Do you want your staffing agency to grow into an 8 Ton Elephant?
Recently, I stumbled upon Tukufu, the large elephant skeleton at The Oakes Museum at Messiah College. While the pearly white skeleton was quite a spectacle; I was more impressed with the raw facts about the size of these creatures: can grow up to 8 tons, and consumes 300-500 lbs/day of bark, leaves, branches, grass, and fruits to sustain itself.
Don't Be an Elephant! Use Your Staffing Software to Be Lean and Cheetah-Like!
That’s insane! I really can’t imagine being that large and eating that quantity of roughage every day. Plus, have you seen the cost of organic packs of hearts of romaine these days?! I’ve always preferred to be more cheetah-like. And I’m sure when you’ve been asked, “If you’re staffing agency could be any animal what would you like it to be?” (or perhaps a similar question but worded a bit more professionally), you’ve probably thought of something lean, flexible, mobile, and most importantly profitable!
Chances are, your business is in a great position to be lean and profitable, especially since you’ve probably carved the fat from your staffing firm’s operations since late-2008. Now, the key is to stay lean as you grow; in other words, grow lean! Typically as businesses grow, they pack on more operational mass, requiring them to consume an “elephant load” of their own revenue to sustain themselves. However, if your staffing agency can grow while remaining operationally lean, then you’ll be making more profit per dollar of revenue you bring in.
3 ways your staffing software can help you grow lean, especially if it is a fully integrated front and back office system:
1. Get candidates to self-enter themselves through a web-based application that flows into the front office of your staffing industry software.
Each application can take between 5 and 15 minutes to data enter. This is too much time your service coordinators are doing busy work instead of value-added work (e.g. getting candidates to work, and making sure working candidates and clients are happy). Your staff can save hours per week if applicants do the entry process themselves through a browser-based application, accessed from your website, a front lobby, or a kiosk. Check out the web-enabled components of our staffing industry software. Email me if you’d like to see a case study on how one of our clients saved $70,000/year using WebStaff, our web-based application tool.
2. Automate time capture.
The hours your temporary employees work are most likely reported to your staffing agency in all sorts of ways: paper timesheets, excel spreadsheets, and files from various timeclocks. You don’t want all these hours to flow through the bottleneck of manual time entry. See if you can import or setup imports in your staffing software for various types of files that you receive to process hours. Also, look to speed up the your manual hours entry process with macros, or by entering hours on a spreadsheet that you can import into the back office side of your staffing software system. Check out the time tracking and payroll side of our fully integrated staffing software.
3. Automatically email invoices and paystubs during your weekly pay/bill processing.
Giving your clients and candidates (esp. on direct deposit) the option to receive and access invoices and paystubs electronically can save your back office staff many hours each week in collating and stuffing envelops, and answering questions about invoices and checks. See if your staffing software solution has electronic invoicing and paystub technology that can substantially reduce the weekly burden of your pay/bill process on your back office staff. Email me for case studies on how two New York-based staffing firms are saving between $3,600 and $12,000 per year using the electronic invoicing and paystub components of our staffing software.
Contact us if you want more information about our fully integrated front and back office staffing software and the ways we’re helping staffing firms grow lean!
Everett Reiss Director of Marketing and Communications
Applied Systems Technology
845-534-7100 X1102
Connect with me on: Connect with me on:
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.
A Word About Outputting Reports to Excel from Your Staffing Software
While “being Green” or “going paperless” (as you sip a Starbuck’s Iced Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha) seems to be the rage these days, many temporary staffing firms are still printing reports on paper.
And you know what – that’s OK! You can still enjoy your beverage-of-choice to the rhythm of your printer. It is worth noting that with the ability to output reports to Excel, PDF files, web pages, and text files from with our staffing software, many of our clients have gone paperless.
Nevertheless, whether you’re a “paper-printer” or a “file-saver” there probably are some reports that makes sense for you to export to Excel, since you often end up compiling data from various reports into one or more Excel workbooks. Perhaps you already can and know how to quickly output reports from your temporary staffing software into Excel. For instance, in our staffing software, some reports (e.g. financial statements) give you the option to export into Excel, and all reports that our clients make or have us make can be exported to Excel.
