volumes. This way they are prompted automatically for approvals. Once they login to the portal they should easily be able to approve or reject the timesheets for a specific period with just a click, and add notes where needed.

Staffing firms have varied approval needs depending on the size of the workforce, hierarchy, etc. Hence, a configurable approval system is a must-have.  For example, a firm with a large workforce will have several approvers at various levels. The timesheet solution should be configurable to meet their needs and ensure automated and seamless routing at each stage.

Integrated Expense Management

The timesheet solution should support adding attachments as well to ease the approval process for reimbursement and client billings. Look for software that supports users submitting reimbursement requests for their regular commute and other expenses. They should be able to upload expense attachments which can then be approved for processing, and/or take photos directly from their mobile device.

Integration with Payroll Systems

If the timesheet solution doesn’t integrate with payroll and accounting systems it is likely that there will be a significant manual rekeying overhead, which adds cost and risk. You should look for software where files can be created in any format for integration with any third-party payroll solutions. This way hours worked can be imported from time and attendance solutions and processed easily.

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TargetRecruit now has a new and improved Middle Office Solution. It acts as the command center for timesheets, pay, and bill. It bridges the gap between the front office and the back office payroll and accounting systems and offers a single source of truth. Learn more.

The post 4 Must-Have Features for Staffing Timesheets appeared first on TargetRecruit.

When you think of heat maps, do weather forecasts come to mind? Well, they have come a long way from there! By definition, they are graphical representations of data using color-coding; their primary usage is to assist in visualizing a large volume of data points, drawing attention to the areas that matter most.
Heat maps have evolved to be high-tech, interactive and varied. They are used in staffing analytics to generate insight into hiring demand, the supply of qualified candidates, average salary, the average time-to-fill, etc.

Identify What Candidates Want

You can deploy heat mapping tools on your website and identify what job seekers are looking for. Heat mapping tools can tell you which section is most read or where the most time is spent. You can even track which sections are getting the most amount of clicks. This data is presented in a very effective visualization, where the most used parts of your web page are usually displayed in red. Refer to the image below for an example:

Recently, LinkedIn also revealed a heatmap that gave employers insight into what job seekers are reading, where they are clicking and which sections are most important.

Measure Employee’s Workload

You can even create an employee heatmap to measure the workload of your employees. You can plot the data on a scale of 1-10 where 1 is idle and 10 being overloaded. This way you can analyze who in your team is fully committed and who could be dissatisfied or looking elsewhere. This measure also gives an understanding of the employee’s stress level.

Accelerate Candidate Search

In TargetRecruit, our new Heatmap feature can help you perform candidate searches geographically with a visual representation of the results. You can view candidates against a job or a particular skill set on a heat map. Depending on your business requirement you can create a color-coded one as well, e.g. the most suitable candidates or fully on-boarded can be seen as green and least suitable as red. Recruiters can preview the candidate’s profile by clicking on the color-coded icon and approve, reject or save the profile for later.

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Keen to find out more about the new Heat Map feature in TargetRecruit and other great new features in our Q1 release? Click here to learn more!

The post Recruitment Heat Maps appeared first on TargetRecruit.

In my time working with small, mid-sized, and enterprise level staffing and recruiting organizations, I’ve seen many different flavors of evaluations. Evaluating enterprise front, middle and back office recruiting technology that will essentially run your organization is very difficult and often fails. I recently read that organizations switch ATS systems (recruiting technology) every two and a half years on average. Who knows, could be a made up stat but it had me thinking about why the cycle is so short.

Considering the quantifiable costs (implementation, double paying for licenses, man hours it takes to find a new system, etc.) and the un-quantifiable costs (dip in employee morale, time to productivity on a new tool, loss of confidence in leadership, etc.), you would think there would be a heavier emphasis on getting it right. That’s not to say that the intent is not usually in the right place but the execution is often lacking and it’s usually because there is not an expert on staff that has deep knowledge and experience with conducting an evaluation like this that touches so many aspects of an organization. In this article I will explore some ways I have seen firms increase their chances of success in selecting the correct solution.

