Over the last few years, the recruitment outsourcing industry has experienced significant growth, which stems from an ever-expanding market demand for scalable, flexible and cost effective recruiting solutions. Today, new clients not only expect RPOs to fill jobs but to help them build better process along the way. With recruitment outsourcers facing more complex assignments and more competition than ever, RPO’s must select and leverage technology that’s specifically designed to address their most common business challenges. This technology must facilitate the attraction of new customers, allow them to manage existing accounts better and must help them increase their overall customer retention rates.
Managing an RPO isn’t easy. On the hook to monitor the activity of multiple recruiters, thousands of jobs, hundreds of hiring managers and hundreds of thousands of candidates, RPO’s operate in a complex environment facing huge challenges both internally and externally. Using applications like spreadsheets and email or worse, selecting just any recruiting software will severely limit an RPO’s performance, scalability and ability to retain customers. To ensure that your RPO is successful and continues to attract new customers while keeping your existing customers happy, you must leverage technology that is designed specifically for recruitment outsourcing.
Until very recently, finding a technology platform that’s specifically designed for outsourcing engagements has been difficult if not impossible. There are still few applications available today that are specifically designed for RPO’s. But there is good news. As the recruitment outsourcing market continues to become more sophisticated, demand for specialized RPO platforms is increasing, and a handful of vendors are responding with modern technology to address the challenges faced by RPO’s.
A little advice to start
So, what should you be looking for? Here is a list of things that you need to consider and questions to ask when evaluating software for recruitment outsourcing.
My first piece of advice is to really focus on your “must have” features, the knockouts. Focus on what you really need right now, because as you expand and optimize your RPO business, your “nice to have’s” are going to change. For example, 5 years from now you almost certainly are not going to need fax integration (I hope you don’t need it right now)-this type of feature shouldn’t be a deal killer in your buying decision. It is always better to learn to walk before you try to run. And, remember, choosing any kind of business software is all about managing trade-offs.
My second piece of advice is that you take the time to see your “must have” features in action. This starts with a demo, but you should also move at least some of your recruiters on to this platform. Take full advantage of the free trial (most vendors should offer this, it’s 2010). Don’t use fake data and don’t just test the system for an hour here and there. Use it to manage a customer, or 2, or 10. If it fails at managing a small portion of your business, it will certainly fail at managing a large one. Remember, this will be the lynch pin of your business, your platform; don’t just take the salesperson’s word for it.
What Questions do you ask of your RPO software vendor?
Does this RPO software enhance our brand?
Selling an outsourced recruiting solutions is a hard. You’re truly selling the invisible. Before software, the buyers of recruitment outsourcing solutions had little more to go on than a sales pitch, an SLA and some promises. Today, with the right RPO software you can gain an incredible advantage during the sales process: proving that your solution is more complete, more modern and more efficient than competing solutions. Your software should enhance, not detract, from this message. Choose software that your stakeholder is going to be proud to roll out to their team, something that will make them look good. Make presenting your technology solution the buyer’s first win.
If I were an RPO customer, would I use this software?
No software platform is magic. Some users will love it. Some users won’t. But, choosing RPO software that increases your chances of getting more users will result in higher margins, and reduced customer turnover.
Obviously, every hour you spend training and every week you spend implementing RPO software is money from your bottom line. The harder your recruitment outsourcing software is to use, the less likely your clients will be to use it, and the more work you’ll have to do manually. Simply put, the easier your recruiting technology is to use, the less work your recruiters have to do, and the better your margins will be.
There are other benefits as well. The more users you get, the better off you’ll be as you’ll capture critical information that you’ll use to diagnose and solve problems. Solving minor problems before they become major headaches keeps customers happy. Pick the right technology and it will become the hardest working part of your solution. When you customer periodically evaluates other solutions, they’ll realize that you provide not only a valuable service but, a valuable technology.
Will this allow us to be more valuable than just the last resume we sent?
