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How Staffing Software and Recruiting Software Helps Find The Right Culture Fit

Routine disagreement.  A new hire just doesn’t gel, disagrees with new coworkers and openly disrespects the way things are being done.  Frequent disagreements lead to lost productivity due to the constant need for discussion to clarify issues, impacting the bottom line.

Awkward social interactions and increased tension.  When just one person is on a different page from everyone else and is not willing to make the necessary change, it puts the rest of the staff on edge.  When everyone is on edge, workflow is disrupted and when that happens, the bottom line is negatively impacted.

A culture gap that just cannot be overcome.  An otherwise stellar Generation Y candidate you recruited simply does not fit in with a more traditional employer, leaving both the employee and the company unhappy.

When you engage in the staffing process, you’re typically looking at a number of factors to determine whether the candidate fits the position well. The backbone of our company’s staffing software and recruiting software, in fact, is the built-in functionality designed to help you find candidates with the right experience, skills, education and references.

Fortunately, staffing and recruiting software can help you move beyond searching for skills, education and references – and also help you find the right culture fit for both your clients and candidates. For instance, you can:

Filter candidates with short work tenures.  How often have you come across a candidate who has held multiple jobs over a short period of time that did not reveal some underlying issue with past employers? Even if your answer is ‘no,’ would this type of candidate be worth the risk with a larger client?  Using staffing and recruiting software resume harvesting capabilities, you can parse the candidates you have on file based on custom criteria, like length of time at past jobs.

Documenting the unstated portion of candidate interviews. The answers the candidate provided were on target – but there was something about the body language and interaction style that didn’t quite feel right. Documenting this type of information in your recruiting software – and making it searchable for later – can ensure you don’t inadvertently match up a client with the wrong candidate in the future, based on answers alone.

Sorting by industry. Would your client in a traditional industry – think steel working – gel with a stellar marketing candidate who has the right qualifications but comes from a more modern online background? With the right staffing and recruiting software – you can add in or segment out these candidates based on how you answer this question.

Ultimately – the purpose of your staffing agency, and what companies like mine try to help you do, is to put people back to work. But doing so at the cost of connecting the wrong candidates with the wrong companies is simply the wrong way to accomplish this.

Will LinkedIn Profiles Replace Resumes At Your Recruiting or Staffing Agency?

Industry standards are hard things to change.  And most times – they are still in use because they still work.

Take resumes for example.  When it comes to staffing and recruiting, they’re required reading – whether you choose to read each in detail or automate resume reading with staffing or recruitment software. But the resume has new a force threatening to take its place as the industry standard: the LinkedIn profile.

The question is: Will LinkedIn profiles completely overtake resumes as the prime way for your recruiting, employment or staffing agency to learn what it needs to know about candidates and job seekers?

Personally, I don’t see it as an either-or situation just yet.  That said, I don’t think any true candidate picture is complete without a powerful LinkedIn profile, regardless of the strength of their resume.   Here are 3 reasons why:

1. Personal Branding Is Here To Stay
Branding isn’t just for businesses any more.  Now candidates have ample opportunity to present themselves to your recruiting or staffing agency in a compelling fashion through their customized profiles.

Rather than the traditionally brief resume, a personal profile can be a more creative platform for showcasing a candidate’s unique interests.  In addition to listing job experience, the profile can link to a blog, share a reading list and even offer SlideShare presentations.

2. Messaging Makes A Difference
A candidate’s online profile is the ideal place for you to get a better sense of a job seeker’s communication skills.  With all the added information a candidate can include, you can assess not only how qualified a person is for the job but also how they communicate their strengths.

Candidates can use a more conversational tone to expand upon their experience and interests and recruiters can get a better sense of the person’s personality and creativity.

3. Referrals Can Complete The Picture
A candidate’s profile can provide you with a treasure trove of referrals and recommendations.

It can also offer a road map of a person’s career path by showing how well connected that candidate is within their chosen industry.  The profile is the online fulfillment of the traditional “Recommendations Provided Upon Request.”

With a finite universe of qualified candidates, enterprising recruiters and staffing professionals need a variety of tools to discover the cream of the crop.  The LinkedIn profile combined with a resume – rather than one or the other – offers the most complete and powerful overview.

To learn more about how your recruiting or staffing agency can best take advantage of social media, and how our recruiting and staffing software can help, contact us or request a free demo.

Why are you wasting six seconds reviewing a resume?

Time is money - save both with the right staffing software or recruiting softwareThat’s ten resumes a minute, 60 in an hour, and 480 in an eight-hour work day (assuming you actually spent all that time reviewing resumes). That’s what a recent eye-tracking study of recruiters by TheLadders.com concluded.

Sure, the study was obviously self-serving (TheLadders successfully showed that the resume formatting on their website was easier for recruiters to use than that of the profiles on LinkedIn). The observation is that recruiters and staffing coordinators charged with determining the “fit/no fit” of job candidates really don’t spend much time on reviewing individual resumes. In that six-second review, the average recruiter might be able to read seven, that’s SEVEN words – candidate name, title, company worked at, and maybe their last job start/end dates. Think you can read more? Test yourself here.

So, my question is, why are you wasting those six seconds reviewing a resume? You’re really not getting anything substantive about the candidate’s fitness for the job in six seconds, so why bother? After all, according to many, “the resume is dead” anyway (a Google search for that term came up with 56,200,000 hits). Profiles, such as those on LinkedIn, have really taken their place, at least for many professionals.

Nope, the reality is that your staffing software or recruiting software should be doing the grunt work for you of “reviewing” resumes. The data you’ve collected on candidates through all of your sourcing – including those “dead” resumes and through your social media channels – is the data pool you swim in most often. Then you plug in the criteria for the job and the software spits out a list of the most likely candidates that will fit the job opportunity. Then you set up interviews, present the candidate(s), fill the order/placement, bill the customer, and collect payments. Repeat for continued success as a staffing and recruiting professional.

I know I’ve over-simplified the process, but that’s the gist of it, right?

What I’m saying is that you probably shouldn’t waste those six seconds looking at a resume. If you’re not wasting time looking at resumes, think about how many more placements you might make using your recruiting and staffing software to find the most likely candidates. More importantly, you can work at what software can’t do – build relationships that help you better understand your customers and candidates and that in turn result in sales and fills. Then your software becomes an enabling tool to help you manage those relationships successfully.

Naturally, each of Bonds’ staffing and recruiting software packages can help you do that.

Plus, while Adapt, eEmpACT, and StaffSuite offer tools for the business of staffing and recruiting, each has its own specific feature/benefit sets, so I’m confident that one of them can fit the unique needs of your firm. Click or give us a call at 800-318-4983 to talk about how your staffing software or recruiting software should be making your life easier today. We’re here to help you stop wasting time and effort reviewing resumes – six seconds at a time.