Mad Staffing » Customer Service in the Staffing Industry

Use Your Staffing Software to Ensure Candidates Meet Client Requirements

Everett — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:58:07 +0000

Whether you are staffing IT professionals, clerical candidates, or light industrial workers, your clients have all sorts of screening needs and requirements. Plus, you’re probably selling potential staffing buyers on your superior process, which includes all sorts of screening: interviews, reference checks, skills testing, background checks, drug testing, and credit checks. Your prospects and clients have varying pre-employment screening demands: one client requires 10-panel drug testing, while another client does not require drug testing.

The last thing you want are staffing coordinators to place a candidates that have not been properly screened for particular clients. At the same time, you don’t want the screening process to be any more laborious than it already is. This is where your staffing software can streamline the process and set- up of automatic checks to make sure candidates meet client credentials during the placement process.

Here are some steps you can take to improve your credentialing process in your staffing software:

1. Identify all the screening requirements your clients have.

For instance, many of the professional, commercial, and industrial staffing firms who use our staffing software have clients that require:

Criminal background checks: Some do not accept candidates with any misdemeanors or felonies on record. Others will, but the offense must have occurred at least a certain number of years ago.
Drug testing: Some staffing buyers require specific types of drug testing, i.e. 5-panel or 10-panel. Also, some of your clients may not accept candidates that haven’t been drug tested past a certain number of years and months.

2. Design and create a way to track your clients’ pre-employment screening requirements in your staffing software.

You’ll probably need to get your staffing software provider or systems consultant involved. Here are some of the data screens and fields we’ve created for staffing agencies that use our software. It is important to note that we didn’t have to use expensive customized programming to create this; instead we used the standard workflow and data customization tools that come with our software.

In this example, a blended staffing firm had us create fields to indicate if the client requires drug testing, the type of test, and if a criminal background check is required.

Indicating the type of drug testing the client requires in AST’s staffing industry software

We also created additional data fields to track the clients’ credentials regarding misdemeanors and felonies that may turn up from background checks.

Indicating the type (if any) of criminal history a client would allow.

3. Create the corresponding pre-employment screening fields in your staffing software’s candidate database.

The following print screens show the additional data fields we created to track whether or not the candidate had a drug test, the type of drug test, and date of the test.

Indicating type of drug test candidate received in the front office side of AST's staffing software

We also added the corresponding criminal background fields to make sure felony and misdemeanor specific requirements of certain clients are met.

Defining candidate criminal history.

4. Set up checks during the placement process in your staffing software to ensure that candidates meet all the requirements and credentials of the client during the placement process.

For instance, when a staffing coordinator tries to place a candidate that has not had the background screening that the staffing client requires, the placement is automatically blocked and the following message is displayed.

Make sure you can setup these types of checks in your staffing software solution

5. Test customizations and automation you put in place within your staffing software and get feedback from your staffing coordinators.

Once you start automating and customizing your staffing software system, you can actually “over-automate” and put rules and messages in place that actually don’t work with the way you do business, and become a hindrance. So be sure to test out your automation and get buy-in from the people who use the system on a daily basis.

Contact us if you have questions on streamlining your screening and placement processes, and would like to see more on how we’re helping staffing companies make and save money through the implementation of our fully integrated front and back office staffing software.

Everett Reiss
Director of Marketing and Communications
Applied Systems Technology
845-534-7100 X1102
ev@astusa.com
Connect with me on:
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/everettreiss
Twitter: http://twitter.com/everettreiss

3 Ways to Support Your Candidates and Clients Through Extenuating Circumstances and Distinguish Yourself in the Staffing Industry

Everett — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:36:47 +0000

If you didn’t experience it last week, you probably heard about the massive snowstorm that hit the Northeast, which took out our power along with that of the rest of our county. You can read more about the details of the storm and how we managed to support our clients in the previous post, Staffing Software Firm Weathers the Storm to Support Clients.

AST, Staffing Software Developer’s Snow-Covered Headquarters in Cornwall, NY

While I can’t say we had an emergency “snowicane” protocol established, we had progressively put things in place that helped us act quickly to:
#1 Notify our clients in the staffing industry of our situation.
#2 And offer an alternate way to get support for our staffing software.

Here are three things our staffing software firm had in place that you can easily do to prepare your staffing company for some type of natural disaster or act of God that renders your office temporarily inoperable. �

Record your staff’s cell phone #s: At the very least, two or three of your office’s top decision-makers should have everyone’s cell phone numbers programmed into their phones and on hard copy hanging up at their homes. If the phone lines go down, cell phones are typically the best way to get in touch with the staff and tell them what’s going on and what the plan is.
Keep your client email database in an online email application: If the power goes out at your main office where your servers are housed, then you’ll have no access to your company email or to any contacts that are on those servers. Therefore, having a company Gmail account or other free online email service is a simple way to give your clients an alternative way to get in touch with your staffing company. However, if you send out a mass email to your client database notifying them of your situation through your free email account, your email may be flagged as spam. Therefore, I suggest you have your client email database loaded into an online email service like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp, through which you can send out mass emails that are spam compliant. Make sure two to three people know how to access and use the mail service and it would be a good idea to have an “emergency” email notification template setup and ready to be modified and sent out.
Make sure there’s a clear distribution of responsibility: This makes things a whole lot simpler once the unexpected strikes. Here are the main responsibilities that should be doled out ahead of time:

Decision-making regarding how your staffing company is going to react to the current situation.
Phone calls to staff letting them know what is going on.
Email to clients and candidates notifying them of your situation and how to best get in contact with your company.
Monitoring and responding the available support-channels for your clients and candidates to get help.

Being able to support your candidates and clients through extenuating circumstances goes a long way in their eyes. After sending an email through Constant Contact to our client-base notifying them our office was down and to email our Gmail account as an alternate way to get support, I received numerous emails (once my power came back on and our servers were restored) of appreciation for our commitment to keep support going. Also, Frank Salustro, owner of a temporary staffing firm in Jamaica, NY, was extremely grateful that he was able to get a hold of Chantel, the manager of our support department and one of the few people who had power in our county. She helped him print payroll checks from our staffing software after he had run into a snag.

To help other staffing firms prepare to support their clients and candidates through the unexpected, email me, ev@astusa.com, some other ideas you have and may have put into practice. If you are interested in talking to us about our staffing software, go to our Contact Us page.

Remember that taking these simple steps ahead of time will go along way with your clients and candidates and make your company stand out in the staffing industry when it matters.

Everett Reiss
Project & Account Management and Internet Marketing
Applied Systems Technology
845-534-7100 X1102
ev@astusa.com
Connect with me on:

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/everettreiss
Twitter: http://twitter.com/everettreiss