Recently, we talked about how you can Use Your Staffing Software to Ensure Candidates Meet Client Requirements during the placement process. Similarly, you should be able to customize your staffing software system to automate the application of either contractual or target client-specific markup percentages when calculating pay and bill rates. Here is what one Florida-based staffing firm had us do for them in their fully integrated front and back office staffing software system.
First, we created additional data fields in their client database to store contractual and suggested markup percentages.
With some of their clients, this staffing company had agreed on a contractual markup percent. For other clients, this staffing company wanted to define a target or suggested markup for staffing coordinators to shoot for. Therefore, we added field 10, Contractual Markup % and field 11, Suggested Markup % to the client database. For each client, staffing coordinators can choose to leave these fields blank, or define either a contractual or suggested markup percent.
Suggested and contractual client-specific markup fields defined in AST's staffing software.
To create these additional data fields, we are able to use the customization tools that come with our staffing software and avoid the high expenses of custom development work.
Secondly, we modified the placement process to account for client-specific suggested and/or contractual markup percentages.
During the placement process, if a suggested markup is defined for the client, the staffing coordinator is prompted by a message displaying the suggested markup percent.
Message staffing coordinator sees when suggested markup is defined for a client during placement.
After acknowledging the message, the system calculates the appropriate bill rate based on the pay rate and the client’s suggested markup. Since the markup is only “suggested” the staffing coordinator can modify the bill rate or continue on.
Suggested markup is automatically calculated if defined for a client.
If instead of a suggested markup a contractual markup is defined for the client, the process is similar, except the operator is not given the option to change the bill rate since it is contractual. Anytime you can improve certain processes like calculating and applying client-specific markup percentages within your staffing software, you usually end up saving a good deal of time and money while improving the service provided to your clients and candidates.
Contact us if you have questions on streamlining your placement process and the application of client-specific bill rates and markup percentages, and would like to see other ways we’re helping staffing companies make and save money through our fully integrated front and back office staffing software.
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.
Applied Systems Technology, Inc. (AST) has developed email and contact integration between their fully integrated staffing software system and Microsoft Outlook. This integration greatly increases the productivity and mobility of the salespeople and and staffing coordinators of staffing companies using AST’s software.
Cornwall, NY July 7, 2010 – Contacts and e-mail communication are now easily synchronized between Microsoft Outlook and AST’s fully integrated staffing software system.
Easily move contacts and email between Outlook and AST's staffing software system.
With the touch of a button, e-mails sent and received within Outlook are automatically documented in AST’s staffing industry software and associated with the applicant/candidate/employee or client contact to whom they were sent. If the relationship does not exist in the software, a short form pops up in Outlook allowing you to quickly create the relationship in your staffing company’s AST system. This integration with Outlook is part of a larger initiative to make AST’s staffing software easy to use and adapted to the way people naturally do their daily tasks.
In addition to the ever expanding web interface throughout AST’s software, this feature allows AST to provide the power of a sophisticated fully integrated staffing software system in a package that is easy to use and highly functional.
Taking advantage of Microsoft’s Add-ins feature, AST added a button-bar in Outlook that their clients use to intuitively select and move e-mails and contacts back and forth between Outlook and their staffing industry software. Since Outlook is used as the primary communications tool for many business users, AST has automated the process of keeping e-mails and contact information synchronized between both applications. Existing or new contacts in Outlook can generate new applicants/employees/contacts and customers in the AST system’s database.
We are expecting these features to substantially enhance the productivity of the service and sales departments in our clients’ staffing companies. Contact us or email me if you have further questions about Outlook integration, and other ways staffing companies are saving money and gaining efficiencies through our fully integrated staffing software.
Dave Reiss
Founder and CEO
Applied Systems Technology
845-534-7100 X1101
dave@astusa.com Connect with me on:
About Applied Systems Technology (AST):
In 2010, AST is celebrating 25 years of helping staffing firms improve profitability by combining automation and best practices within our fully integrated front and back office staffing software. With Persona, our web-enabled role based software, you can reduce workers comp and unemployment, and go paperless.
Checkout my video below on Three Ways Staffing Professionals Can Use Linkedin Today, and consider registering for my free seminar on Building Profitable Web 2.0 Activities into Your Daily Work Lives with the New Jersey Staffing Association at the Edison Sheraton Hotel on June 22, 2010 from 8a-10a. Through June, I’ve been working with recruiters and salespeople from three different New Jersey-based staffing companies to improve their use of Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. At the seminar we’re going to share with you what we did, what worked, what didn’t, and what our plans are going forward. You’ll see that social media is an important part of many staffing firm’s strategies to build longterm profitability and relationships.
Just to recap, three things you as a staffing industry professional should do today on Linkedin are:
Get your Linkedin profile 100% complete by:
Uploading a photo.
Adding a keyword rich professional summary with specialties listed.
Updating your professional experience with descriptions.
Requesting recommendations.
Import your contacts from Outlook, Gmail, or whatever you keep your professional contacts in.
Search for people, follow companies, and join targeted groups to connect with candidates, prospects, and clients.
