Archive for the ‘RPO’ category

Applicant Tracking Software that Drives the Decisions that Drive Hiring

November 9th, 2010

Groundbreaking ideas spring from companies that find innovative ways to solve problems, rather than just focusing on technology or staying ahead of competitors. While Newton Software isn’t rolling over for competitors, they are focusing on the problems that their peers in the ATS space continue to ignore like user adoption and driving the critical decisions that drive recruiting. In fact, at the core of Newton, their popular applicant tracking software, Newton Software has invented a way to allow recruiters and hiring managers to complete the most critical paths of the recruiting process with just one click of a mouse.

Here’s a video demonstration of how Newton, easy-to-use, modern applicant tracking software drives the decisions that drive recruiting.



3 Easy Ways to Make Life Easier for Corporate Recruiters

October 22nd, 2010

Our friends at Newton Software design their applicant tracking software with corporate recruiters in mind. “How can we make life easier for corporate recruiters? This is what our product managers are always thinking about.”, says Joel Passen, Newton’s co-founder and Head of Marketing. Joel went on to say, “There are 3 constituent bases that we’re always concerned about: applicants, recruiters and hiring managers. Given that recruiters are a huge part of the recruiter process, the drivers, the catalysts; we want to build software that simplifies their lives.” With that in mind, the marketing team at Newton has outlined 3 ways to keep your corporate recruiters happy. It’s not a coincidence that Newton, their popular applicant tracking software facilitates all of these suggestions.

How to Choose RPO Software

March 1st, 2010

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 platofrms 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.

Note: I originally wrote this post for the Newton Software Blog at www.newtonsoftware.com/blog

Newton Software Releases Newton RPO: Recruiting Software Designed for Recruitment Outsourcers

February 24th, 2010

Newton Software has released Newton RPO, a cutting edge technology platform that enables recruitment outsourcers to strategically manage and analyze their client’s recruiting programs
.


San Francisco (PRWEB)

February 24, 2010 — Newton Software, an innovative recruiting software
company, launched Newton RPO today, the first complete applicant
tracking platform designed specifically for recruitment outsourcers
(RPOs). Newton’s web-based technology is designed to complement the
consulting services RPOs provide, not only giving them the capability
to offer their clients a true end-to-end recruiting solution—but
enabling them to manage their clients’ entire recruiting programs more
efficiently and effectively.

Newton RPO
Newton RPO

To date, most recruitment outsourcers do not offer complete recruiting solutions. RPOs primarily provide consulting services, and most do not provide technology to their customers: they tend to rely on outdated and homegrown systems, legacy ATS solutions that weren’t designed to provide outsourced recruiting services and various cobbled together solutions using email and spreadsheets. The release of Newton RPO gives recruitment outsourcers the opportunity to leverage cutting-edge technology that was built specifically to optimize the business processes associated with outsourced recruiting.

Over the last few years, the recruitment outsourcing
industry has experienced dramatic growth, which stems from an
ever-expanding market demand for scalable, on-demand recruiting
programs. Today, new clients not only expect RPOs to fill seats but to
help them build better process along the way. Newton RPO is a
technology platform specifically designed to address the latest
challenges faced by recruiting services providers, enabling them to
easily attract new customers, manage existing accounts better, as well
as increase their overall customer retention rates.

Originally developed to run a recruitment services business, Newton RPO has been under development since 2004. The developers of Newton had the unique opportunity to use the product in a production environment for 4 years, offering it to clients, testing the product and optimizing its features. To date, Newton has been deployed to hundreds of companies, thousands of recruiters and hiring managers and has processed hundreds of thousands of applicants (from small start-ups to multi-billion dollar corporations).

“I’m really excited that we can now make Newton available to recruitment outsourcers with Newton RPO”, said Steve Hazelton, Newton Software’s Head of Products.

Hazelton continued by describing how Newton RPO can help recruitment outsourcers: “Having run an RPO, I know that they’re hard businesses to manage. You have to monitor the activity of dozens of recruiters,
thousands of jobs, hundreds of hiring managers and hundreds of thousands of candidates. We’ve lived these challenges and we’ve built RPO Software that addresses the major issues that we faced as outsourcers years ago. This is software that I’d want to use if I were still managing recruiting programs.”

Availability:
Newton RPO is now available. For more information contact a Newton RPO specialist at newtonsoftware.com.

