Staffing Technology

39: A call to front office vendors: onboarding automation please

Hiring companies are pushing more and more administrative functions to their staffing suppliers. Staffing companies have between one and two dozen forms for new hires to complete. Just figuring out which federal, state, local, client-specific, position-specific and staffing company forms need to be completed for each new temporary employee is a major feat. Strict client compliance requirements and looming government audits mean that staffing companies need to implement effective processes for managing this immense amount of paperwork. Automation is the natural soltuion for exactly this type of uniform, high transaction process.

Many corporate HR oriented applicant tracking systems come with onboarding workflow, forms tracking and management and e-signature capabilities. However, onboarding solutions are not readily available fromcommercial front or back office vendors, even though the pain of managing onboarding paperwork is industry-wide. Because front and back office staffing solutions have not provided robust solutions fast enough, staffing firms are starting to find innovative ways to automate these painfully manual processes. It's unfortunate that staffing firms are having to work hard toadd additional technology in order to automate onboarding. In 2010, we hope to see more onboarding and compliance functionality integrated with, or built into, leading front office solutions.

Check back for our upcoming article on onboarding automation in ASA's Staffing Success magazine.

38: All work and no play: software selection sandboxes

Here at The Code Works, we facilitate a number of staffing software selections for our staffing company clients.

Throughout our marketing and sales process, we explain our software selection methodology to prospective clients.

In the spirit of one of our core company values, continuous improvement, we are always working to make the selection process more efficient while maintaining a high level of quality. To us, a quality selection process means that the selected software:

• Will enable the staffing company's business goals and business strategy
• Accentuates and/or does not detract from the company's competitive and operational differentiators
• Is aligned with the IT strategy, considers the other applications in the staffing firm's architecture and can fit into the IT environment

In addition to we need to understand meaningful gaps so that we can determine where business process will change or customization will occur. We have found that most company's do not like financial, functional, performance or implementation planning surprises. So, the selection process needs to be thorough enough so that these "gotchas" can be identified.

In October 2008 I presented a number of Code Works' best practices for software selection at ASA's Staffing World conference. One of our recommendations was that staffing firm's forget about a sending out a request for proposal (RFP) and focus on scripted demos instead. Our rationale driving the recommendation was that:

a) RFPs list requirements and vendor's make check marks but there is much room for interpretation

b) Software enables business process - so requirements need to be connected and not just listed

c) Seeing is believing - in addition to demonstrating functionality, scripted demos show how efficiently and elegantly a software enables a requirement

Staffing firm's have really appreciated the scripted demos. While vendor's tend to appreciate why customer's want them (i.e. apples to apples software comparison), sales people find the prep time requirements to be too much which is aggravating (they are used to quick decisions) and dramatically increases their cost of sales, which is then reflected in pricing or profit impacts.

We have had a great deal of success working with vendor's to set-up sandbox environments for selection purposes and then working through key business processes with selection stakeholders. I really enjoyed reading Jim Holincheck's post on this topic and it is my hope that The Code Works will find ways to make this process more efficient for staffing firm's and vendor's in 2010.