The Data and Measurables

After doing research into this topic, I found data showing failure rates of IT projects ranging between 25% and 90%. Part of understanding the data here is defining failure. In this Couchbase study that had failure at 90%, failure was defined as projects that had “fallen below planning expectations, delivered only minor improvements or altogether failed.” In the Forbes article that showed a study that used 25%, failure was defined as “outright failure,” or not even completing the project. The links to the articles are referenced below if you’d like to see some of the data yourself. One way or another, the data suggests that if your implementation does fully succeed, it will be in the minority.

Coming to Terms

When selecting a committee to help with an evaluation, one must come to terms with an important fact early on… people are self serving in nature. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it is what has helped us survive and thrive! But we didn’t evolve to evaluate technology, we evolved to survive in the wilderness, and those two things that can be in evident conflict when organizations evaluate technology solutions because people (almost) always put their interests above the greater good of the company’s. I cannot tell you how many times that someone evaluating recruiting technology will get hung up on a piece of functionality that will save them from five minutes of agony a day so they choose that solution vs the one that will save their company hundreds of hours a week. We are wired for our own survival, and often it’s difficult for people that especially sit within one function of an organization to see the forest for the trees. Select people who are global thinkers and prep them to think of things rationally, not emotionally, when making their decision.

Selecting the Right Lead

Now that we know what to look for, we need to decide who is going to be on the committee. Should it be just a few people? Should we let the entire organization take part? Ideally, a CEO, CTO or COO would run point for any technology evaluation because those people usually see the organization in a more global manner than anyone else. Unfortunately, execs rarely want to devote their time to the minutiae of looking at technology. Because of this, there is usually someone chosen to run point on an evaluation below the exec level and the reason they are chosen can vary greatly. Some reasons might be: they are a vocal agent for change, they are viewed as being tech savvy, the executives trust them, or maybe it’s just because they happened to be there when the conversation was brought up. None of the above are the best reasons in my opinion. The person running point should be someone who is a pure operations type that has nothing to gain by making one particular part of the organization happy over another. If you don’t have anyone like this in your business, do yourself a favor and hire a consultant from the outside. Maybe even consider someone without a considerable background in the recruiting technology space for the initial evaluation. I find that people in those types of positions bring less baggage to the table that would harmfully impact their decision.

Selecting the Right Committee

This to me can be the trickiest part that staffing leaders struggle with. Especially within organizations under $100MM in revenue. They still often are hyper-concerned with preserving culture (as they should be) and are often of the mentality that if they all choose it, they will have to live with it without complaining. Nonsense! For starters, you will never have a unanimous decision where everyone sings kumbaya and harmoniously selects the one perfect tool for your business to grow on. In fact, this may actually cause a division where two camps viciously fight over which tool to select. Also, end users and even managers and directors, are usually going to choose the tool that fits their agenda best, not the one that makes it so the entirety of the company can accommodate its needs today and 5 years from now. Recruiters will have mostly their needs in mind, as will salespeople, accounting, payroll, IT, marketing, etc. It would go almost completely against our fundamental nature to think otherwise.

My recommendation is to have your point person survey each team and maybe even some of its members to see what their needs are up front, document them, and make sure they all make their way into the evaluation criteria. From there, identify the best people from each part of the organization to represent their team, while also understanding the bigger picture, and encourage the most data-driven and pragmatic approach possible. It can help to ask the top 3 things someone would want in a new recruiting technology to make their life easier and the top 3 things that would help the company grow. Their answers may be telling as to whether or not they should be on your committee. Also encourage the committee to not only think of today, but consider the problems that might come up down the road, and how the recruiting technology they are evaluating could solve those problems.

Creating a Criteria & Scoring

Often times we will look at 5 demos from 3 vendors over a 2-3 months evaluation period and at the end just throw our hands in the air and say screw it, I’m just going to choose X vendor because I like them. Or, I like these one or two things Y vendor does so I’ll choose them. Evaluation fatigue is real and it happens to everyone. How can one single person ingest so much data in a drawn out period and remember everything about it? Not to mention they may not revisit the conversation for another 5-10 years, or ever again for that matter! Having a rock solid evaluation criteria documented can make you feel 100% more confident in your decision.

