Enterprise software buyers agree that usability is just as important as feature offerings. If half of your company doesn’t use a software solution you’ve purchased, you’re compromising the benefits of your investment.

“Achieving Software Success” provides insight from software buyers and sellers on the drivers, expectations, and responsibilities for success in enterprise software implementation.

The biggest takeaway from the report is that “‘People issues’ rather than ‘technology issues’ are the greatest barriers to success.”

So how do you get your people to work with technology, increasing usability of enterprise software and capitalizing on your investment?

Role of Management

You can’t just install a new program and expect people to start using it. Processes need to be re-aligned. Because management owns the process, they have to initiate and embrace the changes in the organization needed to realize the most benefits from the software.

A software implementation can occur without a hitch on the IT side, but an organization that is stubborn to change will have a tough time incorporating the new technology into their daily processes. The increased revenue, decreased costs, and market differentiation the software was intended for in the first place will be lost without management adoption.

Role of the Vendor

Software buyers are looking to vendors to help with process alignment. The vendor’s expertise needs to go beyond how the software works, and address how it can be used most effectively within the daily operations of an organization. Buyers are looking for software companies that understand the day-to-day challenges of their business, and can address them accordingly.

Role of Technology

The complexities of the economy paired with quickly evolving technology mean that a complicated installation process is no longer acceptable. Companies don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to installing software delivered on a CD and maintaining their own hardware.

SaaS (software as a service) and web based software solutions have alleviated these issues by automatically delivering updates, and remotely hosting data. Increased accessibility provides users with a better experience, as the newest features and latest fixes are available without delay.

Technology doesn’t work without people. Successful software implementation requires dedication from management to integrate process with technology, a vendor with expertise in your business, and technology that is easily delivered and maintained.

How do you help your employees take ownership of their work?

Workflow technology can erase excuses for missing the mark, and help your employees to excel without a manager breathing down their back.

Erase these flimsy employee justifications for not meeting objectives with workflow technology:

I don’t know where I stand. Workflow technology tracks employee progress. So whether they’re working with a shared checklist, or robust recruiting software, employees know how close they are to meeting their goals now – not just at the end of the month.

I can’t find the information I need. Workflow technology gives everyone access to the information they need to do their job. Recruiters have candidate information, and can see who the primary account manager is on their jobs. Researchers can see what types of jobs are coming down the pipeline and source accordingly. Salespeople can see who is the primary rep for each client and avoid stepping on each other’s toes.

I have too many distractions on my plate. Workflow technology keeps employees on the path toward a placement. Workflow designates tasks, roles, rules, and procedures, while technology keeps employees aligned with their responsibilities. Employees can focus on their specific tasks, and avoid pursuing fruitless endeavors.

I’m not doing what I love. Take redundant, menial tasks off of their plates, so they can focus on putting their strengths to work. Workflow technology automates mundane tasks (like data entry), so that your star players can use their charisma, intuition, and persistence to sell candidates and clients on your services.

You don’t care about my performance. Providing your employees with the best technology – and a great process for using it – demonstrates you are invested in their success, so that you can retain the best talent.

You have enough challenges in your day without trying to squeeze potential out of your employees. Workflow technology that automates business processes and best practices can empower your employees to work with greater autonomy and reach higher objectives.

Recruiters have unprecedented access to phenomenal technology. Some solutions are free, some are a large investment. Some provide basic sourcing tools, and some solutions have so many bells and whistles, it’s hard to figure out a use for them all.

No matter what your budget, or your goals, everyone has access to great technology.

But there’s one key element great technology needs to actually work:

• If your recruiters don’t know how to use your technology to its fullest potential, it’s not worth the investment.
• If your employees don’t adopt your chosen software solution, it’s useless.
• If productivity is lost every time you hit a technical issue, you’ll miss out on additional opportunities.

The solution? Excellent customer service.

The key to great technology is access to training and support.

When your recruiting technology solution provides training, your employees are equipped to use the product to solve their problems.

When they see the technology as a solution rather than a frustration they have to work around, they use it how it was intended, every day.

And when your employees have access to support when they have an issue, they can get back on track quickly. Excuses for not producing fly out the window.

Without great customer service, why invest your time, money, and resources into technology at all?

Traditionally, spring is the time to sweep out the dark corners that were neglected over the winter, open up a window or two, shake out the rugs and perform all of those once-a-year cleaning rituals.

That’s in your physical space.

And with everything feeling so fresh and new, the spring cleaning frenzy may even spill out of your home and into the confines of your office.

But I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

Spring Cleaning doesn’t matter in the virtual space.

