During a training this week the group was talking about candidates and how to know where they were in the process i.e.: resume sent, interview, refused offer, etc.  Although most of us find ourselves in a candidate rich environment, it doesn’t mean that all the candidates are ones we would want to place on assignment.  More often than not, one candidate is a perfect fit for multiple positions; let the battle of the staffing specialist begin!

I thought back to my days of settling disputes between staff members of who “owned” a particular candidate.  Why did it have to be so difficult?  How did it get to the point of each staff member working with the same person for different positions?  In my case it was due to the fact that in order to see where a person was being considered you had to scroll through all their notes(a large collection of all sorts of information that could not be sorted).  There wasn’t one easy place to see all the candidate statuses for the order or for a particular employee/candidate.

Candidate In the sub menu of the Order, you will see the Candidate section.  Here you can add candidates to an order and update their status.  Your administrator can trigger a message to be added to their record each time their status changes.  Another User can quickly look at the order and see who is being considered and what stage of the process they are in.  This is a great tool for managers as well!

Need to know what orders a specific Employee is being considered on?  Choose Candidate in the Employee sub menu to view all the orders he/she has been a candidate on.  You can also click on Actions, Employee Candidate to see the same information.

Order Description Have you ever wished the Job Description box in Order was a little bigger?  Maybe you need to edit some information and would like to see more than a few lines of information?  Go to Detail in the sub menu of Order and double click on the job description box.  The box will open in a new window with a larger view.

Have you had a chance to explore all the new features of v2010? Our development team worked hard to deliver a new version filled with brand new features and updated ones too!  If you don’t have a copy of the new release documentation, send me an e-mail and I would be happy to share one with you.

Now, let’s talk about what the new Favorites feature can do for you.  First, you will notice that it’s no longer located on the top left (the preference button).  Favorites has its very own place at the Main Menu table.  The first change you will see is when you click on Favorites it will take you to the Home page allowing you to see all of your Favorite groups in one place and perform the same basic search functions that you can in other main tree categories.

Note that you can now see not only your own groups, but groups that have been shared with you.  After you have chooses a Favorite group you can:

-Edit Group – add or delete Employees, Contacts, Customers, etc.

-Mass Mail – Send out a mass mailer from a predesigned   template  or one you create

-Move/Copy Favorite Items

-Add Child – just like Departments in Customers you can build a group within a group

-New Message – post a message within that group

Just imagine all the different types of Favorite groups you can create.  I think about skill marketing groups and building a pipeline of top candidates.  How about creating a group for all your active employees that you can send out a Mass Mail letting them know your holiday pay day schedule?

The second part to Favorites is within the type of group (Employee, Customer, Contact, etc).  When you click on Favorites in the Sub Menu, you will see what group they belong to.  Now it’s easy to know what groups Employees, Contacts or Customers are associated with.

Adding to the Favorite group can still be done through the Actions menu or through Edit on the Favorites page.

Have you missed one of the past Tips of the Week?  Here are some of my favorites that our users have found to be helpful.

Counters are Cool

Who Changed That?

Match ‘em Up Automatch

Paycheck Voids/Reversals

Save Time – Shortcuts

Generating Resumes

Do You Document?

Forgotten Timecards

I’ve Got Skills

Sometimes Basic is Best

Search Options

Too Many Tabs

Favorites v2010

Keeping Track of Candidates

Start Sheets

Do You Inspect?

Ending Assignments

Tracking Sources

Quarter End Reports

Look What I Can See

My Favorite Child

Assignment Changes

Data Requirement Message

Mass Resume Parser

QuickPlace

Mass Mail

More Than a Message

Mass Mail

New Back Office Features

Search Options in Advanced Search

New Back Office Features

Adding Transactions to Orders

Agency

New Resume Parser Feature

Web Time Entry

Employer Health Reporting

Do you have an idea for the Tip of the Week?  Send me an email.

When I first started in staffing I worked exclusively for one account.  At the time we had anywhere from 50-100 employees working.  Just keeping up with entering in orders and closing assignments took up most of my day.  Not to mention the software I was working with was old and not very functional.  I had to switch from screen to screen to see my information; not very efficient.  Looking back there are two things that I wish I had, Quick Place and a Customer Web Portal.  These two items would have saved me a great deal of time, not to mention help me be more productive.

Quick Place is a new feature (v2010) that allows for assigning large groups of employees to open orders in one place.  Quick Place shows all open and partially filled orders with the list of Available (unassigned) Employees as well as current assignments.  Quick Place is accessed through the Start Page in the Actions menu or short cut button and will open in a new window.

One page that will show the user all the information that is important to them regarding the Order, Employee and Assignment.  Quickly look through Available candidates, see who is currently a Candidate and do an Auto Match from the same screen.  You even have the ability to see who is currently Assigned and close the assignment from that same screen.  Want more?  How about easily “jumping” to an Employee, Customer or Order?  You can log a message and send an e-mail right from Quick Place. I have done several demos on our webinars, each time to hear great excitement about this feature.  Quick Place, why weren’t you in my life 10 years ago??!!

When I wasn’t entering and ending assignments I was sending candidates to my client to review.  I can’t tell you how many hours I wasted standing at the fax machine watching applications go through, then waiting for the phone call of who they wanted me to assign.  The Customer Web Portal would have allowed me to give them access to all the candidates and let me know (electronically) who they would like me to assign.  It would have saved both of us a ton of paper and toner in the fax machine too!  Did I mention that I picked up time cards every week too?  All of those timecards could have been entered online and sent directly to our back office for processing.  These two features would have probably saved at least two hours every day; what else could I have been doing with my time?  How about you?  Could you be saving more time by leveraging the technology that is available to you?