The rise of social media seems is leading staffing industry trends for 2010, but still many staffing businesses do not know how to fully utilize Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. Check out the video below to see how easy it is to build a Facebook fan page for your staffing firm. I also urge you to take a look at CareerBuilder’s Facebook fan page, along with the links they provide to other staffing companies’ pages.
I hope you find my video on How to Build a Facebook Fan Page for Your Staffing Firm helpful, and consider registering for my free seminar on Building Profitable Web 2.0 Activities into Your Daily Work Lives with the New Jersey Staffing Association at the Edison Sheraton Hotel on June 22, 2010 from 8a-10a. Over the next two weeks I’m working with recruiters and salespeople from three different New Jersey-based staffing companies to improve their use of Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. At the seminar we’re going to share with you what we did, what worked, what didn’t, and what our plans are going forward.
Towards the end of this video, I provided some extra tips that will really help you fully make use of your Facebook fan page:
Email your candidate database with a link encouraging them to join your Facebook fan page.
Incentify candidates joining your fan page by giving away one Starbuck’s gift card a week to one of your “fans.”
Post an employment related question of the week on your fan page and give a prize (e.g. could be another Starbuck’s gift card) each week to the person with the best response.
Post one to two minute video testimonials of candidates who had great experiences with your staffing firm.
In case you haven’t heard, “SOCIAL MEDIA’s a BIG DEAL!” You’d know this even if you’ve been stuck in a monastery for the last decade – the monks at the last monastery I stayed at had blogs, RSS feeds, and Flikr accounts. Or if you read Jeff Reeder’s article, “Developing a Social Media Plan: Make the most of interactive technologies,” in the April 2010 edition of Staffing Industry Review. Without a doubt, the growth of social media is one of the main staffing industry trends for 2010.
A few key points for staffing executives and professionals from Reeder’s article and my assimiliation of the content:
Social media is much more than Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin: There are all sorts of niche job boards, discussion forums, listservs, wikis, and websites like Yelp.com that you should consider monitoring and contributing content to.
Social media is just another client and candidate relationship management tool: If properly used, social media can drive more traffic to your staffing companies’ websites, increase sales and leads, improve search engine ranking, and brand and service awareness; but it should not replace traditional marketing/networking channels. Instead the real power in social media is when it is combined with more traditional tactics through integrated marketing strategies.
Be focused, frequent, and fully committed to social media:
Be focused by defining measurable goals (e.g. increase monthly web applications from 100 to 150) and clear on the social media tools and tactics you’re going to use to get there.
Be frequent by using on a daily basis whatever social media tools and tactics you decide to go with.
Be fully committed by getting people involved with social media at every level within your staffing firm in a focused and frequent manner.
Here are a few social media power moves for staffing companies to consider:
Hand candidates a postcard, or email candidates who have a positive experience with your staffing company encouraging them to give your staffing company a positive review on sites like Glassdoor.com or Yelp.com.
For professional recruiters, create a list of 3 to 5 niche forums or listservs to actively monitor and participate in.
Use Yahoo Pipes to create custom news feeds relating to your clients’ industries for you and your clients to stay up-to-date on.
What “social media power moves” are working for you?
Email me some of your ideas; I’d love to hear from many of you who are leading one of the main staffing industry trends in 2010!
Also, contact us to find out more about how we’re integrating social media into our staffing software.
Everett Reiss
Director of Marketing and Communication
While not as weighty or existential of a question as the one Prince Hamlet posed, the question of seeking tax credits related to the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act or the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) is especially relevant for professionals and companies in the staffing industry.
You Can’t Do Both for an Employee
Employers cannot take advantage of both tax credits for an employee; you have to choose. You can have some employees qualify for HIRE Act savings and other employees for WOTC, but you cannot benefit from both credits for one employee.
The Greater the Risk, the Greater the Reward
Like most things in life, the option that is harder to qualify for, the WOTC, can yield greater tax credits for your staffing company. However, the HIRE Act can save an employer over $6,000/year for an employee, which in certain circumstances is a greater savings than what you’d get with the WOTC.
Sample HIRE Act Savings for Staffing Firms
The Maximum potential HIRE Act savings for an employee is $6,621.60 – 6.2% of the max social security taxable income of $106,800.
As you probably concluded, this is an unlikely scenario because you would have had to pay one of your qualified temporary employees enough to hit the social security cap of $106,800 between March 19, 2010 and December 31, 2010.
Here’s a more realistic scenario:
You hire a qualified temporary employee making $500 per week, and save $1271 for the year. 6.2% of $500 is $31 in employer social security tax that you don’t have to pay. Multiply the $31 by the 41 weeks you don’t have to pay social security tax for a qualified employee, and you get $1271.
If you keep that person on your payroll for 52 consecutive weeks, you could get an additional tax credit of $1000.
Therefore, through the HIRE Act you could save between $1271 and $2271 for that qualified employee.
Potential WOTC Savings Per Employee for the Staffing Industry
Employers hiring employees that fit into such targeted groups as veterans, ex-felons, food stamp recipients, and summer youth employees, can reap WOTC savings of:
$2,400 for each new adult hire.
$1,200 for each new summer youth hire.
$4,800 for each new disabled veteran hire.
