Press Coverage

Changing the Staffing and Recruiting Game: The Synchronized Front Office

From Employment Marketplace, Fall, 2006

By Art Papas

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. Realtime 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.
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Editor's Note: Art Papas is CEO of Bullhorn, the global leader in On Demand staffing and recruiting software. He co-founded Bullhorn in 1999 and is responsible for leading the company's operational and strategic initiatives. He is also Bullhorn's technical leader and the principal architect of the Bullhorn Development Platform (BDP)

	By integrating email, calendaring, sourcing, applicant tracking, job management and customer relationship management, Bullhorn's On Demand, integrated front office enables users to communicate and collaborate with contacts, candidates, colleagues and clients in real-time to generate, source and fill job orders, at anytime and from anyplace. Talk to an expert. Contact us now.