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2023 Recruiting: 8 Tips to Attract More Candidates

As the labor market in the United States continues to tighten, businesses must focus on proactive ways to attract job seekers to fill their openings. The US Labor Department reported in January 2023 that there were 10.5 million job openings across the country as of November 2022, with about 1.7 vacancies for every available worker. Employers must look for ways to entice and hire qualified applicants to meet the growing demand for workers. Furthermore, a Korn Ferry study predicts a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people by 2030.

Businesses must use all available resources to attract job seekers to combat this looming problem. This could include targeted recruiting, competitive wages and benefits, and creating an employee-friendly workplace. Furthermore, posting job openings on social media and job boards can be an effective way to reach a large number of potential candidates. Employers can ensure a pool of qualified applicants to choose from in the future by taking proactive steps to address the talent shortage.

Here are eight tips to help you attract more candidates in 2023.

1. Job Posting Tips: Job postings should be succinct, informative, and easy to read. Make sure to include the necessary information, such as job title, salary range, location, job responsibilities, and qualifications. You should also include any additional benefits or perks. Additionally, use keywords that are relevant to the job posting so that it will appear in searches.

2. Utilize a Job Board with an Extensive Resume Database: Look for candidates in the right places, such as job boards, social media, and other online platforms. The best place for you might not be the best place for someone else, so look into the unique offerings of each type of platform.

Because they provide a large and constantly replenishing pool of talent, resume databases have numerous advantages. This allows you to fill positions quickly while also saving money.

A good job board will also let you search its database for qualified candidates in a variety of ways, including by role, skills, location, expected salary, and much more.

3. Use Niche Job Boards

Niche job boards are those that specialize in a specific industry, field, or skill set. They receive less traffic than large websites such as Indeed or LinkedIn, but they allow you to fish for the exact fish you want.

The following are some examples of niche job boards for specific roles:

For startups, Try AngelList, VentureLoop, and Startupers.
For Remote work, Advertise on WeWorkRemotely, NoDesk, or Remotive.com.
For developers, Try Dice and CrunchBoard.

4. Utilize Banners, e-shots, and other premium tools: Many job boards provide a variety of premium tools to help you promote your job and attract qualified candidates. As an example,

Jobs with premium featured ads appear at the top of search results.
CPM display advertising enables you to target specific audiences and display banners promoting your company’s profile and job opportunities.
Featured jobs, banners, e-shots, and tools that allow you to add an engaging video to your jobs and showcase your company culture are among the other tools available.

5. Examine Your Job Boards on a regular basis.

Not all job boards are created equal, and things change. It’s worth checking in on a regular basis to ensure that the job board you’re using is serving your needs.

Regularly review your job boards to ensure that your postings are up-to-date and that the resumes in the database are relevant to the job openings. This will help you narrow down the list of potential candidates.

6. Make the application process easier.

According to research, 90% of job seekers abandon their application if they are redirected to an external site during the application process, such as from a job advertisement on a job board to your website’s application form.

Despite the fact that very few people carry their resumes on their phones, 64% of job seekers apply for jobs via mobile devices, which makes the issue worse.

By importing the candidate’s information from their resume on the job board directly into the application form on your site, a direct application integration removes barriers. From the perspective of the job seeker, this occurs seamlessly; the result for you is nine times more applications!

7. Create an Employee Referral Program.

Employee referral programs are nothing new in 2023, but they are still challenging to get right.

A quick way to meet exceptional talent is to request recommendations from your current employees’ contacts. The fact that this recruitment strategy is totally free is what makes it so appealing!

One of the best methods for recruiting is through employee referrals, for the following reasons:

Referred candidates experience less turnover.
They are higher-caliber hires.
Their sourcing is cost-effective.
The key to successful employee referral programs is to strike a balance between quality and incentives. But not their poor connections—you want your staff to recommend people from their network actively.

The good news is that creating employee referral programs is simple, inexpensive, and produces qualified candidates quickly! It’s no surprise that it’s one of the most popular recruiting strategies among technical recruiters.

8. Nurture former employees

In keeping with the talent pool, one of the most overlooked recruitment strategies involves contacting former employees.

Therefore, it may seem like a bad idea at first to hire someone who previously worked for you, but bear with us. If the employee left on good terms, they might be ideal for their old role, a different role, or a new role higher up in your company.

Previous employees have the ideal combination of in-depth knowledge of your business and fresh knowledge, experience, and skills from working for other companies. Additionally, you’ll spend less time onboarding and hiring more quickly.

