To this day, companies large and small across the U.S. are struggling with staffing their businesses and retaining new hires. It is no secret that in the last two years since the beginning of the pandemic in the United States, U.S. businesses have been experiencing an ongoing national staffing shortage. Of course, there are unlimited individual scenarios that are causing the mass U.S. staff shortages, but many of these reasons overlap and can be pinpointed back to the effects COVID-19 had on the country–and the world. Here are 7 reasons why your business might be having trouble attracting the right talent.

People want to be fairly compensated.

It’s as simple as that. After years of declining wages– topped off with a global pandemic that caused U.S. staff shortages left and right– employers were forced to start paying more. As the world became an “employee’s market,” companies began competing with each other to outpay the competition. Paying more meant hopefully attracting and keeping quality hires. A team of happy, well-paid workers will perform better and prove more loyal than a team who is underpaid and knows the business next door might be willing to offer higher compensation.

People want more job flexibility.

Another main reason for the U.S. staff shortages is the fact that flexibility at work is a common–and expected–benefit now. As the pandemic hit and everyone was forced to begin working virtually, employees learned first-hand the benefits of flexibility in the workplace. Work out in the middle of the day? Sure. Clock in at 9:30 and clock out at 5:30? Go for it. Take conference calls in your pajamas? Absolutely. Once the world began to open up again, the lack of flexibility for in-person jobs became unattractive, and people began to quit or not even apply to less-flexible opportunities.

Now more than ever, people care about actually liking their jobs.

For generations, enjoying your job was not something people expected or even cared about. You would go to work, get the job done, come home, and complain about your day–only to do it all over again for 50 years until society said you could retire. Ever since the pandemic hit, the younger generations in the U.S. workforce took a deep look within and decided to put their foot down. A life-changing event like a global pandemic caused workers to look within and realize that life is too short to do something they aren’t passionate about.

Workers with children require childcare.

Another huge reason for U.S. staff shortages is that once the pandemic hit, parents needed to begin working from home and taking care of their children at the same time. Childcare was not an option during the national lockdowns, so most families had to make the best of what they had. Thousands of parents had to choose to either let their work quality suffer, their children struggle due to lack of care, or quit their jobs altogether. Naturally, these circumstances led to a lot of 2-weeks notices.

Millions of Baby Boomers retired early.

People everywhere are calling this particular cause of the U.S. staff shortages “The Great Retirement.” The Baby Boomer generation had millions retire early in the midst of the pandemic. As of October 2021, an additional 3.3 million people, or roughly 7% more than predicted, had retired since right before the pandemic hit. Continuing to work from home in the mayhem of it all was stressful and seemingly pointless to a large percentage of retirees who were just a few years away from retirement anyway. Leaving the workforce early was the most logical thing to do for these workers, yet the effect it had collectively on U.S. staff shortages was massive.

The US lost lots of immigrant workers.

As you know, COVID-19 had a huge effect on traveling both intra- and inter-nationally. For a country like the United States that usually has a constant stream of people immigrating to it, restrictions like these can significantly contribute to U.S. staffing shortages. After two years of travel and immigration restrictions, the U.S. staffing world lost over two million working-age immigrants.

There’s a disconnect between available jobs and worker needs.

Today, there seems to be an available job around every corner or on every website you check. If this is the case, why is there still such a huge U.S. staffing shortage? The final reason is simple: the people looking for jobs are not interested in the ones available. This problem is widely known by economists as “mismatches.” Job expectations, pay, and location are all lacking in the eyes of applicants, and knowing how to reach the right people can be frustrating for employers.

Getting More With Less

It is clear that the pandemic caused a snowball effect that led to the staffing crisis the country is currently facing. However, we encourage you to view the U.S. staffing shortage as an opportunity to improve upon your current staffing approach. There are many ways to find the right hires for you, but automating these back-office tasks in your hiring efforts is key–as it frees up necessary time for higher level tasks and strategic functions. With Bilflo , you can automate the simpler tasks and manage hundreds of contractors and direct hires from one simple platform so you can focus on hiring and paying your talent well. Save time and labor while doing more for your business. Schedule a demo with us today.

The uptick in the application of automation is nowhere more common than in the business world. Many back-office tasks that used to be the domain of human workers have rapidly shifted to being run by software programs, and it’s not hard to see why. Programs are consistent, never need to take breaks, and don’t cost nearly as much per completed task as a human worker. The staffing industry, in particular, has benefited from the introduction of increased automation of back-office tasks and staffing automation tools. This allows for the managing of far more contractors than ever before while ensuring accuracy in the tasks assigned to the programs.

Below we’ll discuss some of the most common areas for staffing industry back-office automation and some of the leading programs in each field.

All-In-One Automation Tools

When we write about all-in-one automation tools, we mean a program that can link up all your other automation tools into a single interface. This overall program should be able to provide greater control and organization and ease of use improvements over using each of the programs independently. Let’s dive into two of the best.

Bilflo

Have you ever wished you could integrate your applicant tracking system with payroll and accounting, all in one easy-to-navigate location? Bilflo does just that. By linking seamlessly with the vast majority of the top software offered in these three areas, it can function as an aggregator of three independent data sets, including sales activity, timekeeping, and accounting, a rarity in this space. But it does so much more than that. Featuring built-in metrics that make the most of all available data, you can easily keep track of your team’s performance. Can’t seem to find a preset that works for you? Create your own analysis by any available metrics. This further level of integration also creates the need for fewer human employees, in turn leading to savings.

Bilflo is set up for both contract and direct placement work.