Paperless. It means no paper. No shuffling, stacking, sorting or filing. It’s simplified, streamlined, and it’s why we keep moving more and more physical items into the virtual space.

We didn’t want to deal with a pocket full of receipts, so we started scanning them.

We didn’t want to search through and store stacks of physical resumes, so we invested in recruiting software.

Cleaning Up with the Could

Even our virtual space is becoming cleaner, leaner, and increasingly virtual. Now, instead of storing multiple files across our devices, we send them to the cloud, and summon them when we please. How’s that for eliminating desktop file folders?

Things are getting so clean, that our desktops might be a thing of the past in the very near future. Cloud paging is being hyped as the next technology to change the software industry, allowing software applications to be housed in the cloud. Check in the software you need from whichever device you’re using at the moment, and send it away when you’re ready to move on to a different task. No need to clutter a hard drive with a plethora of software applications.

Search, Don’t Scrub

Of course, no matter where you store your records, files, and software, they have to exist somewhere.

But today’s searching technology means that you don’t ever have to touch your data until you need it.

You don’t have to spend time reorganizing your files.

Looking for a document? Search with your document explorer. Can’t find an email? Search in Outlook. Trying to recall a candidate’s availability? Search for them in Sendouts.

And searching is constantly getting smarter. It’s more sophisticated that just keyword matching. Semantic searching uses context to derive meaning out of a search, providing even better results.

If you need to rearrange your files or de-clutter the icons on your desktop – go for it. It’s therapeutic.

But if you need to save time, do something productive and skip spring cleaning altogether.

When you’re in the virtual space, you don’t have to clean up.

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image from here.

Flavors.me can be described as a personal content management system, a tool for aggregating your social media presence, and personal landing page.

The appeal of the site is the ability to create an aesthetically pleasing web page without the need for web design experience, for free.

And if you are a recruiter specializing in the creative industry, it could be another site for finding fresh talent.

Active and passive candidates are finding the value of giving people access to their social media profiles and portfolios in one place, while at the same time controlling their online image.

Flavors.me is well suited for writers, photographers, designers, bloggers, social media experts and marketers.

But it doesn’t have to be limited to creative types.  As a recruiter, could you benefit from giving your network a taste of what you’re about at a glance, while providing options for discovering more about you through your social feeds?

Or is your time better spent making a few extra calls than setting up another account and web page?

Explore….Recruiters Using Flavors.me

Sara Hearts Sourcing
Kyle McCourt
Ad Recruiter
Jeremy Fanning
Blake Cannon

A complicated procedure for a relatively simple process, vendor management systems are the Rube Goldberg machines of today’s recruiting industry.  Instead of connecting with a hiring manager via a phone call or email, recruiters work with all of the over-done levers and pulleys of VMS Systems to get job orders and submit candidates.

The implications have been big:

Companies – VMS systems let companies access large candidate pools, however the candidate pool is often shallow. Skill sets are matched, but because there are too many candidates to screen and interview, candidates who look good on paper end up clashing with company culture. In worst-case scenarios, turnovers increase, employee loyalty decreases, and it becomes increasingly difficult for companies to retain talented, innovative employees.

Candidates – VMS boards eliminate simple communication between third party recruiters and hiring managers, as well as candidates.  There is little to no feedback throughout the entire hiring process.  Resumes, however, become more important than ever. Candidates compete with each other by being the most compatible person on paper. In addition, standardized rates enforced by vendor management systems put more experienced professionals at a disadvantage.

Hiring Managers – The number of candidates hiring managers need to choose from rises exponentially with every vendor submitting talent to the system. Time is spent filtering through the masses, rather than meeting one-on-one with third party recruiters to assess the type of person and skills the company really needs.

Third Party Recruiters - The lack of direct communication with hiring managers drastically levels the competition between third party recruiters. In the past, the ability to screen, interview, and sell candidates to a hiring manager was key in making placements. Now, more emphasis is placed on the mechanics of the recruiting process. The recruiter who can get the best matched resume to the hiring manager first is the “winner.”

The Workaround - Fortunately, some hiring managers have chosen not to accept the ho-hum results they get from VMS-procured talent. Instead of using this clumsy system with it’s over-abundance of procedures, hiring managers skip the VMS, and work with recruiters to decide on candidates before jobs are even posted. As a formality, jobs are posted and the recruiters submit pre-determined candidates.

While many of us may wish the whole system could be scrapped,  a large number of companies have invested in VMS systems, and they are not going to disappear anytime soon.  In the future, recruiters and hiring managers need to work together with corporations to achieve a more harmonious balance between technology and the human element.