Conclusion:

In 2022, the competition in the job market was fierce. Recruiting top talent will still be difficult, even after it eases up a little bit in 2023.

These 8 efficient recruitment tactics offer some simple strategies that you can use to fill more positions, attract higher-quality applicants, and shorten your hiring cycle.

We suggest putting them to the test in your company to determine which ones are effective for your market and candidate pool.

About Bilflo

Bilflo tracks sales and recruiting activity, consolidates time and rates from various systems, and unifies sales and gross profit data. With all of this data in one place, you get an accurate overview of your contractors, team members, and organizational health.

Schedule a demo today to learn more about how Bilflo can help you streamline your staffing process!

How to Build the Right Tech Stack for Your Staffing Firm

Having the right tech stack is critical to optimizing your staffing firm’s business operations. But what exactly is a tech stack? And how do you build the right tech stack for your staffing firm?

Your tech stack is the set of technology tools that your staffing firm employs to achieve its objectives. It is the backbone of your company, supporting the work of your recruiters, administrative staff, and employees.

Why does your tech stack matter in today’s staffing landscape?

Choosing the right technology allows your staffing firm to remain competitive in the marketplace.

In today’s market, there is still a scarcity of qualified job candidates. This makes it more important than ever to reach, screen, hire, and onboard employees before your competitors—and to keep them.

Technology can help you boost your recruitment efforts by automating processes and workflows.

When your recruiters are preoccupied with administrative tasks, they have less time to contact job candidates. Automation allows you to accelerate tasks like sourcing and screening, allowing your recruiters to reach out to more candidates.

You can use technology to enhance the candidate and employee experience.

The right technology stack will make it easier for applicants and employees to fill out paperwork, search for open positions, and communicate with your staffing firm. When you create a positive candidate experience, your employees and job applicants are more likely to recommend your company, which boosts your reputation and generates more referrals.

Building a Successful Tech Stack

Things to consider when building your tech stack:

1. Business Goals: Consider what business goals you are trying to achieve with your tech stack, such as improving customer experience, increasing efficiency, or reducing costs. This will help determine which technologies are most appropriate for your needs.

2. Compatibility: Integration is important for a variety of reasons. It is necessary for increasing efficiency, eliminating redundancies, and creating a unified system. Integration helps to avoid duplication of effort, thus reducing costs and improving workflow. It also allows for improved data management, as data from multiple sources can be consolidated into a single source

3. Security: Security should be a top priority when building a tech stack. Ensure that the technologies you select have secure authentication systems and data encryption.

4. Scalability: Consider how the technologies you select will scale with your business as it grows. You want to ensure that you are not limited in the future.

5. Budget: Make sure you are aware of the cost of the technologies you are selecting and that they fit into your budget. Additionally, consider the ongoing costs of maintenance and upgrades.

Software solutions to include and why they are important.

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS): ATS software is important because it helps businesses manage their recruitment process. It allows them to track and manage job applications, keep up with applicant information, and automate processes like resumes, job postings, and interviews. It also helps businesses create a better candidate experience and make sure they are hiring the best people for their business.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: CRM software helps businesses manage customer relationships. It allows them to track customer information, manage customer interactions, and create marketing campaigns. With CRM software, businesses can better understand their customers and build better relationships with them.

Recruitment Marketing Solutions: Recruitment marketing solutions help businesses attract the right candidates to their open positions. They allow businesses to create campaigns, track the success of their recruitment efforts, and optimize their strategies. This helps businesses find the right candidates and ensure they are hiring the best people for their business.

Timekeeping Solutions: Timekeeping solutions help businesses track employee hours and manage payroll. They can help businesses monitor employee attendance, manage employee schedules, and create reports. This helps businesses be more efficient and accurate when it comes to managing their payroll.

Billing and Invoicing Software: Billing and invoicing software is important because it helps businesses track and manage their invoicing and billing processes. It allows them to quickly create invoices and track payments. This helps businesses ensure they are billing their customers accurately and on time.

Business Intelligence: Business intelligence helps businesses make better decisions. It allows them to analyze data, create reports, and identify trends. This helps businesses make more informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition.

Conclusion

Any new technology should be approached with caution, especially if it represents a significant investment. However, staffing tech stacks are no longer a new technology. They are, in fact, proving to be a necessity.