If you have a report that you’d like to get into Excel and aren’t sure how, talk to your staffing software provider and they should be able to show you, or setup such a report for you.
An Easy Macro that Combines Multiple Excel Workbooks from Your Staffing Software into One Excel Workbook
Once you are able to get the reports you need in Excel from your staffing software, you may find yourself copying data or sheets from multiple Excel workbooks into one workbook. Or perhaps you have Excel workbooks from other sources that you’d like to quickly and easily combine into one workbook.
In a recent situation, a client of ours has over 10 different financial statements setup in our system – one for each profit center along with a summary statement. Through our system, they are able to export one, two, or all ten financial statements into Excel. However, each financial statement is outputted to a separate file, so they were manually copying the worksheets into one workbook. This became time-consuming since there are numerous iterations of their financials each month.
So they asked me to find a solution. Here’s what I found: Watch the video above to see how you can easily add a macro to your Excel workbook that quickly combines multiple workbooks into one Excel Workbook.
Google Some Other Macros to Slap onto Repetitive Time-Consuming Office Tasks
Think of some other time-consuming tasks that you regularly do in Microsoft Office products. Chances are you can automate some part of the process with macros. To find the solution I demonstrated above, I simply googled “combine multiple workbooks into one workbook” and found my answer in the fourth result, VBA Express: Excel – Combine All Workbooks From One Folder.
I hope this saves you some time, and inspires you to experiment with some other macros. Remember, if you think there’s a way to save time and money by doing something faster, then there probably is!
Contact us to discuss the reporting features or any other aspect regarding our staffing software solutions. Also, feel free to email me if you’re a staffing executive or professional with further questions about macros in Excel.
The most simple and disarming answer that people receive regarding the stock market is buy low and sell high. If we were all prophets and could foretell the future, we would all be putting a lot of money into the market. Sometimes opportunities like these are staring us in the face even when we do not realize it. Many executives in the temporary staffing industry have gone through substantial cost cutting measures to survive the severe economic downturn. Going hand-in-hand with dropping revenue, slashing operating expenses has been one of the leading trends in the staffing industry. In essence, many of you have achieved a low cost of operating the business – you have achieved a low entry point to be doing business at this time in the life of the company.
Leveraging undervalued stock - a simple strategy for the temporary staffing industry.
What if you could leverage that cost against growing revenues similar to the way an investor leverages an undervalued stock against future growth?
Building on this strategy, you want to build an operating model that keeps your operating costs to a minimum during an uptick in the economy and your business. This might seem obvious, but in reality it takes good planning and execution to implement this type of strategy. Few staffing operators spend the necessary time on process improvement during down times for improved operating ratios when the temporary staffing industry trends up. Operators were willing to use older inefficient models because profit margins and economic “V-shaped” rebound hid the waste. This recovery is looking very different then past downturns – more “L-shaped” than “V-shaped”.
This will mean that staffing operators will have to find profits in places that they historically ignored. Margins will be as tight as ever… maybe even tighter forcing executives to recalibrate their business finding more and more profit dollars below the line.
What the Temporary Staffing Industry Can Learn from the Manufacturing Industry?
Manufacturing companies have used automation to increase the output per worker by 300 times over the past 30 years. The independent staffing operator needs to embrace similar types of process reengineering strategies to move from financially surviving to thriving. This means whole new levels of operational discipline and efficiency to achieve high levels of productivity – imagine the rewards if this became the staffing industry’s #1 trend!
The challenge for every operator will be to buy the cost of operations low and sell/leverage that low cost of operation at acceptable sales prices in the marketplace.
Contact us if you want help identifying areas of inefficiency that could be improved to achieve a scalable low cost of operation.
Dave Reiss
Founder and CEO
Applied Systems Technology
845-534-7100 X1102
dave@astusa.com Connect with me on:
Much to the dismay of your cardiologist, I’m going to say it right now – eggs are really good for you and all the stuff about high colesterol is a bunch of bunk! Eggs are the perfect food, which is why you should only hope that your staffing firm becomes as efficient and elegantly designed as an egg.
Start a new staffing industry trend and make your staffing firm like an egg!