You can create one on your own from scratch, or the easier road is ask your friend who works at another staffing company if they have anything hanging around that you could base yours off of. Also, you can weight each feature by level of importance and then rate the features vendor by vendor 1-5 or 1-10. From there you can determine the final score of each vendor. You can also break functionality out by group so they can rate the features that are important to them while they are watching the demos, rather than having to look at the entirety of the document that is largely irrelevant to their life. This way they don’t have to rely on their foggy memory later and it keeps people engaged in the demos. They aren’t going to want to turn in a blank score sheet or have scores on there that can’t be justified because they had no idea why they put them there. Just be careful that if you do decide to score and rank solutions, that you choose line items to score that are clear cut and definable, not confusing and ambiguous. For example: say “Rate the ease of creating reports from scratch” instead of “Rate their reporting from 1-10”. One asks a specific question. The other leaves it completely open to interpretation. They could be rating how visibly appealing the reports are, how many reports there are, how well the reports fit their needs, or even if the reporting tool allows them to create their own report in the first place. In the end, find out what’s important to each team, and give them a manageable list to help them organize their thoughts and help you make a solid decision.

Process – Evaluating a Recruiting Technology

Similar to implementations, too often sales processes face unnecessary delays or get put on the back burner. Even worse, sometimes people reach out to vendors too late, putting them both in a precarious situation because the vendor of course won’t turn down the opportunity despite knowing the implementation is already in jeopardy. Allot at a minimum of 3 to 3.5 months for a smaller organization. If you are larger, there is usually a sliding scale upwards from there. Be wary of any company that is offering to do an implementation in a shorter time frame. They are most likely not spending much time making sure your data migrates properly and/or their system barely has any functionality so there’s just not much to do in an implementation!

Another detriment to an evaluation process is when it gets delayed or put on the back burner. I can confidently say that you will need additional meetings to discuss the same things over again because you and your team will forget these details as time elapses. To prevent this, work with your vendor to create a timeline from the beginning to move the evaluation forward. A timeline should outline the expected meetings needed for a company of your size within your vertical. A timeline document will rarely be adhered to perfectly, but it sets expectations that you are a serious buyer. Your time is extremely valuable, as is theirs, so why not make sure you are both not wasting it.

One other major time-waster is being unprepared for meetings. This falls on both the vendor and the staffing company but not having clear agendas and prepped teams on both sides, inevitably more meetings will need to take place in follow-up. To quantify this, let’s say an average demo is attended by 7 people. If those people are making on average $100k/year fully burdened then that’s roughly $350 down the drain if another hour needs to be tacked on that could have been avoided. Effort up front can save far more effort on the back end. Having a clearly defined process from beginning to end is time well spent.

Get Behind Your Decision

This may sound simple but it can easily get botched. As an executive or a decision maker, your team needs to know that you are 100% behind your decision. If they feel you are not, some will exploit this fact. It’s basically giving them carte blanche to say if since our CEO doesn’t fully believe in this, why should I? Then they might poison the well for others, really throwing a wrench in your investment. BUT, if they know you are unwavering, they will fall in line. You and your carefully selected team know what is best for the business, and they have to have faith that your goals are aligned. Their success is your success, so you’re obviously not going to purposely impede them. They have to know if it’s not in the system, it didn’t happen. Joe the recruiter spoke to that Jan the candidate but the call’s not logged? Sorry, Jan’s going back into the pool for someone else to take a stab at. Your team is conversing via email about candidates rather than using the internal social collaboration tool like Chatter, they lose out on kicker bonuses for the month because visibility in the system is key for your organization. There has to be value in using the system and everyone needs to know you strongly believe that value.

Closing Thoughts – Recruiting Technology Stack

I’ve seen companies run evaluations that are totally haywire and others that are nearly spotless, and in my experience they are far more often the former than the latter. As people in the staffing industry know, there are no shortcuts in success. Doing the hard thing the right way is not for everyone and it ultimately can determine who thrives and who fades away. Outside of the people at your company, your recruiting technology stack is your biggest opportunity for differentiation. Decisions of a large magnitude like this should be considered accordingly.

References

Forbes article on 7 reasons why tech projects fail

ZDNet article on why 68% of IT projects fail

Couchbase article on the data dilemma holding back digital innovation

Digital Journal article called “9 out of 10 digital transformation projects will fail

ERPFocus article called “Ten ERP failure statistics that highlight the importance of getting it right first time round”

The post How to Evaluate Enterprise Staffing & Recruiting Technology appeared first on TargetRecruit.