Staffing firms must shift their focus from working IN the business to working ON their business. And that work should be centered on the creation of a fully functional technology stack. Because, when done correctly, a technology stack has the potential to transform your organization into something far greater than the sum of its parts.

With Bilflo, we make it simpler to manage your technology stack by giving you a single point of control and visibility into your entire tech stack. This helps you to monitor performance, identify areas of improvement, and make informed decisions about how to manage your tech stack.

When you have all of this functionality in one platform, you improve the efficiency of your staffing firm by making it easy for your team to perform their day-to-day tasks without having to switch between multiple tools.

Looking for a software provider with industry-leading technology solutions? Contact our team to learn more.

6 Major Recruitment Challenges with Solutions for 2023

In general, the goal of recruiters is to fill the funnel with talent and then sort that talent until the best people are matched to the right roles.

The working environment is constantly changing, so even if the core goal does not change, the context is constantly shifting. Most likely, the economy, the law, and compliance are the main forces of change that make it hard to hire people.

In addition to this, the recruitment market has recently been shaken by large-scale global events like the COVID epidemic and the volatility in energy prices, which have sparked skyrocketing inflation and a cost of living crisis.

In essence, the issues with COVID and inflation that recruiters deal with in 2023 are different from those in 2022. Even if the questions are the same, things are always changing, so the answers to the recruitment problems from the year before may not always be the same. Here, we examine the 10 greatest hiring difficulties for 2023 and their remedies.

1. Deciding on the best tools to handle the aspects of the hiring process

The recruitment process is made up of various processes, such as posting vacancies, managing applications, vetting resumes, assessments, and interviews. When your agency hires contract and freelance workers, there may be a lot of work behind the scenes, like filling out timesheets.

A tech stack solution exists for every one of these. Many of these processes are integrated into some solutions, which may further lower costs and make the purchasing decision easier. If you want to make things work with the program, you might have to make some compromises or change how you do things. Decide what your individual issues are, such as where you waste the most time, and make fixing them a top priority to assist you to make the best decisions to address this recruitment obstacle.

2. Maintaining applicants’ interest throughout the application procedure

Many recruiters who have come across good candidates discover that job seekers quickly lose interest because they have been drawn elsewhere, wooed away by other recruiters or chances. This may be a reflection of the world’s apparent transience in general.

Making sure that recruiters form close bonds with such prospects is the best method to overcome this recruitment challenge. Encourage the candidates to be honest with you as part of your relationship, and ask them if they are looking into other jobs or if they have any concerns about the job.

Relationship building is an old-school search and selection skill that is easy to overlook when technology takes over the hiring process but always keep in mind that recruitment still remains a true people business.

3. Shorter hiring process

Getting people hired faster is another ongoing issue. Clients of the agency frequently have immediate needs. Additionally, candidates would prefer for the procedure to be finished in 14 days. The easiest way to overcome this recruitment difficulty is to strive to expedite the search and selection process because it’s typically impossible to avoid the necessity for successful candidates to negotiate notice periods with prior employers.

The key is efficiency. An integrated, good tech stack is essential for streamlining the hiring process steps and shortening the time to offer, from scanning resumes using machine learning algorithms and keyword searches to video interviews and process automation.

4. Lack of skill, diversity, and untapped talent

The market will be more volatile than ever through 2023 as a recession looms. In particular, in businesses like IT, where there was enormous development during the pandemic amid increasing demand for work-from-home technology, long-standing difficulties like the skills shortage may slightly ease. Big tech is undoubtedly displacing workers and returning skills to the market.

This, however, is not a solution to the talent gap. Immigration issues make it difficult to recruit from international markets. One good way to get around this problem is to use talent pools that haven’t been used yet. To help with the need for diversity, job postings should be written in a way that makes them more appealing to people from different backgrounds and with disabilities.

5. Utilizing data more effectively

Because the recruitment industry uses cloud technologies so much, a huge amount of data is being generated. Some of the solutions to the growing number of recruitment problems could be right in front of you, but they are hard to see because they are in different data sets from different software systems.

This may be overcome with the aid of a specialized tech stack analytics and reporting solution. Data from many apps can be combined in order to find hidden trends or spikes that can provide business intelligence and support decisions with hard facts.

6. Understanding of the tech stack market

The technological market for recruiting is expanding. Like in any market where there is an abundance of options, customers may feel a little overwhelmed by their choices. There can be some confusion given the wide range of technology available.