Here’s how your staffing company can be like egg salad (without the mayo):
High output with minimal waste: an egg only has 75 calories with 5 grams of fat and yet it has an enormous amount of protein with 13 essential vitamins and minerals (don’t you wish most of your service coordinators were like that). All kidding aside, if that was your staffing company you’d be looking at a lot of operational muscle and output with little waste and almost no fat.
Eggs have a lot of lutein in them: Lutein who? Lutein is good for the artieries. One egg has more lutien than a big serving of vegetables and tastes a heck of lot better. Let’s face it – eggs have a lot of appeal, certainly more than brussels sprouts. If you’re in the light industrial side of the staffing industry, what do you think your clients down at the warehouse would rather have: brussels sprouts or some hearty egg salad?
Eggs have a great RE Factor: What’s “RE Factor“? It’s Mad Staffing’s way of saying Return on Employee. In the egg world, the equivalent would be the fat to protein ratio. For your staffing firm, you want to concentrate on your RE Factor because that’s where tons of money will flow from as your staffing business grows. In the ideal staffing model, just like in the ideal food, you want to get rid of that fat and keep it off. This is where compounding wealth creation comes from – get your operating ratio in the ideal range and keep it there.
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Chew on this math:
When a 10 million dollar staffing firm picks up a measily 1/2 of a precent in net profit it equates to 15% growth in sales.
Who wouldn’t die for 15% growth in this economy?
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Comment on this blog to share some of the ways you’ve trimmed your staffing business’s fat. Whoever offers the best suggestion will get a personal email from me, in which I’ll share the exercise routine I’ve used to transform my body in 3 minutes and 20 seconds per day.
Recently went to Hudson Street Cafe, one of my favorite breakfast haunts, to treat myself to Donna’s oat bran pancakes with REAL maple syrup. Donna owns the café and creates all the incredible recipes and dishes; checkout their website: http://www.hudsonstreetcafe.com/. As I placed my order with the attentive waitress, this guy named Klaus at the next table broke into my space, affirming what I already knew – my bent for healthy eating. Maybe it was the oat bran pancakes or the poached eggs that triggered his comments, but regardless, my peaceful breakfast was quickly hijacked as Klaus then proceeded to go ‘Oprah’ on me sharing all the ‘miracle working, get rid of your aches and pains, lose 30 lbs in a week, gain untold vitality’ hope and benefits of the acai berry, a palm fruit cultivated for its widely touted health benefits. Yup, you guessed it, Klaus was a distributor and I could become one too!
What can the acai berry do for your staffing firm?
Klaus actually was a nice guy and seemed to believe in the little berry and its miracle working cures. I held off on placing an order, since a case of four bottles of MonaVie juice pulls about $130 a month out of pocket; I could probably lease a Kia for that much! But Klaus and the berry got my attention and I figured there are some things that we could all learn from the acai berry and its tempting promises:
Lesson # 1: Be suspicious of anything that looks like a quick fix to your staffing business issues, no matter how popular the broader business or staffing industry trend may be. Big improvements take big deliberative changes implemented in smaller manageable steps.
Lesson # 2: Hope is important, we need it. Hope is what gets us out of bed, it motivates us. It becomes sustained if it puts us on a path of believing that our problems can be solved; it puts us on a path of discovery. And if it is the right path, it will yield even more reason for hope, which you should generously share with your salespeople and staffing professionals.
Lesson # 3: Fad diets and fad foods do not sustain change. They do not bring about substantial long term results, but we do need to get rid of and keep the fat off.
Lesson # 4: When the fat goes, vitality and energy show up. Our resources are precious – the right amount of cash, the right amount of employees, the best and most efficient processes and tools within and outside of your staffing software are all important. The top performing staffing operators create vitality and energy in your staffing company and in the marketplace by carefully managing these four key ingredients in your organizational recipe.
Lesson # 5: Google anything or anyone you’re suspicious of. This was initially a joke, but actually is a good habit to get into; when I got home and googled “acai berry,” Google showed me that “acai berry scams” was a popular search term, which yielded many results including this article on CNNhealth.com, Group challenges acai berry weight-loss claims.
Have you heard of the RE Factor? If you like to play with explosives on the weekends, then maybe you know it as the relative effectiveness factor, which measures an explosive’s power (e.g. TNT) in camparison to its weight. The higher the RE factor the bigger the bang per pound.