Unless you choose technology that allows you to show all of your work, your client will continue to judge you on one thing - the last resume your team sent. How else are customers going to feel any ownership of the service you’re providing them? Without the right technology, all the work that your team is doing, except for the last resume sent is invisible to them. If your customer just wanted resumes, they would have hired a contingent agency or signed up with another job board. When companies hire an RPO, they want hires and they want problems fixed. They want visibility and they demand accountability. Provide technology that you can build around, a platform that will enable all those best practices that you talked about in the sales meeting. Choose technology that will tackle the tactical and create the opportunity for your firm to be strategic.
Will your technology vendor continue to be innovative?
Ok, you’ve narrowed down your options, done the demos, set up some users and wrestled pricing information from the vendors. Now, you need to ask what the vendor has in store in the coming 6-12 months. What’s on their roadmap? Are they adding features just to add features, small things to win a customer here and there? Or, are they designing critical enhancements that will help you overcome your biggest challenges? Select a vendor that is constantly innovating and looking for ways to make your team more efficient. Select a vendor that has been on your side of the table, a firm that has employees that have actually worked in an RPO or at least a recruiting environment. They’ll provide the most innovative platforms, ones that work the way you work.
Finally, you’d probably expect that RPO software, the technology that’s going to power your business is going to cost a pretty penny and is going to be a major headache to implement. Not the case, it’s 2010. Thanks to new delivery methods and even newer business models, there’s technology available that you can set up in a matter of days and will be affordable and will scale as your business scales. So, get educated, ask the tough questions, kick some tires, do the demos and choose modern recruiting software that will accelerate the growth of your recruitment outsourcing practice and make your clients happy.
Think back to your last staffing meeting or the last time that you were asked for recruiting status. Where did you get the information? Spreadsheets? Better yet, how long did it take you to compile all the information? If you just sighed, you’re not alone.
Do you loathe those Fridays when you have to “update” your ATS or staffing spreadsheets? We did. So we built recruiting software that works the way recruiting works. Now capturing all of your recruiting information is simple. And, because Newton is easy for everyone to use, even your hiring managers will add data to the system allowing you to collaborate and store critical information.
Newton is designed to be like air traffic control for your entire recruiting program. See all the information that’s important to you at a glance, right from your home page. Now you’ll drill into detailed analytics anytime from your analytics dashboard to access real-time information like: candidate pipelines, conversion rates, average time it takes to move candidates from stage-to-stage, best sources of applicants, missed opportunities and more.
Give your hiring managers and executives logins. It’s free! Get ready to show all of your hard work, to point out bottlenecks and to make better decisions about your recruiting resources. With Newton you’ll be the envy of your company, running the most informative meetings with the best information at your fingertips.
In this installment of The Proactive Employer, Stephanie R. Thomas, Ph.D., Director of the Equal Employment Advisory and Litigation Support Division (EEA/LS) of Minimax Consulting, outlines ten tips for examining the question of whether your employees are ‘fairly’ compensated. While these tips cannot replace a comprehensive self-audit of compensation, they provide a launching point for collecting the information required for the audit, and open the dialogue of compensation equity.
Minimax Consulting is a full service consulting firm providing quantitative services across a wide variety of industries. The Equal Employment Advisory and Litigation Support Division of Minimax Consulting brings more than ten years of experience in expert statistical analysis of employment decisions and employment litigation risk management. Headed by Stephanie R. Thomas, Ph.D., the EEA/LS Division provides consulting services, dispute resolution support, and expert testimony to small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, major law firms, and local, state, and federal governments and agencies. The EEA/LS Division specializes in labor and employment issues in both advisory and litigation contexts.
Automated rejection letters aren’t a new thing. But, having used these features ourselves over the years, we felt it was time to reinvent them.
Introducing Newton Thank You Letters, they’ve been a long time coming. Now you can quickly and easily send automatic, stage specific thank you letters to any candidate that has ever applied to or interviewed for any job at your company without additional administrative work. And, best of all, the feature is smart so you’ll know if applicants are assigned to other jobs or have received previous thank you messages.
We designed this feature to be flexible, to save you time and to help you continually improve your recruiting program. So far, our beta users are really excited about Thank You Letters. And,the feedback from applicants has been overwhelmingly positive too. People love to know where they stand.
Our product team spent a lot of time working on the experience (both employer and applicant), the interface, the workflow, and the efficiency of this feature. Many variations and hundreds of little tweaks later, we’re pretty sure we nailed it. We hope you’ll agree.