This may be about the actual functionality of a tech stack cloud software product as well as the need for it. Finding the challenges you wish to solve and asking the software service providers how their platforms address them are part of the solution to this recruitment dilemma.

If you believe your agency needs assistance in overcoming this recruitment challenge, a strong tech stack partner should be able to offer guidance and integration services to get the various platforms in your tech stack correctly communicating with one another. This isn’t your average IT help; it’s a specialized service offered by a company that knows the tech stack industry.

With Bilflo, you can automate every back-office task and manage hundreds of contractors and direct hires on one simple platform. Save time and labor while doing more for your business.

Our business intelligence feature gives staffing firms further capability to streamline and uncover opportunities.

2023 HR Trend: Shifting to an employee-first approach

As the future of work continues to evolve, more companies are shifting to an employee-first approach. In order to stay ahead of the curve and attract and retain top talent for your firm, it’s imperative to be aware of continued demand for things like better employee experience and workplace flexibility.

By adopting a flexible, people-centered approach, businesses can make sure that the needs and wants of their employees are at the center of their HR strategy.

Here are a few global HR trends that, as we look beyond 2023 and beyond, will affect how companies all across the world manage the employee lifetime.

Developing your current talent

It’s a good idea to broaden your recruitment strategy to include your existing workforce, whether you’re utilizing them to backfill a position or when you’re looking to fill a new one. Businesses can also demonstrate their concern for current employees by offering upskilling opportunities, encouraging self-directed learning, or just following up with them frequently to find out how things are going and what they think the company can do to improve.

Investing in current talent is more crucial than businesses realize. In fact, a Gallup survey found that almost 50% of American workers may be considered “silent quitters.” What does this actually mean? When an employee doesn’t feel engaged or fulfilled at work, they may quietly leave.

Businesses that don’t invest in their existing talent see a decline in employee engagement. Because of this, your HR strategy should put a lot of emphasis on retention initiatives.

These initiatives might involve holding so-called “stay interviews”, in addition to offering opportunities for skill upgrading and other forms of personal growth.

1. Stay interviews

A stay interview is just as important as an exit interview.

Employers can assess a current employee’s overall job happiness and morale by conducting a stay interview. Companies benefit from a greater understanding of what motivates people to work for them and what areas may require development. This could help companies find the first points of pain before they become big problems.

Employee surveys can be used to conduct stay interviews, but face-to-face interactions are frequently more fruitful. While doing one-on-one interviews with a few people from different departments may not be simple in large organizations, it can give firms a lot more insight into the demands of their current staff.

2. Upskilling

Upskilling your workforce means helping people keep learning, either through training programs or other development opportunities, to close any gaps in skills and improve their abilities.

Gallup found that 65% of workers think it’s important for an employer to help them learn new skills when they’re looking for a new job, and 48% of American workers said they would switch to a new job if it offered career advancement and training opportunities.

Offering upskilling opportunities benefits both people and their employers. It gives employees the chance to broaden their skill sets and advance their careers, which frequently results in more employee engagement and better retention rates for firms. Several instances of upskilling possibilities include:

Online or virtual courses
Coaching sessions
Internship or mentoring programs

Reevaluating employee experience

To attract and retain top talents, you need more than a good wage package. It’s more important than ever for businesses to think of new ways to affect their employees’ lives in a meaningful way, which means taking a more personalized approach.

Before updating your perk offerings, it is best to ask for employee feedback. If you ask your employees what perks they would like, you might find out that they would rather have a tuition stipend than a gym allowance. By making perks fit the needs of your employees and realizing that they don’t work for everyone, you’ll make your current staff feel appreciated and make your company more appealing to top talent.

When evaluating the employee benefits program at your company, it’s important not to forget about the mental health part. Employees in place a high value on working for organizations that prioritize their mental well-being. While occasionally giving employees a day off for mental health purposes is a great start, businesses should look at other options to demonstrate their genuine concern for their employees’ mental health.

Flexibility is the “new normal”

Being adaptable about the location of the people you hire may be necessary for many firms. It’s highly unlikely that all the talent you need will be in one central area. By expanding your search to the global market, your business will be able to take advantage of a wider range of opportunities and strengthen your workforce in the process.

It’s essential for workers to have flexibility in their work schedules and methods. The transition to remote work during the pandemic demonstrated that people do not need to spend their working hours shackled to a computer in an office; in fact, a sizable portion of the workforce has no desire to return to this way of life.