Communication is central to the recruitment cycle. An ATS integrated with email helps you respond faster to clients and candidates, capture and organize critical details, and collaborate and share in brand new ways. In fact, it enables a new way of working, giving you an edge when you communicate both outside and inside your organization.  Let’s look at the top benefits of ATS and Email integration: 

Get critical information straight from your inbox

With ATS and email integration, you can view and access information about clients, candidates, and contacts directly from your inbox. You’ll watch information flow and sync like magic, allowing you to edit on the fly, stopping you from bouncing between systems. Productivity will skyrocket because everything you need is in one place.

Track all emails

Integration allows you to track all candidate and client emails automatically. No backtracking. No extra clicks. Just forward movement. You’ll be able to see all of the emails from one contact, then filter those emails too see them in order, as one project, however you choose. You’ll feel organized. You’ll work full speed ahead.

Create candidates, jobs, tasks, and more

After receiving an email from someone new, quickly add as a contact or candidate directly from Outlook or Gmail. Say a client sends you a job order in an email. Now you can finish the job right in your inbox. Say you want to parse some resumes or add some notes. Easy. All from your inbox. Any new task you create flows right into the ATS.  

Easy internal communication

Need support for enterprise collaboration tools? Want to chat with your team about a contact or candidate? No problem. TargetRecruit’s Email Connector gets everybody on the same page, helping your team get work done faster than ever before. Let technology drive teamwork. These are the kinds of enterprise-grade tools that help navigate projects, track actions and events, and maximize opportunities. 

Work from any device

Employees to clients to suppliers, everyone wants to be mobile. Without any additional plugins, ATS and email integration allows anyone touching your business to work from any computer or mobile device. Today’s candidate wants to engage, connect, and communicate from a phone, wherever they are. 

Email is still the preferred communication channel for staffing firms, which makes email integration a must-have ATS feature. So what happens when you combine TargetRecruit with Outlook or Gmail? Valuable data flows through email. Workflows accelerate. You build a culture of collaboration. You get everything: contacts, leads, accounts, opportunities and tasks – in your inbox. Ever wanted your email to do more? 

TargetRecruit Email Connector integrates your software solution with Outlook or Gmail, unleashing the real power of communication across your entire staffing organization.  The integration is seamless and transparent. Overnight you’ll have people and jobs and tasks all in one place, all at your fingertips. Your email inbox will transform into a single workflow of speed and agility and intelligence. And success, mainly success. 

The post 5 Reasons Why ATS and Email Integration is a Must appeared first on TargetRecruit.

The “build vs buy” decision is a hot topic when I speak with staffing agencies. Pros and cons are weighed, time and costs are measured, and more and more it’s a decision that may determine the future health of your business. And since TargetRecruit is built upon Salesforce, I encounter this topic more than in my past roles because Salesforce encourages developers to build on its platform. In other words, rather than building a homegrown solution from the ground up, you can leverage the billions spent on infrastructure, security, reporting, mobile, workflow automations, and more by building your tool on Salesforce. Multiple top 10 recruiting firms have done this. Others, still, have decided to “buy”, partnering with an existing recruiting technology provider on Salesforce – like TargetRecruit – to save time and money, and lean on the expertise of a dedicated technology provider.

As for the “build” option, the main pro I hear is control over the product roadmap and control over business workflows. They want more control. I also hear things like “there isn’t anything out there that fits my needs,” which I perceive as less of an objection and more of an educational opportunity. Going forward, I will explore some of the cons, or pitfalls, I have encountered working with companies who built their own ATS solutions on Salesforce, or built a homegrown solution hosted in-house.

Build vs Buy Cost: Developers

Big companies with complex requirements might buy a solution like TargetRecruit and then hire Salesforce developers to extend functionality on top of our platform. Because TargetRecruit is the only tool built entirely on Salesforce, with absolutely zero code hosted on external clouds (like AWS), this scenario allows our clients to work in harmony with our roadmap while still making updates without breaking their instance. This sparks innovation and embodies the spirit of Salesforce. I’m asked how is this possible since none of our competitors can achieve this? Well, if you are familiar with the AppExchange model you know that Salesforce has over 4,000 plug and play apps that would break every time Salesforce made an update if this was not the case. If you choose to build your own solution from scratch, however, you plunge quickly into deep, dark waters. In this case, you’ll need an army of developers, as well as product managers, QA specialists, and more. This is not cheap and easy talent to find. You are now building a development team. The clock is ticking. And that is why recruiting is such a valuable skill!