But you probably want a solution for right now…

A Solution

VMS Sync, from Sendouts, pulls job orders from the VMS systems you work with to your Sendouts database. No more copying and pasting means that you can begin working job orders instantly, and fill them faster.

In addition, VMS Sync features a split-screen view that allows users to easily drag and drop candidate fields into VMS submit forms.

Getting job orders into your database faster gives you more time to add the human element to hiring transactions.  Instead of manually parsing field after field into a database, you can be screening candidates, conducting interviews, and connecting with hiring managers.

No other ATS has a solution quite like it. Learn more about how Sendouts VMS Sync can help you overcome VMS challenges.

Today we’re releasing some big things for companies with big goals. Our latest version (8.7) is geared towards companies that want to solve the problems of working with VMS boards and defining their firm’s individual process. Of course I’m talking about our new VMS Sync and Business Rules Engine, both of which help solve these problems and make it easier than ever to focus on recruiting and leave the mundane, boring stuff to your ATS.

Lets take a look at these two in a bit more depth:

VMS Sync

We’ve been listening and have built a great new tool for pulling down job orders from your VMS of choice. Our brand new VMS Sync automatically adds the latest job orders directly to Sendouts and let’s you and your crew start working right away, eliminating copy/paste and more importantly reducing the time it takes to get VMS jobs into your system. We’re really excited about this and we think our users will be too.

Business Rules Engine

Ok, we know it sounds boring, but the Business Rules Engine is completely unique in in the recruiting software space. Essentially it helps recruiting firms build rules that are as complex or simple as they need. Larger firms in particular will find this tool extremely valuable. It’s infinitely complex or infinitely simple as can be imagined. For more examples of just some of the capabilities of our business rules engine, travel on over to this link.

Along with the VMS Sync and Business Rules Engine we’re releasing the WebConnect API and Custom Reporting Tool ^beta to help firms with larger needs build their own job search and posting applications and custom reports right in Sendouts. You can take a look at all the new tools by clicking here.

Missed Connections…Are You Checking In?

Imagine that you are sitting at the local bistro, chowing down on a café sandwich between appointments.  Thirty feet away at the burger joint next door, an old colleague is munching on some fries before heading back to the office.  You used to work together in retail, but now you source top buyers and she has her own chain of orthopedic footwear outlets.  She has been looking for a new buyer, without any luck, and is ready to source the job out to a third party recruiter.  If she thought long and hard about it, she would remember that you were a on the talent –procuring side of retail these days, but she’s busy and will probably turn to Google when she gets desperate.  You dump your tray in the trash can, and walk back out to Central Ave., headed to the next appointment.  She walks her bill up to the register and heads back to the office.

We come so close to rubbing shoulders with our social and business networks every day.  We come from the same social circles, went to similar schools, received comparable education.  We live in the same types of places, and like to frequent the same sorts of shops and eateries.  So it’s no surprise that you could be in close proximity to a number of great networking opportunities at any given time.

How to Put Yourself in the Right Place, at the Right Time

Many opportunities are to be had just by being at the right place at the right time.  Enter Facebook Places.  While some are convinced it’s just another way for marketers to exploit social media as a means of targeting potential customers, Facebook Places has great potential as a networking tool.  Places allows you to use your mobile device to post your physical whereabouts on your FB wall by “checking-in” and alerting your network of FB friends.  Places shows you who else is at your location or nearby.  You can also see where your Facebook friends have checked in recently.

Places already seems to have woven itself into the fabric of the social media tapestry, trumping similar mobile applications like Foursquare.  The majority of check ins occur at restaurants, cafes, and bars/clubs.  This is great news from a networking stand-point, as those are the types of establishments where real discussion and socializing take place – over, say a retailer or grocery store.

Networking, Not Marketing

For recruiters, Facebook Places is not relevant in terms of marketing.  You don’t have a brick and mortar storefront, and don’t need incentives for people to visit your physical location.  However, on the networking front, Facebook’s check in feature potentially allows you to make connections instead of missing opportunities.

Meet Up

If you’re out for the evening or out for lunch, see who’s in your area.  Check out your FB friends’ recent whereabouts. Perhaps you just missed a client at the golf course – maybe you can schedule a round with him next week.  Plus, you never know who could surprise you by seeking you out when they see you are nearby.

Who could you be missing?  Do you use Facebook Places to check in?  Do you see its potential as a networking tool?