  • Contractors
    • Manage your roster of current contractors
    • Automatically invoice clients based on the number of hours worked by your contractors
    • Automatically send data to payroll and accounting
    • Create reports based on metrics of your choosing
  • Direct Placement
    • Provide a single place to manage all of your placement data
    • Automatically invoice clients based on the terms set out in your agreement
    • Keep track of your payments and commissions
    • Create reports based on metrics of your choosing

Bullhorn One

Like Bilflo, Bullhorn aggregates and centralizes the information from your applicant tracking system, payroll software, and timekeeping software, all with an easy-to-use interface to boot. One key benefit touted by Bullhorn One is its built-in integration with HereFish, a leading automation platform also made by Bullhorn. Indeed, stressing the importance of automation is very central to all of Bullhorn’s products. And when you find out how much time it can save each recruiter and effectively multiply the number of candidates they can manage, you’ll likely be interested in learning more as well. However, while Bullhorn is amazing at what it does, its focus is typically on larger clients and their products are therefore costlier to purchase and implement.

Applicant Tracking Systems Automation

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are at base repositories for all candidate-related information. Today’s ATSs go well beyond simply holding information. They must be well designed and easy to use, and provide insight into each candidate and requirement. Here are some top options on the market today.

Avionte

A mix of ATS and customer relationship management (CRM) software, Avionte strives to make every candidate and client profile easily accessible in an intuitive manner and short amount of time. It accomplishes this through the integration of automation. Among its automation features are:

  • Resume parsing
    • Find resumes with the qualifications you’re looking for quicker than ever
  • Email synchronization
    • Track and send emails through any provider, including Outlook and Gmail
  • Fast and accurate search
    • Boasts a powerful engine for boolean searches
  • Comprehensive order management
    • Provides tracking for status, types, durations, and requirements
  • Mass/quick assign
    • Assign multiple recruiters to large requirements at the same time

Bullhorn

Another mix of ATS and CRM comes from the previously mentioned Bullhorn. Its software promises to increase margins by maximizing productivity per recruiter through the use of automations. Post-placement relationship management is another area Bullhorn puts emphasis on in its program design. All of this allows you to make better business decisions through the availability and analysis of data.

JobAdder

JobAdder has many of the same features as Bullhorn and Aviante, including resume parsing and intuitive search. One area that JobAdder seems to have a leg up on the competition is its easy-to-use mobile app. It touts the app’s number one ranking and rave customer reviews including claims helping agencies get jobs to market two to three times faster. As a bonus, they claim to be able to post to more job boards than any other provider, which saves time and increases productivity and speed to market.

Accounting Automation Tools

Keeping track of numbers is an area uniquely suited to computer programs. After all, everything they do ultimately comes down to ones and zeroes. And accountants have been using tools to assist them since the time of the abacus. For this and other reasons, there is a proliferation of accounting software on the market. Here are a couple that stand out from the rest.

QuickBooks

There are many options available in the QuickBooks family for everything from payroll processing and taking payments through the accounting software we’re discussing today. The progeny of one of the first accounting programs on the market, this is probably the one you were most likely to have heard of coming into this article. By automating tasks like bookkeeping, invoicing, time tracking, and more, valuable company resources are freed up for more strategic roles while overall headcount drops, minimizing expenses. This also helps ensure there are as few errors as possible while surfacing the relevant data when called upon.

MS Dynamics

If the Quickbooks family serves a large number of verticals, MS Dynamics from Microsoft operates in almost every corner of the business realm. There is little it doesn’t touch, from commerce to supply chain and marketing. Its high-level approach to finance emphasizes forecasting abilities and overall adaptability in the face of change, while its automation allows for greater accuracy and lower headcount. Frankly, with the power of Microsoft behind this, it’s best not to ignore it.

Payroll Automation Tools

Your company wouldn’t have employees very quickly if you stopped paying them. Traditionally, the process of actually paying employees has been a fairly labor-intensive process. Poor record-keeping in this area could lead to legitimate lawsuits or leave you open to frivolous claims. That’s why it can be refreshing when you first use either of the two programs below.

ADP

An all-in-one payroll and HR solution, ADP has been around for years and built up a good reputation during that time. By, like all these platforms, utilizing automation in ways that eliminate the need for unnecessarily large department sizes, ADP saves your company time and money. Offering different services to suit the needs of companies large and small, they strive to have something for everyone. Just starting out or have a smaller business? They’ll help you get your small business tax credit. Have thousands of employees? Maybe their tailored compliance services are more for you. The backbone of this all is comprised of their tested payroll and HR services which rarely disappoint.

Paychex

Payroll, HR, and benefits are the three areas where Paychex operates. In addition to allowing for faster and typically more accurate than non-automated payroll methods paycheck and payroll processing, it can calculate, file, and submit your payroll taxes for you and has built-in integrations with their other two areas of expertise. A compliance feature is also present to help businesses of all sizes not run afoul of relevant regulations.

Staffing Automation Tools: Conclusion

As we’ve seen, back-office automation saves businesses time and money by applying machine processing power to tasks that used to require large numbers of individuals and where the results were often suspect. Indeed, the modern staffing organization wouldn’t be able to function without some or all of these four functions receiving some degree of automation. Which one is right for you in each area will require additional research on your part and reaching out to some for consultations before making final decisions. But we hope this list has proven a good jumping-off point for your journey towards further back-office automation in your staffing agency.

Tracking Contractors’ Hours And Payroll: Introduction

Tracking hours and doing payroll have traditionally been very labor-intensive processes. For staffing, keeping accurate hours and payroll can be more challenging than for most other industries. With large numbers of workers on the payroll at any given time and a high population of transient workers, there’s simply more opportunity to make mistakes, leading to a lot of work for not a lot of output. That being said, the output that is produced is critical to almost every type of organization. Remember, we’re talking about both time and money here, and automation can help save up to 75% on labor costs when properly implemented. In order to accomplish this, we recommend using a combination of automated timekeeping and payroll programs optimized for contractors.