About Newton Software:
Newton Software is a leading provider of innovative applicant tracking and recruiting software solutions. Newton software delivers an easy to use, fast-to-deploy, affordable solution for creating, managing and improving corporate recruiting programs with no hardware to buy or software to license. Featuring the most modern, intuitive application on the market, Newton is not only pushing the boundaries on how recruiting software is designed, it’s also changing the way business software is delivered and purchased.

Contact:
Newton, Inc.
415-593-1192
http://www.newtonsoftware.com

I Used to Run Lousy Staffing Meetings

February 9th, 2010

I’m gonna be real honest here. For the 10+ years that I was a corporate recruiter, I ran lousy staffing meetings.

If you’re anything like me, you’d rather be talking to people about jobs, fixing problems, or best yet, filling jobs rather than playing with spreadsheets. I loathed entering data on Friday afternoons just so I could get a report to my boss. The data was accurate, right? Sigh.

Staffing meetings were the bane of my existence (other than “turn downs” of course). I always felt a little defensive during staffing meetings. The quality of my work wasn’t the issue. Rather, it was my inability to show the quantity of my work that bothered me. Did the VP of Engineering know that I’d picked through 250 applicants before sending her those choice 5? No, this wasn’t on the staffing report. Did my boos know that I collected 185 profiles of product managers that had knowledge of some obscure security protocol, called them all and got one to send me their resume. No, the report just showed that we only had one candidate interviewing. Double sigh.

I have a friend that says, “recruiters either make hires or make excuses”. I believe this. When I wasn’t making hires, I was forced to make excuses because I didn’t have the data to back me up to do otherwise. I didn’t want to be seen as a whiner, complaining about hiring managers not reviewing candidates or not giving me feedback or how many hours I’d spent to find that one person. I’d just say that I’d work harder. This was a vicious circle, one that I’d seen burn out the best recruiters.

So, a couple of years ago when I was given the opportunity to provide some input into a new tool that would help recruiters show all of their work and actually run a valuable staffing meeting, I jumped at it. Early on, I even used the tool to run a couple of recruiting programs at a recruiting outsourcer. And eventually, I went to work for that very same company that that great tool for recruiters.

This is how I’d run them today…..

Contract, Hourly, and RPO Recruiting Recovering First

October 20th, 2009

green sprout, pushing out from stones

Many will agree, it appears the economy is defrosting and we are seeing the first green shoots of a recovery in recruitment outsourcing industry. Recently, I’ve read several optimistic blog posts written by firms and individuals that offer hourly and project based recruiting services. While obviously still cautious, all are indicating a recent uptick in their businesses. Some even claim to be busy.

Recruiting outsourcers were among the hardest hit last year when the economy officially stalled. “It was like someone flipped a light switch last October”, said Michelle Rich, a Bay Area technical contract recruiter who is currently working 7 openings. “The work just dried up all of a sudden.” For those of us that survived the implosion of the tech bubble earlier this decade, this pattern comes as no surprise. Unfortunately, contract recruiters and recruiting outsourcers are historically the canneries in the coal mine.

The upbeat outlook of hourly recruiters appears to be substantiated. September figures published by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) and KPMG showed the first rise new starts for permanent hires in 17 months. Temporary and contractor hours, often seen as a barometer of the health of the recruitment industry, are up nearly 30% since the beginning of the year.  At my company, Newton Software, aprovider of applicant tracking sofware, we’ve added more customers in the last 6 weeks than we did the first 4 months of the year. Nearly40% of our new clients employ either an individual contract recruiter or some sort of hourly recruiting service to manage the recruiting process. And, more and more, we are hearing about our friends and contacts in the contract recruiting sector landing new assignments, a trend that we hope continues into the holidays and beyond.

So, what gives you ask? Why are the recruiting outsourcers seeing increased activity? Jonathan Chenard, GM of the Union Hill Group, a firm that provides hourly contract recruiting services and customer of ours sums it up pretty well in his most recent recent blog post .
• Employers don’t want to commit to a full time recruiting resource – yet.
• HR is getting hammered with resumes and now that there are jobs to fill, they need recruiting support.
• Employers are looking to do things as inexpensively as possible and hourly recruiting is a cost efficient and often effective.
Jonathan also points out that HR groups have gotten lean over the past year and are being asked to do more with less. Hourly recruiting services offer more flexibility and cost controls to HR folks looking to manage recruiting programs that are as dynamic as ever.

I’ll be the first to admit, times aren’t great yet. Many predict that the recovery to be jagged and slow. But, there are signs, both anecdotal and data driven, that show the worst is most likely over. For the recruitment outsourcers, it appears the growth cycle has begun and if history repeats itself, they will be the first in the recruiting industry to fully recover.