Here are some Thank You Letter “highlights”.
Newton comes standard with pre-built, customizable, thank you letter templates for every stage of the recruiting process. There is a set of corporate templates and a set for each user to personalize.
Choose the email aliases from which to send Thank You Letters, corporate or personal email addresses.
Decide which members of your team are permitted to send thank you letters.
Preview and customize individual thank you letters easily before sending. Choose your desired email alias too.
Newton will alert you if an applicant is a duplicate, interviewing for another role at your company and if they’ve received previous thank you messages.
Pending Thank You Letters are stored so you can send them later and even send them in bulk. This gives HR / recruiting departments better control of the messaging.
I managed to secure an invitation to TEDxSF, an independent version of TED, at the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. I’ve never been to the Big TED conference but I’ve been a fan of the videos on the website for years. Calling TEDxSF a conference is not doing it justice. The event was more like a series mini-performances featuring musicians, entrepreneurs, scientists and change-makers.
All in all, independent TED events, TEDx, are less exclusive than Big TED. You apply for an invitation and you’re asked to write about how you’ve changed the world or at least how you’ve been an innovator. I wrote about being a recruiter for 10 years and realizing the need for better recruiting software, throwing caution to the wind and starting a technology company amidst the worst recession in recent memory. Maybe the TEDx committee felt sorry for me.
While the format of the performances was paradoxically similar, a thought provoking monologue aided by some slides and self-deprecating humor, the topics varied dramatically. I enjoyed every presentation and I loved the music and comedy too. Even the crowd was interesting, not the room full of geeks I’d anticipated, more chic, less geek.
Here are some highlights.
- Zoë Keating, a talented, avant cellist, informed the audience that computers crash but cellos don’t after her laptop crashed mid-performance. For the record, it was a Mac.
-Gavin Newsome, San Francisco’s Mayor, was given 3 minutes to address the crowd. Ever the opportunist, he delivered an inspirational, self-promoting rant ending with, “San Francisco has always been a city of dreamers and doers”. At least he got that right.
-Taking advantage of the venue, Ryan Watt, the Director of Morrison Planetarium and Science Visualization at the Academy of Sciences, reminded us that we may not be alone.
-The best story of the afternoon was told by Jill Vallet, the founder of Playworks, a non-profit that brings physical activities to low-income urban schools.
-Proclaiming that Silicon Valley has been as influential as the industrial revolution, photographer, Doug Menuez, shared images of the Valley’s most brilliant innovators, some in their weakest moments.
“Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.” Marshall McLuhan
We Wish
I was at a barbeque in San Francisco this weekend and while everyone agreed that it’s nice that summer has finally arrived, our conversation inevitably meandered into talk of work and our summer work intentions. Alex, a partner in a small marketing consultancy, remarked how he planned to lay low and enjoy the summer, taking some time off to relax. “After all,” remarked Alex, “No one is doing anything this summer except waiting out this economy.” Liz, an executive at an enterprise software company, agreed, mentioning that she’s observing “summer hours” and hoping that the fall will yield better results for her firm (I’d like to add that I hope it will yield better results for everyone). When the conversation turned to me, I stuttered on about a fly-fishing trip and some weddings. I really didn’t want to tell the group that my summer is going to be as busy as they come and that “summer hours” are definitely not in the mix for me. I may dub this summer, “The Summer of Work”.
I see it like this. Throughout history, recessions have produced new leaders like HP, FedEx, and Microsoft. While someone was cost-cutting and retrenching, someone else was innovating. When spending is tight, companies look for new, less expensive ways to do routine things. It just so happens that hiring (my business builds recruiting software) is something that most, if not all, companies need to do at some point or another—and I can assure you that there is plenty of room for innovation in the world of recruiting software. Marshall McLuhan, a scholar of media theory, puts it best saying, “Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools.” This quote is very timely. When the anxiety subsides and the economy loosens up, the way business is conducted will have changed.
So at Newton Software we are pushing development harder than ever, making things smarter, simpler, easier and faster—making tools for tomorrow, because the economy WILL get better.