Timekeeping Software

Timekeeping software is a key component of almost any business these days. Offering a host of benefits over traditional punch card systems, it allows for a reduction in payroll while increasing accuracy in time tracking. Here are some of the top benefits of using automated time tracking software.

Reduce Legitimate Error

Sometimes mistakes are going to be made, even the best employees make them. But there is a way around this, automation. By automating your timekeeping process, you virtually eliminate this risk. Simply put, there’s no one to make an error during this process as the entire thing is managed by software.

Lower Labor Costs Associated with Timekeeping

Manual timekeeping requires manual data entry. At this point, it’s more cost-effective to automate than staff many roles. This isn’t necessarily news, but it does need to be taken into consideration. For timekeeping specifically, eliminating the need to collect and enter time information into the system can be a huge timesaver with so many contractors on the payroll. 

Enhance Real-Time Financial Planning

The ability to accurately know how you’re doing is key to planning for the future. That’s why automated timekeeping software’s ability to provide that data is so appealing. With traditional timekeeping, companies had to wait until payroll got involved to have a real idea of where they stood in regards to labor costs. Even then, the data was out-of-date by the time it arrived. Now, with the ability to have accurate labor costs in real-time, forecasting is easier than ever.

Decrease Scheduling Time

The need to schedule large groups of individuals can be time-consuming. The maintenance of these schedules after publication even more so. Having them centralized in a single location, where there can be no mixups that leave a client short-staffed, is paramount to keeping clients happy. Should a change need to be made, a qualified manager or administrator can go in and make them and it will be disseminated to everyone who needs to know in an instant.

Cut Down on Time Theft

This is the big one that occurs to most people when you mention the benefits of automatic timekeeping software. Buddy punching, “forgetting to clock in” and giving a false start time, and the manual alteration of timecards have been problems in the workforce for as long as people have been paid by the hour. With an automated time tracking system, those problems are things of the past. Keeping an exact digital record of arrivals and departures of your workers with ease makes time theft a much harder task to accomplish.

Payroll Software

Just like timekeeping, payroll automation and software have gone a long way toward reducing now avoidable errors when paying employees. A critical part of nearly every business, payroll software is responsible for managing, maintaining, and monitoring payments to employees by a company. These programs are ubiquitous and come in a variety of flavors. However, all share the same key benefits.

Employee Self Service

A payroll manager’s day can be busy enough without everyone personally stopping by who needs a copy of an old paystub or some minor piece of personal information adjusted. By offering self-service portals for employees. These types of programs can take a great deal of strain off the payroll department. Most employees would rather get this information themselves rather than be a bother, so the process is doubly efficient. 

Stay Compliant

With the Fair Labor Standards Act requiring a minimum of the previous three years’ payroll records to be saved at any given time, automating your process ensures that every bit of information you’ve entered into the payroll system is saved until you delete it. This way should any issue ever arise with the government, you can have everything you need right at your fingertips.

Generate Reports

What good is data if you don’t do anything with it? With automated payroll software, you can create specific reports based on almost any payroll-related metric. Whether it’s total payroll over the years or comparing an onslaught of contractors during a specific time of the year, every year, by having your data in digital form you can easily create most reports you can think up.

Save Money

Automation came around to save money, plain and simple. Today, one of the biggest drivers behind the adoption of automation in payroll is still cost-cutting. Beyond the accuracy and increased capabilities, there is also money to be saved, a fact not to be forgotten. In fact, automating payroll can decrease your payroll expenses by as much as 80%.

How Bilflo Can Help

So, now we know how useful automation can be in the world of payroll and timekeeping. But the staffing world has its own unique challenges. That’s where Bilflo comes in. Specifically designed to integrate with your existing ATS through open APIs, it helps cut down on back-office expenses by automating essential but often time-intensive processes. Below are some examples of how Bilflow can help your staffing company cut down on unnecessary overhead while attaining new levels of accuracy and efficiency in hours tracking and payroll.

Tracking Contract Data

Keeping track of every detail of contract assignments can be a real lifesaver when you have so many contractors working for you at the same time. Bilflo can track a wide variety of data points associated with your contractor, all in a single easily accessible place. So, rates, burdens, timecard types, overtime rules, job site addresses, workers’ comp codes and rates, location-based burdens, approvers, sick and vacation journals, client agreements, candidate onboarding records, and more, are all at your fingertips with Bilflo.

Timecard and Expense Management

There’s a lot that goes into managing time and expenses. Particularly when you have such a large and transient pool of workers. With all of this, there can be many issues with inaccurate time, whether accidental or otherwise. The American Payroll Association estimates that 7% of total payroll can be attributed to inaccurate time. That’s why automation can be so helpful. With Bilflo, you can:

  • Automatically create, send & get approval for contractors’ timecards
  • Calculate overtime in all 50 states
  • Contractors can upload necessary documentation for reimbursement or as required
  • Timecards come in a variety of forms to suit your needs or can be imported from another program.

Automatic Data Transfer

As we just showed with timekeeping, manual entry of information is one of the biggest causes of error in business. The manual transfer of information between payroll and billing software can wreak serious havoc on a company’s finances due to errors and inconsistencies. By automatically retrieving and transferring data from contractor profiles to and from payroll, there is a significantly reduced risk of error.

Take the Guesswork Out of Invoicing

When invoicing, there can be a lot to keep track of. With Bilflo, you don’t have to rely on memory or handwritten notes. You don’t even need to access more than a single digital repository to see everything you need to invoice with confidence, including:

  • Payment terms, billing addresses, line item information, POs, email, and mail delivery preferences.
  • Automatically create invoices from client-approved timecards.
  • See reports in real-time on your contractors’ timecard status.