“Data quality problems currently cost U.S. business in excess of $600 billion per year, according to interviews with industry experts, customers, and survey data” – Garvroshe

Few people want to have a conversation about data. It’s not that exciting, until you put a number like $600 billion on it. Then they stop and take notice. Because, sure, $600 billion is just an estimate, but the truth is, there is a big price tag on maintaining and handling data. How you store your contacts, resumes, cover letters, and other data has a significant impact on how costly it will be to restore your data if your desktop system crashes.

As a recruitment and staffing firm, your data is one of your biggest assets. It represents the contacts you’ve made, the candidates you’ve placed, and the vendors you trust. Your data helps leverage your business for future opportunities. But if you had to put your data in the hands of a stranger, would it be a powerful tool, or a holy terror of a mess?

3 ways dirty data can cost you

1. Data Cleansing Fees. If your data is clean and well-formatted, it should be relatively easy for a data specialist to read your data and render it in a manner that best suits your firm. If it is a hodge-podge of missing fields and ill-placed characters, you’re looking at a $75.00 per hour (or more) fee to fill in the blanks.
2. Lost Candidates. Maybe you have a great candidate, but her resume is lost in a dark dungeon of inappropriately named folders on Sam’s desktop. Well-organized data means the best candidate is always at your fingertips – not lost to the competition.
3. Misuse of Time. You’re a recruiter. You need to be on the phones, hitting the pavement, sending emails. You don’t have time to be Googling “Jennifer Anderson” because someone neglected to fill out the “phone” field and emails are bouncing back from her email address.

Whether you’re using your Microsoft Outlook contacts or have invested in an ATS, keeping your data well-formatted will save you money in the long run. Perhaps you’re a small to medium firm working with ACT or Goldmine – you may want to upgrade to a sophisticated ATS as your firm grows. Or maybe you already use an ATS, and have decided to switch the software you use. Maybe you’re a one-man firm and just want to sync your outlook contacts to your iTouch. Either way, your firm will absolutely benefit from clean, organized data in the event of data transfer, as well as in your day to day operations.

“According to Gartner Inc., more than 25 percent of critical data in Fortune 1000 companies is flawed.” – Swartz, Nikki

For large recruiting and staffing firms, dirty data can be quite costly.  Inaccurate, incomplete, and duplicate data compromises the quality of candidate matches, diminishes placement opportunities, and increases the expense of communicating with candidates and clients.  Eradicating data errors and standardizing the way data is entered at enterprise-level firms can significantly boost assets and productivity.

Large recruitment firms can add to their bottom line by:

1. Regarding data as a corporate asset
2. Entering data that is relevant and meets overall business goals
3. Maintaining consistency in how data is entered
4. Approaching clean data as an ongoing objective, and creating a company culture that recognizes the value of clean data

So, how do you keep your data well-groomed and happily maintained?

In the next post, Sendouts’ own data specialist, John Born, shares the lessons he has learned as a data conversion specialist that recruiters can keep in mind as they keep track of their candidates and clients.

You’re a tech-savvy, multi-tasking machine, and that’s why I commend you for deciding to sit in on a training session with your ATS account manager.  You’re smart, because even though you know pretty much everything about your ATS, a little refresher course can’t hurt, right?

Ok, you’re probably groaning inside that you don’t have enough time to finishing going through your call list, much less sit through an hour of training.  But you bit the bullet and listened to that tiny voice in the back of your mind.  You know, the one telling you that maybe you could be working more efficiently.  Don’t worry.  You can be confident that your ATS trainer wants to help you.  They don’t want to waste your time, or theirs.  Taking a few minutes to prepare for your ATS training will help you get the most out of your time.

3 Ways to Prepare for ATS Training

1.  Be aware of your level of expertise. Decide if you’re a newbie, a seasoned veteran, or somewhere in between.  This can help you determine what you want to get out of training.  Do you want to immerse yourself in the software just to get the feel, or have you been using the program for a while and have specific questions?

2.  Evaluate your use. Where are there disconnects in your work process?  What features do you neglect to use, and why?  Is it a matter of changing an old habit, or is it because your software doesn’t have the functionality you’re looking for?  Bring these issues to your trainer’s attention.  She can help you connect the dots and show you how you can use the software to its full potential.

3.  Get a fresh perspective. If you’ve had training with Sarah, consider scheduling training with Bill.  Everyone has their own cache of unique experiences, and no two trainers will present material in the exact same way.  Soliciting a new view is a great way to discover updated features or to learn a few short-cuts that will help you work more efficiently.

Take ownership of your training session.  Prepare to engage with your trainer and lead the conversation in a direction that will be the most beneficial to you.  Training is definitely worth your time when it results in a smarter, more efficient way to work.