First off, in just a few weeks we will be releasing the recruiting software industry’s most innovative analytics application. Our product management, design, and development teams have been working tirelessly to design and develop a product that will allow companies to examine and reposition corporate recruiting programs to be more efficient and effective. Creating the behind-the-scenes algorithms and measurements is a time consuming process, and making the module easy to use, yet powerful, is 10x as laborious. Our entire team has spent countless hours interviewing HR pros, recruiters, and contributing our own domain expertise to this product. Look for more news about Newton’s analytic functionality in early July.
Second, we are integrating a billing system into Newton®. This will make it easier for customers to sign up and manage costs. It also means that we can offer an unrivaled transparency to our clients. The addition of the billing system reinforces a key tenet of our business plan: take the friction and hassle out of buying our software (and, even cancelling it if you want to!). Our investment in online billing software marks another innovation in the recruiting software industry and will make a dramatic improvement in the way that HR, recruiting, and finance professionals will interact with a software provider (us). We anticipate providing hassle free, completely transparent billing and invoicing by mid-August.
Our third major project this summer is already underway. We are designing a feature that will make it easier for recruiting agencies to do business with companies that are hiring, and vice versa. Since the beginning of recruiting a certain animosity has existed between recruiting firms and the companies they assist. We want to help smooth these relationships by making it easier for companies to get great resumes while at the same time freeing agency recruiters from having to make 100 cold calls a day. The end of the cold call is near, my friends. Solving an issue that has plagued both sides of the recruiting industry for decades is, as you can image, not easy. You can bet that the phrase “summer hours” has not come up at Newton (except when remarking that it is still light out when we leave the office at 9PM).
This so called “summer of work”, what does it mean? Well, at Newton, we see it as an opportunity to turn a slow buying cycle (read financial turmoil) into a business advantage and to launch innovate products that solve real problems for our customers. While we would love to be out fly-fishing, backpacking, spending time with families or just cruising around getting tans on our bikes, we are planning to hunker into the Newton fish bowl (that is what our friend’s call our office) to get some work done.
Newton Software has debuted the Newton® Affiliate Program, a third-party sales program for its smart, easy-to-use, recruiting technology, Newton®. The program allows qualified individuals to refer Newton® to friends, contacts, and companies and earn a percentage of the revenue generated from each sale. Ideal affiliate partners include agency recruiters, contract recruiters, human resources consultants, and other service providers.
Interested parties can sign up for the program on the Newton Software website. Approved affiliates will receive a unique code via email. Approved Newton® affiliates can then distribute their code to interested parties. When a company becomes a paying customer of Newton® the referring affiliate will earn a commission.
“There is quite a demand for this type of affiliate program in the professional recruiting communities where Newton® is quickly gaining momentum. Many contract recruiters have expressed interest in recommending Newton® to their clients and now we can easily empower them to do so,” said Steve Hazelton, Newton’s® CEO and Chief Product Officer. “With the Newton® Affiliate Program, our partners can provide more complete, effective recruiting services to their clients while generating a little additional income.”
Jeff Winter, General Manager of GravityPeople, Silicon Valley’s most established technology recruiting firm became the first affiliate partner 4 months ago during a beta test of the program. “The Newton® Affiliate Program has given our team the ability to recommend easy-to-use, affordable software to our clients. Having been in technology recruiting for nearly 12 years, we have seen plenty of ATS software applications and nothing compares to Newton’s intuitiveness. Newton keeps our clients organized and generally improves the recruiting process allowing my team to focus on identifying and managing talent, not chasing hiring mangers around.”
Jonathan Chenard, Practice Manager at Union Hill, a recruiting consultancy, said, “The Newton Affiliate Program has been a great opportunity for my firm to extend the services we provide to our clients. As a recruitment consulting firm, we have been actively providing both support and training for Newton software. Now, through our affiliate code, we offer our clients a convenient and efficient way to purchase Newton. ”
“We want to apply Newton’s key values of innovation, collaboration and ease-of-use to the entire business ecosystem. We have an innovative business model that enables us to create unique programs that provide value to our partners and customers,” said Joel Passen, Newton Software’s Co-Founder. “Our best advocates are those that have used Newton on a daily basis. Referring Newton is the ultimate compliment and we want to provide as much incentive our community as much as possible.”