Accounting Integration

Integration between timekeeping and payroll makes sense on just about every level. However, there are many payroll departments that aren’t communicating as well as they should with their counterparts in timekeeping. With more businesses than ever are using accounting software to track their billing, integration between accounting and timekeeping software is more important than ever. Bilflo was built with this in mind. Now, you can export invoices in full detail and programmatically create and update invoices in your billing system all in a single place.

Find Answers Easily

Now that we have all this data, what can we do with it? According to Bilflo, the implications are broad. Because so many different data points are now held in one place, they can be utilized to create in-depth and novel reports that make the most of the various metrics Bilfo collects in innovative ways to give you the most utility out of the raw data input.

Tracking Contractors’ Hours And Payroll: Conclusion

Whether it’s the time-intensive nature of administrative tasks when performed by a human or our unfortunate propensity for error while completing those tasks, automation goes a long way toward limiting inefficiencies in the back office of staffing agencies by addressing those very issues head-on. By providing integration with a host of different ATSs and automating the most problematic tasks, Bilflo will help streamline your business processes so you can keep your focus where it should be.

Even though many companies have already started going back to the office by now, many are still choosing to adopt a hybrid work option. It’s safe to say that the hybrid workplace will be here to stay for a while. The staffing industry has had to stay up-to-date on the changing hybrid work trends of this new work era to meet the demands of today’s environment both for clients and their own internal workplace. 

In this post, we’ll be taking a look at the top six hybrid work trends for staffing agencies to be aware of so you can continue to help your clients find the best candidates for their workplace.

Artificial Intelligence for Staffing

AI recruiting has become one of the leading hybrid work trends for staffing with the rise of companies switching to hybrid or remote work. AI recruiting uses artificial intelligence to automate certain parts of the recruiting process, including sourcing, resume screening, and interview scheduling.

Artificial intelligence for recruiting can help staffing agencies more easily narrow down their candidate pool to the best choices for a company or role. Companies that have a hybrid work environment and candidates who are seeking a hybrid workplace can now more easily match up with the use of AI in recruiting. 

Ultimately, you save time, resources, and find the best candidates for a role. Today’s job market is booming with the number of job openings and job seekers higher than ever before, recruiters and staffing agencies are very busy and have a lot on their plates. Finding the right people for roles involving hybrid work can be time-consuming, especially if you don’t have the right automation processes in place.

Artificial intelligence is a staffing agency’s solution to helping companies fill positions for hybrid work more quickly and we’ll be seeing more people switch to the future of AI for recruiting.

Data-Driven Staffing

Staffing agencies are always under pressure to find the right candidates for the job, leading them to turn to use more data to help make smarter recruiting decisions. A data-driven staffing process focuses on using techniques like predictive modeling, data-mining, and machine learning to better evaluate candidates. 

Especially in the hybrid work world where recruiters and employers may not see candidates face to face during the hiring process, using data upgrades the traditional staffing process for more aligned and confident decision-making when it comes to hiring the best candidates. 

Virtual Recruiting and Onboarding

Virtual recruiting was already a rising trend before COVID-19 and skyrocketed when most companies went remote. Now with more companies coming back to the office and implementing a hybrid work option, virtual recruiting and onboarding will still remain a hybrid work trend. 

Most businesses are utilizing virtual recruiting as their primary method of recruiting from the search to the interview process. With many companies remaining remote or adopting a hybrid workplace, companies are also implementing a virtual onboarding process. The switch to virtual recruiting, hiring, and onboarding is allowing business and staffing agencies to make the entire experience faster, easier, and more streamlined.

Staffing agencies can make the most of this hybrid work trend by either switching to or improving upon their existing virtual recruiting process.

Flexibility as a Benefit

Before the pandemic, hybrid working options were rare compared to today’s workforce environment. Since the rapid growth of remote and hybrid work within the past few years, having the flexibility of hybrid working is becoming a non-negotiable benefit for many employees.

More than ever people are actively seeking jobs that offer a hybrid work option. Some job seekers are putting hybrid work at the top of their priority list and only considering roles that offer hybrid work. According to a survey, 72% of office workers would prefer a hybrid work option to full-time in-office work. 

The same survey showed that 83% of workers would be more likely to apply for a position if it offered a hybrid work option. Companies looking to attract and hire top candidates would greatly benefit from offering potential employees more flexibility and a hybrid work option as a main benefit. 

For staffing agencies, understanding this hybrid work trend will become essential for consulting with clients about what they bring to the table for employees in terms of flexibility. As well as using a company’s flexibility or hybrid work option as a main attraction point for recruiting top talent for roles.

Casting a Wider Net

Many of these hybrid work trends center around the world online. With lots of companies moving to a hybrid work environment and some offering fully remote options, and the majority of the recruiting process switching to online as well, staffing agencies and recruiters are beginning to cast a wider net in their candidate searches. With location and eight hours in an office five days a week no longer being limiting factors, the pool of potential employees to consider for jobs is increasing. 

As the remote and hybrid work models become more widely adopted, so does the trend of companies expanding their teams beyond the geographical radius of their companies. Even with a hybrid workplace that requires employees to come to the office once or twice a week, employees are willing to take a longer commute if it means coming into the office less frequently. 

Staffing agencies can take advantage of the hybrid workforce in this way by widening their search in the recruitment process to find the best talent and fit for a role. However, the search pool may narrow depending on how often a company is requiring employees to come into the week each week and how long of a commute people are willing to have. 

