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When I started in the staffing industry, I was working for a Fortune 500 company that still used paper timesheets to collect and approve time for their temps on assignment. Every week the approved timesheets would be FAXED into the office and the branch admin would enter all of the timesheets into our legacy, on-premise database. Like clockwork, each Monday and Tuesday, our job was to track down timesheets that hadn’t yet been turned in which easily took the better part of 4-6 hours.
This wasn’t a small company, and the technology to process this all electronically existed at the time. So then, what was the issue?
As this was one of my first jobs, I really didn’t think much of it since, at the time, I didn’t know how other companies managed this tedious part of the business.
I spent the better part of a decade working in staffing and recruiting and it wasn’t until 2015 that I branched out and started working for a technology company.
This company changed my whole perspective on what was possible and also how broken the legacy systems that I had been using for the past 9 years were. It also introduced me to what is possible in developing products on the Salesforce platform which is a different story for a different day…
When I think about what Talent Rover had to offer back in 2015, I think that this was the early stages of the staffing and recruitment industry finally adopting the tech that other multi-billion dollar companies had been using for years! For whatever reason, the staffing industry seemed to have been lagging behind other industries.
From the early 2010’s and in reality, a few years prior until now, we have seen the entire industry go through a huge business transformation and adopt new software applications that aim to connect key stakeholders within their organization. With these new products and applications available, companies from mom and pop up to the largest global firms are able to gain end to end visibility into how their business operates; from tracking new customer acquisition, job order pipeline, job posting, and candidate applications, placements, and timekeeping – these functions can now live in a single source of truth creating incredible efficiencies for an industry that had been processing paper timesheets as recently as 10 years ago…and in some cases even today!
Now that companies have been able to get their internal processes in order, we’re now starting to see the next wave of innovation and products being developed in this industry to allow firms to keep up with the demands of an ever-changing business landscape.
If the last wave of technology adoption was aimed at creating a more powerful experience for staffing firms, this new and upcoming wave is aimed at creating a powerful experience for the candidates and clients that these companies serve.
In this new wave, where there are more open jobs in the United States than ever before and the ability to attract candidates is as high as ever, we’re seeing a handful of companies bring new products to the market that enable these companies to create a custom digital candidate experience to enable candidates to communicate and manage their relationship with the firms that they’re engaged with.
What has fueled this new wave of technology adoption?
I think that there are three main points that have happened in the last 10-15 years in the staffing industry that has driven this new wave of adoption:
- Technology Stagnation- The Staffing and Recruiting Industry has entered a transitional period where they have found that the technologies that they used to run their businesses on have limited their growth factors.
- COVID- The pandemic has caused the talent service industry to reevaluate how they acquire and attract candidates, forcing them to begin to build and adopt digital frameworks to help them compete better.
- Accessibility- Now more than ever, there are more tools for staffing and recruitment companies to better improve their services. It’s never been easier to build great software, and staffing and recruitment companies are finally beginning to leverage these options in their favor.
Previously, these types of technology adoption and development would have taken a significant amount of time and money to develop, enhance and maintain as they were by and large custom-built for each company. With new companies coming to market, there are now options for customers to work with product organizations that focus all of their time on this experience for customers.
With platforms like Salesforce, staffing and recruitment firms can now create a digital engagement experience for both the clients and candidates, immediately giving them a leg up on the competition and creating a much more desirable candidate/client experience.
10 years ago, paper timesheets may have cut it. But today, with all of the tools, products, and partners available, if your company isn’t thinking about how to create better experiences for your employees and those that you engage with, now is the time!
Additional Resources
Webinar: Salesforce Lunch and Learn
Interview: Idea to Launch: Parsli a Native Salesforce App
Press Release: Blueprint Advisory Launches Blueprint for Talent Services
Blueprint Advisory helped Able Successfully Enter the Salesforce Ecosystem