$9,000 for each new long-term family assistance recipient hired over a two-year period.
Click here for a full list of the types of new hires that can qualify for WOTC.
For qualifying new hires, the savings under the WOTC are most likely higher than under the HIRE Act. However it is more difficult for an employee to qualify because a state agency must certify that the employee is in one of the WOTC targeted groups.
Making Your Decision
First, decide if you are even going to go for WOTC, which entails:
Familiarizing yourself with the process, which includes taking potential qualifying employees through the screening process and sending the appropriate forms into your State Workforce/State Employment Security Agency’s WOTC coordinator.
Or, talk with a company that offers WOTC processing services (e.g. Talx).
Consider the industry you supply labor to. If you are staffing the defense industry, then your employees could qualify for substantial WOTC tax credits if many are WOTC qualifying veterans.
Be sure to consider the costs:
Of using an outside agency for either/both of the processing of WOTC and HIRE Act credits.
Of the administrative burden of the HIRE Act, which requires the employer to keep a signed copy of the affidavit; or the WOTC, which comes with a more lengthy approval process.
You may conclude that you want to keep it simple and just worry about the HIRE Act.
If you are going for both WOTC and HIRE Act credits:
Know the WOTC targeted groups and potential savings for each.
Only go for the WOTC if the potential savings for the employee is significantly greater than the HIRE Act, and you feel confident that the person will qualify for that targeted group.
Otherwise, if you know the employee qualifies for the HIRE Act, stick with that.
Either way, make sure your new hire process is locked down tight!
WOTC and HIRE Act Resources for the Staffing Industry:
I hope this helps you saving a great deal of money! Let me know if you think there are any other factors that staffing executives and professionals should be considering when deciding to go for savings related to the WOTC or HIRE Act.
Also, contact us to discuss other ways we can help your staffing firm save money by combining automation through our staffing software and best practices from over 25 years of serving the staffing industry.
Special thanks to Kathleen Bodnar, Controller of Staffing Solutions Enterprises, Inc. who provided some valuable feedback on the decision-making processing staffing companies should go through regarding WOTC and HIRE Act tax credits.
Everett Reiss
Director of Marketing and Communications
Applied Systems Technology
845-534-7100 X1102 ev@astusa.com Connect with me on:
Here is a hint on what staffing companies can learn and do to unseat their competitors (especially the nationals) and gain market share:
First and foremost, innovation is key.
In many ways, the nationals dictate what the rest of the temporary staffing industry does, which often involves competing on price and speed. And like Specter, the nationals act to protect their position towards the top of the food chain. While there are degrees of difference in execution and quality, many staffing companies fall into line dancing to the staffing buyers preferred song of “commoditization” that the nationals are built to move to. Most small to mid-size staffing companies are working from the same business model and as a result are not highly differentiated.
The good news is that it does not take a lot to stand out when everyone is grinding to the same beat.
The following are two ways your staffing business can create and move to some new music:
Do the hard work to learn the economics of your clients’ businesses and the impact workforce strategies can have on their bottom line. Find out the performance characteristics of the types of positions that they use contingency labor for and the impact that deviations have on the production and quality of their products and services. As you target companies in your marketplace, move up the value chain and develop expertise in those areas to the extent that you can identify and potentially even develop those types of skilled workers for a select group of clients.
Use your expertise to develop information sharing partnerships with your select clients so you can manage your contingency workforce effectively and economically for yourself and the clientele. There are significant economic advantages to both the provider and user of contract labor when information is shared and used tactically and strategically. We have recently designed an operating model for staffing firms and their clients that facilitates a high quality cabal of workers for the client at highly competitive costs when the Total Return On Investment (TROI) is understood.
The current economy has actually raised the value and importance of contingency workers in many sectors. There is no better climate for staffing companies to understand the needs and vulnerabilities of companies as they try and navigate through hiring strategies in the face of what is still considered a fragile economy.
Everett shares one of the ten social media habits he’s going to talk about in his presentation on “Building Profitable Web 2.0 Activities into Your Daily Work Lives” at the New York Staffing Association’s Super Seminar day on May 18th at The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 42 West 44th Street, New York, NY.
In this video Everett talks about how to use HelpAReport.com’s (HARO) daily emails to either find free PR for your own staffing firm and personal brand, or to share these requests for expertise with your candidates, clients, and prospects.
As you can see, sharing HARO expertise requests with clients, candidates, and prospects is a great way to stay in touch with important relationships in your network and stay top of mind. Check out Everett’s recent post There’s Such a Thing as Free PR! on The Old School Internet Marketing Blog for Small Business for more info on how to fully leverage HARO as a social media tool in the staffing industry.
Get more information and register to join Everett and many other expert speakers and professionals in the staffing industry at NYSA’s Super Seminar Day on May 18, 2010 by visiting http://www.nystaffing.org/Super_Seminar_Day.html. Feel free to email Everett at ev@astusa.com or Jennifer Kelley at jennifer@nystaffing.org if you have any further questions.
Also, if you think Everett’s social media content is helpful, contact AST to see how we can help you in the area of your staffing software and technology beyond the web 2.0.
Suggested markup is automatically calculated if defined for a client.