Webinars

With the adoption of a more hybrid, virtual workspace comes the ushering out of job fairs and the rise of webinars. Companies have been increasingly shifting over to webinars as an alternative to job fairs to bring in new potential employees. 

Webinars aren’t completely new to the staffing world, but because of the push to a more digital recruiting and work environment due to the pandemic, they’ve become more popular in recent years. With webinars, a company or even a staffing agency can recruit for open positions and reach a wider candidate pool all from the comfort of their home screens. 

Hybrid Work Trends: Conclusion

With more of the workforce moving towards more remote working options, it’s clear that the hybrid work model is going to be the new norm. As trends and best practices continue to evolve in this type of work environment, it’s important for staffing agencies to be on top of these hybrid work trends to help improve their performance and find the best candidates for their client’s needs in the most efficient way possible. 

At Bilflo, we help staffing agencies streamline their process while providing them with the necessary technology and automation to keep up with the changing needs of the hiring process. 

To learn more, you can watch this short video about our software or schedule a demo with one of our team members.

The world has recently seen one of the greatest increases in job-hopping in recent memory. According to a Resumebuilder.com poll, about 23% of employees will seek new jobs in 2022. This represents a huge challenge for companies and staffing firms as they are now required to fill more open positions than they ever have in the past. Luckily, technology has made it easier in many ways to source, manage, and onboard applicants and new hires. The issue for HR departments or staffing agencies is choosing the right technology/software tools for their business so that they can ease the burden of hiring on their staff and make better decisions in regards to bringing new employees on board. 

In this guide, we hope to provide some guidance into the best staffing software tools on the market today.

Bilflo

This powerful software was created to integrate your current front office (ATS, CRM) with back-office processes (Payroll, Accounting, Time Management) to automate data entry, which helps you save time and money. Sales and recruitment activity is consolidated and tracked in Bilflo, along with rates and time from different systems. In addition, sales and gross profit information is unified in real-time.

Features

  • ATS Integration – Bilflo APIs (Application Program Interface) communicate seamlessly with your ATS by bulk retrieving information and transferring it to your backend so you can avoid hours of manual data entry.
  • Timecard and Expense Management – The system effortlessly remember and calculates vacation and sick days, and it tracks per diem charges and generates expense reports for you. It also automates the timecard approval process. 
  • Real-time Reporting – This is great for staffing and recruiting agencies because Bilflo handles direct hire and contract payroll and invoicing, which means you will be able to get gross profit reports in real-time for any team member, over any period of time, for any service offering. These reports help recruiters to find where payments are falling through the cracks.

Jobadder

JobAdder is a leading cloud-based recruitment software solution that helps the agency and in-house recruiters find and manage talent more effectively through automation. JobAdder’s flexible powerful technology works with existing recruitment processes and HR systems to offer a seamless experience. 

Features

  • Web Driven Timesheets – Configure and format timesheets, enter payroll start dates and time-increments, log in to timesheets from any device and receive automated reminders. 
  • Recruit on the go – Take care of the recruitment process on the move with the voice-to-text functionality, applicant screening and smart reminders. Access the system anytime with the range of mobile recruiting apps, including iOS, Android, Windows Phone and HTML5 
  • Easy Access to Job Boards – Facilitate easy access to prominent job posting boards and social media sites. Track every applicant with automatic source tagging and make the hiring process faster. 

BambooHR 

This software provides a suite of human resources software aimed specifically at growing businesses. BambooHR’s ATS tool component can be customized to fit each team’s needs and is designed to make information easy to find for all stakeholders. It also offers the advantage of being able to integrate with a much larger HR suite that handles compensation management, onboarding, time tracking, and performance management.

Features

  • Accessibility – it’s available in mobile, desktop and cloud-based formats. Teams can view resumes, answer candidate questions, and provide ratings and feedback from home, the beach, or really anywhere. 
  • Robust Team Collaboration – their software allows for enhanced collaboration between hiring teams with automated alerts and in-system messaging to ensure continuous communication. It centralizes candidate data that is delivered instantly to desktops and mobiles. 
  • Enhanced Onboarding Experience – Bamboo does a great job with managing the transition from applicant to employee. Recruiters can customize new hire packets that include information about their first day, an introduction to their new team, and onboarding tasks so they will be ready to start as soon as they arrive.

Paylocity

This all-in-one tool allows recruiters and HR pros to easily manage daily tasks in payroll, benefits, talent, and workforce management. Their system is intuitive and easy to use.

Features

  • Customize Processes – Paylocity allows you to delegate responsibilities to recruiters and hiring managers while configuring custom workflows that automate the approval process.  
  • Compensation management – the data and insights from your compensation management program can help you customize merit plans based on your pay cycles. Affirm alignment with company goals by allocating budget and participant eligibility for the plans. Develop automated approval processes and guidelines to ensure the strategy is followed.
  • Recruiting Analytics – this software has a very powerful analytics engine that helps identify bottlenecks, forecasts time-to-hire, gives you cost-to-hire metrics and much more with interactive dashboards that allow you to visualize data simply. 

Workable

A complete solution for recruitment, Workable provides applicant management tools, processes, and automation, all in one place. Their interface is user–friendly, easy to keep track of candidates.

Features

  • AI Recruiter – As you create your job, AI Recruiter scans your job description for the best passive and existing candidates.
  • Anonymized Screening – Improve hiring inclusivity by anonymizing candidate information. This feature is easy to turn on and helps remove bias during the initial CV screening.
  • Pre-Employment Testing – They remove the need to work with an assessments provider – choose from 5 personality and cognitive assessments, right in the job editor. Recruiters can leave feedback in one unified place without leaving the candidate timeline.