The RE Factor: A New Staffing Industry Metric
Well, I’m bringing the RE Factor to the staffing industry and to your staffing business – and I’m not talking about mysterious packages that get mailed from remote places.
What I’m talking about is significantly improving the financial well-being of your staffing business by focusing on a different RE Factor: Return on Employee. Instead of explosive power per pound, we’re calculating revenue dollars per employee!
The calculation of such an important staffing industry metric is relatively simple:
Total revenue divided by the number of FTE’s (Full time equivalents)
This gives you the revenue production by employee, which gives you an accurate picture of the efficiency/productivity of your staffing business.
As a service business, the staff payroll is the biggest overhead cost to the business and therefore the most important lever for manipulating and improving the net profit. Many staffing executives underestimate the financial impact of improving the net profit as a percentage of revenue by as little as .5% of sales.
The following illustration highlights the financial incentive for maximizing your staffing firm’s RE Factor:
A $10,000,000 staffing firm that averages 3.4% net profit will add $70,000.00 to the bottom line by improving the net profit by 6/10ths a percentage point. That would be the mathmatical equivalent of adding 1.7 million dollars or 17% to the sales.
Where you might find it challenging to grow your revenue by 17% in this economy, if you take the time, you can probably build a business model that can pick up a 6/10ths of a percentage point on your net profit. Manufacturing companies have focused on this initiative and have increased the output of each employee by 300% in the last 30 or so years through process improvement and automation.
Let me know what you think of the RE Factor and ways you think staffing firms can improve their output per employee.
There is nothing more obnoxious than someone who is reformed – reformed smokers, reformed meat eaters and especially reformed gas guzzlers. I admit it, I am a reformed gas guzzler – though I did crack a smile over newly elected Senator Scott Brown’s devotion to his GMC pickup. I bought my first Toyota Prius three years ago, and recently purchased my second one. The more I think about my sleak, efficient, and productive Prius, the more I think a staffing firm should work like my car. Okay…I’m getting a bit carried away, but track with me on this one; if you put some of these ideas into place, you’ll put big bucks back in your pocket.
Here are three lessons we can learn from the Prius. If these don’t result in thousands of dollars in profit, I’ll swap my Prius for a Hummer – I promise!
If only more staffing agencies in the staffing industry were as efficient as a prius!
Get the job done with less resources, especially expensive ones.�
Everyone knows that the price of oil has increased dramatically in the last ten years. I have found a tool (a hybrid car) that allows me to get the same job done in a high quality way while saving a bundle of money every month. As the economy levels out, and you look into the future, you need to grab every tool, process, and practice that will enable you to get the job done with fewer resources. The ideal RE Factor (Return on Employee) will make the greatest contribution to wealth creation as it relates to revenue for your staffing business. Those operators that embrace process engineering to achieve an optimum RE Factor will produce the best returns on their businesses. This is all about “trade ins” – processes that are being done by staff that can be automated in your staffing software, integrated timeclocks and other technologies; and tasks done by staff that can be done more efficiently through process redesign and better operational discipline.
Lighter is better. Michael Jordan, the famous basketball player, was known as a light eater. That is why he was called Air Jordan – he literally flew – over the heads of his competition. Toyota made the Prius a light car so it could travel further with less cost. Many staffing companies are traveling lighter. Bad times are good times to jettison bad or marginal employees. In many instances, those companies are running better now than before. That’s because they kept their highest producing and therefore more efficient employees -now it’s time to keep it that way. Proactively design your staffing firm so you do not have to add many employees as business improves. Think of all the things that you could do with the extra money. Here is the challenge – figure out how to keep your staffing firm light.
Think alternative sources of energy. Here are a few alternative energy sources for your company.
New channels of services – self service portals for clients and candidates
On-line applications or kiosks for candidates that come in the door (On average, it take a coordinator 10 to 15 minutes to enter an applicant in a front office application)
Electronic billing (Think of the stamps and labor saved from all those envelopes and especially colating and attaching timeslips.)
Resume import and parsing
Document management
Comment on this blog to let us know one thing that you are going to do or doing now this year that is going to make your staffing agency as efficient as a prius!
Start a new staffing industry trend and make your staffing firm like an egg!
What can the acai berry do for your staffing firm?
The RE Factor: A New Staffing Industry Metric