Companies and individuals that would like to participate in the Newton® Affiliate Program can simply visit the affiliate website (http://www.newtonsoftware.com/affiliate-program.php) and fill out a short application. Approved affiliates will receive a unique affiliate code typically within 24 hours.
About Newton®
Newton® is web-based recruiting software that uses smart technology to simplify hiring. Newton® offers the quickest and easiest way for small and medium sized businesses to organize and manage recruiting. Newton® is a native SaaS application that leverages Web 2.0 technology to empower companies of any size to create an efficient and effective recruiting process, which boosts productivity and lowers costs associated with hiring.
About Newton Software
Newton Software develops and markets smart, easy-to-use, web-based technology for small and medium sized businesses. By offering, free trials, pay-as-you-go contracts, and all inclusive purchase plans Newton software is breaking new ground in the way business technology is designed and delivered.
We recently made some modifications to our website. Not only had we outgrown our first website but we also landed the domain name that we wanted when we started the company—Newton Software.
A light bulb went off during this process—whenever we go to a website, whether we are buying a bike tire or software, we all always want to know how much things cost. We’re pretty sure that you agree with the statement, “Just show us the price!” We hate it when people don’t tell us the price. Why were we doing the same?
The Art of Pricing: According to Dilbert
So to avoid the all too common example told by this Dilbert cartoon, we have published pricing on our website for anyone to see (http://www.newtonsoftware.com/pricing.html).
Obviously, publishing pricing information is considered anathema to conventional business software companies.
The paradox of hiding your price is that it actually makes your software more expensive: hiding your price means you must employ salespeople to sell your software. Therefore, you must charge more for your product to pay their salaries and to provide them the opportunity to earn commissions. This is turn causes the loathsome cat and mouse game that most us have experienced when investigating software; ask for a little information, get stalked by a salesperson. For the record, we don’t have any sales people at Newton Software. We keep our footprint small and our overhead low so we can focus on developing smart technology.
There is, of course, some downside to publishing price on our site. We can’t do all of those annoying things that other software companies can do, like charging one customer more than another, tricking people into long-term contracts and charging for everything under the sun(like adding users, adding forms, implementation and activation).
The other day, I was speaking with a customer of a well known payroll company that happens to sell recruiting software. This person recently hired a recruiter to replace someone that was unfortunately laid-off late last year. She needed to get her new hire “on the system”. So, she called her support number and was transferred to the sales department. The sales department promptly explained that there is a charge for changing users. So, how did she react? Well, there was not much she could do. Buried in her 21 page contract, in section Y, article (ii) there states a clause that “adding and/ or changing a user will incur an activation cost outlined in addendum B of said contract”. She had to pay the $550 dollars for someone to flip a switch and type 10 characters on a keyboard. We think this is crazy.
So what is our thinking on publishing our price on our website? Well, as I mentioned earlier; if we were visiting our own website, we would want to know how much Newton costs and how the pricing works. We want you to get as much information as possible from our website about both the product and whether or not it fits into your budget. And, we want you to be able to do this on your terms without pushy, commission-driven sales people hounding you incessantly because they have a quota to meet.
We believe that part of the reason that people put-off buying technology that could make their lives easier is because the purchasing process is so mind-numbingly painful—rife with complicated pricing formulas, too many options, long commitments, long implementations cycles ( we’ll address that is a future post), and pushy sales reps.
We design smart, easy-to-use software that takes the friction out of hiring. We want the way that we price our product to take the friction out of buying it. Tell people what they get, don’t charge for things that should be included like activation and implementation and provide plans that appeal to a broad spectrum of companies—no brainer. We think of this stuff so you don’t have to.
I was recently asked to speak to a group of Human Resources professionals about emerging trends in recruiting and Human Resources technology. The moderator of the group asked if I could send some preview collateral, a PowerPoint or PDF, that he could distribute to the group prior to the meeting. Having created, reviewed, deleted, ignored, and edited thousands of PowerPoint’s and PDF’s in my career, I decided that I was going to do something different. Knowing that most audiences have a very short attention span, I produced a short video instead.
People seemed to like the “new media” approach to business collateral. So, we’ll be posting more of these from time to time.
You can check out the short video here (it may take more than few seconds to load on slower connections).