Bullhorn

Bullhorn Recruitment CRM is a SaaS based solution that offers a suite of features typical of applicant tracking systems: a mobile app, batch or mass communication with potential candidates via multiple channels, instantaneous posting to multiple job boards, resume parsing, and data and document uploading.

Features

  • Resume Parsing – this feature helps recruiters automatically extract the most needed information from resumes to help save time and improve efficiency
  • Email Inbox Gadget – this helps recruiters better manage the endless amount of emails they receive. This allows you to view emails according to the info that you have in the platform. You can take action from your email instead of having to toggle between that and the platform. 
  • Compliance Automation – this feature allows your team to stay GDPR and CCPA compliant automatically by collecting initial and ongoing consent and sharing privacy policies with every candidate at the right time 

Zoho Recruit

Zoho Recruit is a cloud-based ATS. This product offers features typical of applicant tracking systems: a user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards, batch or mass communication with potential candidates via multiple channels such as email or by leveraging its integration with social networking sites (e.g., LinkedIn) and commonly used applications (e.g., Outlook, Google Apps), posting to multiple job boards and a branded company career page, and resume parsing. 

Features

  • AI Job Matching Assistance – this feature helps quickly identify talent and provides behavioral assessments of candidates, and uses AI to score and better help you select the right talent.
  • Hiring Pipeline Management – this tool helps recruiters better visualize how many candidates are in each stage of a job search. This 360-degree view is fully customizable.
  • Candidate Portal – Bring candidates directly to your recruitment system and qualify suitable candidates. Candidates can apply to a specific job, submit information for future opportunities and track job status.

Best Staffing Software Tools: Conclusion

There are many great staffing software tools on the market today, but only a select few will be great for your particular business. There will always be trade-offs when selecting a technology, so it is important to know what fits in best with your staff and objectives. 

Even though it may seem like something out of a science fiction movie, AI or artificial intelligence is now here to stay. While often depicted as scary in contemporary films and TV, AI has proven to be extremely helpful to the recruiting and staffing industry due to an increasing demand for human capital paired with a diminishing supply of experienced and talented people within the labor pool. 

Although it is still in its infancy, it has made inroads in many industries, but perhaps none more profoundly than in recruiting and staffing. AI for recruiting is the application of artificial intelligence to the talent acquisition process, and is designed to streamline or automate some part of the recruiting workflow, especially repetitive, high-volume tasks. According to a recent IDC report, in 2 years time 77% of HR organizations will be using AI for talent acquisition. While 56% currently use AI for this purpose. Let’s take an in depth look at all the ways AI is changing the game for recruiting.

AI FOR RECRUITING: SOURCING CANDIDATES

One of the most time-consuming and mind numbing parts of a recruiters job is manually going through loads of resumes looking for the appropriate candidates. Nearly half of recruiters say they spend close to 30 hours a week on sourcing alone. Instead of overtaxing recruiters, AI is making it possible to automatically narrow down the best people based on experience, skills, tenure and other qualities by applying this knowledge to automatically rank, grade, and shortlist the strongest candidates. Intelligent screening software that automates resume screening represents a huge opportunity for recruiters because it integrates with your existing ATS. This means it doesn’t disrupt your workflow or the candidate workflow and requires little IT support, not to mention it accelerates the hiring process.

BETTER ENGAGEMENT WITH CANDIDATES

Anyone that has ever gone through a number of interviews with a variety of companies can tell you that the process can sometimes feel dehumanizing. Ironically, it’s because many times humans, in this case recruiters and HR professionals, let emails, phone calls, and inquiries go unanswered due to the sheer amount of work they have on their plate. The result is that otherwise talented candidates that may be a good fit will slip through the cracks because they feel disillusioned with the hiring process of that organization. This is where AI can be especially effective because it can automatically respond and reach out to candidates with more info and even with full on conversations. Even though candidates know that there may not be a human behind this interaction, at least the organization is keeping them updated and answering any questions they have in a timely manner. Additionally, AI and automation can provide assessment testing and scoring without human intervention to create more efficiency in the hiring process by qualifying candidates quicker. 

REMOVING BIAS FROM THE HIRING PROCESS

Unfortunately we all have biases. We tend to pre-judge people based on incomplete information and while most of these biases are not borne of malice, they are nonetheless harmful. Additionally, these biases often lead to bad hiring decisions that can negatively impact a company’s culture. Since AI isn’t warped by human biases, the outcomes it produces have less to do with race, gender, disability, or sexual orientation and more on skill and competency. This technology helps standardize the hiring process which ultimately results in more inclusive workplaces which have been shown to improve a company’s bottom line.

REDUCTION OF HIRING TIMES

In order to thrive, companies need to fill openings within their organization in a timely fashion. The reasons for this are keeping positions open can overburden existing staff, draining their morale and lowering productivity. Perhaps the most important benefit that AI offers is how much it reduces the hiring lifecycle. By automating the most repetitive and time-consuming parts of the hiring process, recruiters and HR professionals are able to find candidates, move them through the hiring pipeline, and onboard them quicker. The best part is that this technology can be integrated into existing recruiting processes without disruption.

DOING MORE WITH LESS

No matter what industry you’re in, executives are always looking for ways to cut costs while improving efficiency. Recruiting is no different in this regard, but luckily AI accomplishes the “do more with less” credo. This technology frees recruiters from menial tasks in a way never before seen, allowing them to forge more deep and meaningful relationships with candidates. This increased time spent with candidates allows HR staff and recruiters to go beyond just skills and achievements to see if a candidate would be a fit with company culture and to better assess their soft skills. 