Build vs Buy Cost: Time

A DIY project will not only direct resources and focus away from what you do best – recruiting, but will also put too many cooks in the kitchen. You’ll wake up to find a lot of valuable people trying to influence product instead of driving revenue. Agendas clash. Lines are drawn. Forces align against you because you are not only paying for an entire software team, but also paying your committee and influencers to be pseudo-product managers, rather than recruiters, sales people, support staff, managers, and business leaders. Doing it yourself is a gigantic enterprise, both delicate and risky.

Breadth of Technology Expertise

From message boards to boardrooms, the quest for the perfect system is central to the build vs buy debate. It goes something like this: “I don’t know why ATS systems don’t do (blank). It would be so easy to make an ATS that every staffing company would love.” Another thing I hear staffing companies saying is, “We are an ATS made for recruiters, by recruiters.” Every company has different needs. And within a particular company, even different needs, cascading down from leader to manager to doer. It is difficult to see the forest for the trees when a recruiter can’t shake one nagging problem that may add a few minutes to their day. But from a global view that problem appears tiny compared to the bigger and broader needs of the company. Point? The great CTOs and product professionals are also great listeners. There is a certain alchemy to assessment and action, prioritizing high and low-value problems such that the greater business benefits. However, when it comes to building a custom solution, the squeaky wheel tends to get the grease and the more powerful or influential get their way. Experienced technologists solve problems; they don’t create them.

Technology Lags

Technological change is relentless and destabilizing. Tech moves at a blinding pace, giving you the sense you are always a full step behind. When I see a company “finish” building their custom solution, and then step back to count the capital it took to build, they typically keep one developer on board to update the system. That’s not how it works for us technology companies. We need to continue to grow revenue to hire more developers, to continue to outpace our competition (or at least that’s what you hope your vendor strives for). Building an industry-leading solution never stops, so the project will never stop. If anything, you will need to amp up development over time as your competition continues to invest in their technology stacks. To this day, I have yet to see a homegrown solution stay at the cutting edge long enough to justify the financial costs and resource displacement. With regard to software development, speed and scale and CHANGE is part of our DNA. Is it part of yours?

High Failure Rate

I have seen top 10 companies in the US and UK with deep pockets sink years into a custom build on Salesforce, only to abandon the effort and opt for a pre-built solution. It’s easy to crash and burn. One company that comes to mind launched a two-year, $2M+ project to build a custom system. Didn’t work. They did, however, later in the game, fit neatly into a pre-built solution they could work with on Salesforce. But it gets worse. Imagine refusing to give up on a custom build because you are so heavily invested you won’t call it quits. Here, entrepreneurial pride and job security sabotage the project, leaving you stuck with a troublesome, half-baked solution simply to avoid calling it a failure. It happens all the time. Sad, but true. On the other hand, pre-built Salesforce solutions are optimized to scale, and easy to customize and tune – by design. The heavy lifting has already been done for you. Your probability of success skyrockets.

The Wrap-Up: Build vs Buy

As much as I’d love to leave this as just an informational opinion piece, I have to give our solution some credit here. We are now one of two Salesforce solutions on the market, and we are the only one that has built all of our technology on the Salesforce platform. This means you can build your own special sauce on our platform, not having to pay for hosting somewhere else or having to integrate through an API. To use a metaphor, building a system from scratch is buying a plot of land and building a house. Building from scratch ON Salesforce is like getting a house with a foundation and a frame but you have to build the rest. Buying TargetRecruit and building on our solution is like buying a fully built two-story home that is already furnished and decorated, but it has been built with the idea in mind that additions will come in the future, so why not make it easy for said additions to happen. None of these solutions are right or wrong, but not all solutions are created equally, now are they?

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, or if you’d like to learn more about TargetRecruit, contact us at sales@targetrecruit.com.

Blog by Bobby Bartlett

The post Build vs Buy: The Challenges Recruiting Firms Face When Building a Homegrown Applicant Tracking System 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.