As always, I enjoy hearing from you.  Feel free to give me a call or send me an e-mail to chat about a current bottleneck you have.

How are you currently communicating with your staff? Do you send out e-mails to let them know what is happening? How about your customers or even your employees? Do you know we have a solution built right into the software for creating and sharing announcements for your internal staff, customers*, employees* and vendors* (if you are using the web portals*)? You look at it every time you log into the system! How about putting an encouraging message or a tip for new (or seasoned) users to better use their Avionté software? It’s easy to create a new Announcement in the Admin Tools. Simple click on Announcement, then click New.

Go ahead, announce away! Stuck for what to put in your Announcements? Send me an e-mail and I will share a list of tips and motivational quotes that you can use.

Dynamic Panels

Since we are talking about what we can do on the Start Page. Don’t forget about the Vertical and Horizontal panels. This is a great way for each user to have the information they want to see where they want to see it. Want to see a list of your Hot Keys on the Start Page? Right click on anyone of the Vertical Panels and choose Hot Keys. Want to see an Employee’s Past Jobs each time you look at the Summary? Right click on a panel and choose Past Jobs. Pretty easy right? Check out the Vertical and Horizontal panels in the other areas too! Admins do you want to change who can view what information in the Vertical/Horizontal panels? Go to Admin Tools and click on Dynamic Panels. You can then set User permissions.

Questions, comments, suggestions? Feel free to give me a call or send me an e-mail.

I had a great discussion with a prospective user last week about searching for employee’s availability.  He wanted to be able to quickly see who was available to work specific days of the week or for specific shifts.  That part was easy enough; only he wanted to be able to do it out of each order and have the system automatically retrieve it for him.  But wait, one more thing.. every week (sometimes every day) the orders change (days and shifts) and the employee’s availability changed as well.

Does this sound familiar?  I’m sure that many of you have run into this same scenario.  How do you quickly gather information from your staffing software on an employee’s availability for specific orders several times a day without running a seperate search each time?

You could set up a couple of saved searches that allow you to run the information quickly and add those particular candidates to the order.  From the search you can also e-mail all of those candidates letting them know a new job is available and asking them to contact you if they are interested/available to work that specific day or shift.  Remember that your saved searches can also be shared with other users so they too can help you fill those orders.

I also suggested using the Skill section to keep track of when someone was available.  I know this is not a true “skill” but it will work quickly with Auto Match when you want to search on a specific order.  By making a skill category such as Availability, you can ask your applicants to check off the days/shifts they are available to work.  Then when you create the order to you can add the “skills” of the days/shifts to the order.  By clicking the Auto Match button you will return those who are available.  Even better, if you have an Employee Portal you can ask them to log in every so often and update their own availability under the Skills section.

The second solution seemed to be the one that would work best for this particular company since their employees call in every week to update their availability with the staff.  Currently they have approximately 200 employees calling in every week!  How much time do you think that will save for them to have their own temps update their availability “skills” online?  By my calculation I figure each employee probably takes roughly 3 minutes on the phone, multiplied by 200 that’s 600 minutes or 10 hours of someone’s time each week that can be allocated to something else!

Do you have a bottleneck you are currently dealing with?  Send me an e-mail or give me a call, I would love to help you find a solution that could potentially save you a few hours each week too!

I have written a good deal about evaluating your processes and procedures over the last few months.  I think this is something that as an owner, manager or even a staff member you should be doing on a regular basis.  I’m not talking about once or twice a year, but on a weekly basis.  The landscape of staffing is an ever changing one.  New challenges, problems and issues arise on a daily basis.  So sit back and take a few minutes to think about the following scenarios; what are your current processes and procedures and could you make them more efficient?

How much time are you spending between different software programs?  As Avionté users you should be spending the majority of your time within the Avionté program.  Take a minute to think about a process that you leave the software for.. could it be done in Avionté?  A few weeks ago I worked with a client that wanted to assign tasks to various staff members.  Instead of using their Outlook (like they had in the past) they started using the Message section.  This not only allowed them to task other users, but kept a record of it in the Customer/Employee/Order.

Reports – No need to create hodgepodge reports in Excel.   All the information you enter into Avionté can be pulled back out to create a report.  Our software comes with over 50 standard reports.  Chances are you will find the info you are looking for.  If not, let us know.  We can talk about creating a custom report for you.

E-mail Communication – By sending your e-mails through your Avionté system you are able to keep documentation of who, what and when.  Other users will also have access to seeing the same information in the message section.  Coming Soon!  Group and marketing management features.  This is a big new CRM enhancement.   You will now be able to put Employees, Contacts and Customers into groups and manage those groups.   From within the groups section, you can log messages, add or remove people from the group, create follow-up tasks and appointments, send mass emails and generate form letters.  This feature works in conjunction with Favorites.  This feature also allows users to send email without using Outlook.

Documents- Keep all your documents within Avionté.

Resume Generator- Supply your Customers with the information they need.

Maps- Use Show Map in Actions to auto populate information.

Web Portals- Are you still asking applicants to fill out paper applications?  Consider the resources for just one application?  The printing costs, wage/time of the person entering it, and then someone to file it.  How about timecards?  If you are not already using our portals to allow your Employees and Customers to manage online timecards.. now would be a good time to think about it.

Are there other functions that you or your staff is leaving your current software to do?  Shoot us a message, we would be happy to evaluate and let you know if you can save time and work more efficiently by incorporating the process within you staffing software.

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