AI FOR RECRUITING: IN CONCLUSION

The bottom line is that AI has made recruitment faster, better and more fair. It’s by no means meant to replace humans in the hiring process, but rather to augment their skills and make them more potent by eliminating tasks that are menial and time consuming. Strangely, AI actually helps humanize the hiring process by improving workflows, improving engagement, and allowing everyone involved to feel more appreciated and allowing recruiters to spend more time getting to know the candidates they are looking to hire.

Our most essential care giving institutions are under siege amidst a nursing staffing shortage that has now taken center stage. The COVID-19 pandemic has uncovered a long known issue amongst medical professionals and amplified it into the public sphere. Nearly two years of caring for critically sick patients who can’t have family or other loved ones by their side and are repeatedly facing death has made an already difficult job even more difficult. This has caused burnout to skyrocket, forcing many nurses and other health-care workers to quit. This has added to the stress of those who remain, because they are frequently forced to work longer hours under more difficult conditions while caring for even more patients. This unfortunate cocktail of less nurses for a greater number of sick people has resulted in worse outcomes for patients. It is crucial for medical institutions to solve these nursing staffing issues to lower mortality rates, shorten patient stays, and improve overall care.

Some statistics from Nursing Solutions Inc.(NSI) :

  • Hospitals are experiencing a higher registered nurse (RN) vacancy rate. Currently, this stands at 9.9%, up another point from last year. Less than a quarter (23.9%) of hospitals reported a RN vacancy rate of “less than 5%”. 
  • An overwhelming majority (94.8%) of hospitals view retention as a “key strategic imperative” and to a lesser degree, is evident in operational practice/planning. Almost all hospitals have retention initiatives (80.7%) however, only half (51.4%) have tied these to a measurable goal.
  • In 2019, less than a quarter (23.7%) of hospitals reported a vacancy rate greater than 10%. Today, over a third (35.8%) are in this group. 

So how does the medical establishment solve the problem of finding and keeping nurses? 

Medical Staffing Solutions

Strategic Engagement in the Hiring Process

In a competitive nurse staffing market, it’s more important than ever for hospitals and clinics to be both more strategic and engaged during the hiring process. As with any sector, the first impression of an organization is usually formed during the hiring process;It’s critical to create a hiring plan that is helpful, thorough, and transparent. You could accomplish this by taking the following steps:

  • Write a complete and accurate job description that reflects your organization’s mission and the role to be filled
  • Communicate frequently and keep candidates updated on the status of their application and establish clear timelines 
  • Perform a comprehensive review of each candidate’s application.
  • Read reviews from employees and candidates to gather feedback about your hiring process
  • Allow for peer interviews by other nurses – this creates cultural buy-in from existing current employees as they are a great barometer of how someone will fit into the existing team
  • Utilize staffing technology platforms that can automate some of the more menial tasks in the hiring process to allow for medical HR staff to both key in on all the appropriate candidates and more easily manage the hiring pipeline

Reward Hard Work and Performance

It doesn’t matter the job or industry, people appreciate being recognized for a job well done. Properly recognizing employees for good work can help them feel like they are a valuable part of the organization, boost their confidence, and motivate them to stay loyal to the company. Create unique ways beyond verbal praise to demonstrate to the nursing staff that their work is valued and appreciated on a regular basis. 

  • Establish a rewards program could include the ability for coworkers to nominate one another
  • A mention in the company newsletter
  • Gift cards
  • Paid for group outings
  • Paid staff lunches 

Collect and Deploy Feedback

Many times medical organizations suffer from a management structure that only allows for communication to go in one direction –top-down. Unfortunately, this results in nurses not feeling heard in regards to the challenges they face in their jobs. 

Not only does not having a voice in the workplace lead to lowered morale among staff, but it robs the hospital or clinic of crucial intel from their most essential front line care workers. In this way, the harm of not accepting and deploying feedback is two fold. It creates resentment amongst nursing staff, and robs the institution from learning crucial information and optimizing processes that could cut costs, improve productivity, and enhance care.

Promote Professional Development

Everyone within an organization likes to feel like they can improve their skills and their standing within their chosen job. The nursing profession is no different in this regard. The first part of professional development is being transparent about a career track whereby nurses can increase their pay, position, and improve their skills. These types of professional development programs can boost nurses’ confidence and create loyalty to their current organization. This means creating training programs in the form of webinars or workshops to support nurses’ desire to advance and gain skills that will help them provide exceptional patient care. Also, sending your nursing staff to conferences where they can network with other professionals and learn about new nursing topics and trends. When nurses feel like their workplace invests in their development, they are far more likely to stick around. In a modeling study, conducted with several colleagues at the University of Virginia, it was determined that hospitals that invest in burnout reduction programs — everything from safe staffing to well-being initiatives to meaningful raises and bonuses and clear lines for professional mobility — spend about 30% less on burnout-related costs. And new nurses who work at such burnout-savvy hospitals tend to stay at their jobs about 20% longer.

Provide Competitive Compensation

This may be an obvious and straightforward point, but organizations need to pay on par or better than their competition to hire and retain nurses and stay adequately staffed. Currently, we find ourselves in a situation where nurses have more leverage than ever before in regards to their career. Quite frankly, supply is low and demand is high. This means employers need to provide a competitive salary, a sign-on bonus, and an enticing compensation package that may include extra paid time off, tuition reimbursement, and other benefits. Although your present employees may appreciate working at your location, it’s critical to pay annual salaries that are competitive with those offered by others in your industry. If salary is a major deciding factor for an employee, and they’re a nurse who contributes significantly to the organization, you might be able to keep them by providing them more lucrative compensation.