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

The post The Era of Recruiting Automation appeared first on TargetRecruit.

Having worked in the staffing industry for over six years now for three different companies, I have acquired a diverse experience with some of the industry-leading enterprise platforms. If I never had the opportunity to sell outside of the staffing software industry, I certainly would not have the same perspective that I have today. Seeing how advanced other companies and industries were with their technology compared to the staffing industry made me take a step back and evaluate why that was the case.

The Difference Between Industries

The information was under my nose the entire time because I could always see that the technology companies I worked for were much quicker to adopt technology than our customers in staffing were. I also took for granted that I was always using Salesforce as my CRM. I have used Salesforce for a majority of my sales career, so when one of the companies I worked for switched from Salesforce to another CRM, I started to realize just what benefits Salesforce offered because I saw them struggle mightily to do things I took for granted, such as: integrate with 3rd party vendors, create and refine reports as an end user, configure the system, and communicate through social collaboration mediums like Chatter. There were a handful of other important things that when taken away had a major impact on our operations and sales productivity as well.

What I will focus on here is how this problem started and how it affects staffing firms at scale. In a follow up blog I will focus more on the specific areas that staffing firms have lagged behind technology-wise and how staffing companies can use these as an advantage to outpace their competition.

Why Staffing Firms Fail with Technology

For starters, it’s important to understand why the problem exists. Integrating with third-party vendors is very difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and can cause continuous issues since with many moving parts, things tend to break. Even with open API access, other software vendors are only going to spend their time building out that integration if there is a worthwhile return on investment in doing so.

Next comes the major fail point: instead of staffing firms finding a way to work with these solutions to provide a seamless environment for their employees to thrive in, they either:

a) buy the tool and never integrate it, creating a disconnected environment requiring dual data entry

b) buy the tool, try integrating it but realize how much work is involved and don’t finish, thus stunting the usability of the tool, or most commonly 

c) they just never try to utilize that type of software at all, which can result in a missed opportunity to improve productivity and user experience on your technology stack.

All three of these scenarios are going to have a negative impact on the experience of using your technology stack and thus will decrease the value you will get from your technology investments. I can’t say I really blame CTOs and other technologists though. It is simply too much to handle to have to take on this responsibility on their own to build and maintain these integrations. For example, I saw one company spend a year and half with two full time developers trying to integrate a CRM with a quoting/financial system and still never realized full success doing so.

Why Salesforce Gives Staffing Industry an Advantage

Salesforce.com has benefited heavily from being “first in” and inventing the idea of the AppExchange. As their success continued, more companies hopped on the bandwagon and suddenly, there were over 4,000 plug and play partners ready to fulfill any of the needs that Salesforce’s customer base wanted filled. This today still stands out to me as the main differentiator that has kept Salesforce ahead of their competition because this cannot be replicated overnight. It will be years if not decades until some of the other competitors will have near the amount of options that a company has access to on Salesforce. To provide some perspective on this, while Salesforce has over 4,000 companies in their AppExchange, the largest providers of technology in the staffing tech space have about 70 or 80 partner integrations. In my research for this article looking at 15 other ATS providers, I found the average to be closer to 30 for most in the space. This significant delta accounts for a major loss in opportunity for staffing companies using these systems.

To rehash, I believe the lack of integration with other enterprise technology providers has been the single largest inhibitor for where staffing companies are today on the technology curve. It’s hard for staffing companies to differentiate from one another and I strongly feel that how you take advantage of technology is the biggest opportunity to do so. This means that taking advantage of a system that has access to a large partner marketplace provides you a significant advantage to draw differentiation from those technology options. You may have noticed in the last 5 years there has been a rapidly increasing footprint of Salesforce in the staffing industry through:

a) ATSs built on Salesforce (like TargetRecruit)

b) Utilizing Salesforce as a CRM for sales teams 

c) Using Salesforce as a platform to build a homegrown (or partially homegrown) solution on top of (mainly for larger companies).

I predict that as more people see what’s behind the curtain with Salesforce-based solutions compared to the competition, Salesforce will continue to eat up more and more market share.

Read Part Two of this series: Tools Staffing Companies Can Use to Reach or Pass the Technology Status Quo

The post Why Has the Staffing Industry Been Behind the Technology Curve? appeared first on TargetRecruit.