TAKE STEPS TO RELIEVE BURNOUT

In nursing, a paradigm change from crisis intervention to mental health promotion and prevention is critical. For years, healthcare executives failed to adequately address high rates of burnout (emotional weariness, depersonalization, job alienation, and a sense of ineffectiveness) and harmful lifestyle practices among their workforce. Instead, burnout was thought to be a personal rather than a systemic problem. Individual nurses were left to work things out on their own, which resulted in a crisis. This problem has been exacerbated by the Covid 19 pandemic and has led to lower moral and decreased retention rates amongst nursing staff. 

Here are some tips to help ease the mental fatigue of nursing staff:

  • Frequently check-in with nurses 
  • Provide nurses wellness programs 
  • Integrate more PTO into nurse schedules
  • Reduce administrative burden
  • Enable technology solutions the remove redundant or menial tasks

In Conclusion

The answers are clear – in order for hospitals and clinics to be better equipped to maintain appropriate nurse staffing levels, medical organizations need to enhance their hiring processes to be more engaged and transparent, provide greater feedback opportunities, incentivize a nurse’s professional development through learning opportunities and career development that allows them to grow and earn more.

Recruitment processes that are efficient, productive, and pleasant for both candidates and hiring teams will surely improve your recruiters’ performance. Let’s take a look at some ways you can boost recruiter performance quickly.

Improve Recruiters Performance: Introduce healthy competition

Let your recruiters see their real-time individual and team performance allowing them to gain insights into their work contributions and encourage fun and healthy competitions between departments

Many employees are motivated by elements other than money and incentives, such as recognition, challenges, and empowerment which can easily be done through individual contribution tracking.

Keep the competition fresh by updating your team in real-time, whether on a digital dashboard or a whiteboard in your office.

Streamline work processes

Wouldn’t you agree that manual back-office processes are mundane? 

Workplace productivity does not only refer to getting things done but more so, the time spent by your employees on things that actually matter.

Repetitive jobs are great for automation, and with so much new technology available, there’s no excuse to keep wasting time on them.  Automation doesn’t mean having to replace human work altogether but instead gives efficiency to the job that needs to be done.

Utilize business intelligence

Seeing the proof in numbers can often clarify the big picture for your recruiters. Use a business intelligence tool that collects your sales and workforce in easy-to-read formats. Having clear data on your organization’s sales and performance will help you identify inefficiencies and address them accordingly.

If you want to better utilize the skills and potential of your recruiters, then we might just have what you need at Bilflo. 

With Bilflo’s automation and business intelligence software, you can work with your staff to figure out what your top-performing teams are doing and how you can build on their achievements. Through this, you create a culture that acknowledges and promotes individual effort and problem-solving and promotes technique-sharing that’s beneficial for everybody in the long run.

Please feel free to check out these 30-sec videos on how our business intelligence software works:

Improve team performance by using Bilflo

We totally believe that many mistakes are technical and unintentional, but they can be costly for businesses. In fact, according to the IRS, 40% of small to mid-sized businesses face IRS penalties related to incorrect and delayed payroll filing.  But what, exactly, are the mistakes that happen during the payroll process?  Here are the 3 most expensive payroll errors and how to avoid them.

Most Expensive Payroll Errors

  • Depositing employment taxes late
    • It’s important to be crystal clear on employment tax due dates.
  • Mis-classifying employees and contractors
    • It’s crucial to make sure you understand each classification and classify every person you hire correctly straight out of the gate.
  • Processing payroll using the wrong state
    • If you have employees that work in different states, keep accurate payroll records and organize your files based on the state they work at and NOT where your office is based.

We know that no business wants to spend its hard-earned revenue on payroll penalties. But when you process payroll manually, you’re leaving a lot of room for human error. 

Our team at Bilflo helps staffing companies automate their back-office workload such as timekeeping and payroll to reduce these costly errors and streamline your existing processes.

Bilflo ensures that our timekeeping software handles different timecard options and is fully customizable to meet your organization’s needs, we also handle overtime calculations in all 50 states to help you stay compliant by only showing state-applicable overtime rules.

Aside from this, we take automation to the next level by combining it with Business Intelligence to provide you meaningful insights to make data-driven decisions.

Feel free to take 3 minutes for a preview of Bilflo.

If you want to learn more about how we can help you reach your goal, please schedule a Discovery Session with our team today.

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Utilize Automation To Ease Workloads and Improve Outcomes

Covid 19 has greatly impacted most businesses in terms of productivity and revenue. The focus for 2022 for most organizations, will be all about recovery and resilience. Organizations are looking for ways in which automation can help make the business run more efficiently and support employees in their work. Here are two technologies we believe, staffing companies should invest in to be successful in 2022:

Technologies to Invest

1. Use Business Process Automation

Once you start your journey towards using business process automation, you see that the automation you use – while helpful – isn’t intelligent. It’ll do the job you need it to, but to take automation to the next level, you need to introduce business intelligence.

2. Invest in Business Intelligence

One of the ways to improve resiliency is through understanding how your business is truly operating. Business Intelligence can help you understand your organization’s overall health and help you easily spot inefficiencies, market trends, and opportunities. 

Business Process Automation and Business Intelligence work hand in hand

In the coming years, we will see more organizations use business process automation to streamline their current processes – especially the manual ones – to see where real value can be delivered. On the other hand, Business Intelligence gives organizations meaningful insights to make data driven decisions.

By investing in these two capabilities, you can help create a strong foundation to ensure your processes work to support and advance your plans. These technologies will become the norm by 2025 and businesses that make an early start on adopting them will be at a huge advantage over their more competitors.

At Bilflo, we combined business process automation and business intelligence to help staffing companies scale their back office with ease while getting the business intelligence you need to manage your staffing company.

See how our integrated solution works by checking out our resources:

If you are interested in learning more, please feel free to choose the time and the date that would be most convenient for you to talk to our team for a Discovery Session

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Staffing Industry in 2022