But in addition to being flexible with regards to where and when people work, this also entails treating each candidate with consideration for their particular needs and objectives, which starts with the hiring process. Finding out about a candidate personally could be all that is required. What hobbies and pastimes do they have? How or by what are they motivated? Allowing people to be themselves and showing interest from the beginning helps the business since it results in:

140% increase in employee engagement 
50% increase in team performance 
90% increase in team innovation 
54% lower turnover

Use of automation to support greater HR strategy

We’re beginning to see more automation in the workplace than ever before as technology develops at a rapid rate. The pandemic is largely to blame for this change since it forced many businesses to switch quickly to remote work, which in turn forced them to try out new ways of using technology in the workplace.

As a result of this shift, 67% of businesses increased their usage of automation and artificial intelligence (AI). Automation and AI have the potential to be extremely beneficial for businesses, whether by removing tedious activities like manual payroll entry or by providing them with a competitive edge.

For example, if you’re a staffing organization looking to streamline your back office processes so you can focus on the best part of your business: people building and reallocating your resources for more marketing, sales, and company-growing projects, back office automation software can benefit your company, and particularly your HR team, by giving them automation to:

Streamline the onboarding process
Ensure compliance and avoid costly penalties
Automate redundant back-office tasks
Implement a unified system of record
Manage everything from a mobile app

By making it easier for HR teams to handle administrative tasks, they’ll have more time to work on things like improving hiring, onboarding, and retention.

Want to learn more about how our back-office automation software can eliminate tedious work for your HR team? Contact us today.

About Bilflo

Bilflo tracks sales and recruiting activity, consolidate time and rates from various systems and unifies sales and gross profit data. With all of this data in one place, you get an accurate overview of your contractors, team members, and organizational health.

Schedule a demo today to learn more about how Bilflo can help you streamline your staffing process!

Source: SafeGuardGlobal

The Benefits of Using Online Staffing Software

One of your objectives as an agency is to streamline the recruiting process in order to meet the demands of your clients as efficiently as possible.

As your staffing firm grows, you want staffing software that is scalable, cost-effective, simple to use, and accessible anywhere. Here’s where staffing software on the cloud comes in.

Software as a Service (SaaS), often known as cloud-based software, is software that can be accessed from any location using a web browser and doesn’t require any installation or management of software on a local computer.

Here are some benefits that may be helpful to you if your business is still on the fence regarding cloud-based staffing software:

1. Shouldn’t the front and back offices be friends?

Have you ever thought about how nice it would be to access and analyze your workforce and sales data in a unified system of record?

One approach to significantly boost productivity at your staffing firm is to be able to integrate the front and back offices of the business,

2. Self-service is popular with clients and staff.

By enabling your staff and clients to utilize online access, you may relieve your team of the pressure of having to engage in the back-and-forth game of calls, emails, etc. that takes up their time and diverts them from hiring the finest people.

3. Payroll in no time. Eliminate the headaches.

Even accountants and payroll officials dislike reporting season since it may be a stressful time to verify data accuracy. If you do it the old-fashioned way or are utilizing unfriendly software, it may be a difficult process to meet the urgency of deadlines, such as payroll.

Why not choose a system that consistently meets payroll obligations and is aware of your company’s needs? The fact that staffing software is aware of these and other industry-specific requirements is one of its many appealing features. Additionally, a solid staffing software solution makes sure you can easily export the reports you want into your ERP system without any hassles, which brings us to our next point.

4. It can integrate with other systems.

Adopting a software solution that seamlessly connects with your current company systems will benefit your accounting team. As we indicated above, you might profit from many other facets of your organization, like human resources, recruiting, and more, if you had the capacity to support services beyond payroll. If your various applications don’t communicate with one another, being competitive in the era of cloud-based solutions might mean that your company falls behind the competition.

5. Multi-tenant and frequent releases

Due to the way the cloud works, users of the product are always running the most recent version of the program, which is often patched and updated to satisfy user demands. Instead of needing to wait two or more years between typical software releases, new features are now accessible a few times each year. Another advantage of this is that everyone who uses the cloud software is always using the same version of a release. As a result, there will be no compatibility problems or need for substantial changes.

6. Configuration and Tailored to Users’ Needs

One of the best features of a multi-tenant SaaS system is that it can operate on a subscription model depending on the specific requirements of a firm. This enables such businesses to utilize the software based on usage levels. Because there is no need to buy a license for software that may have more features than a business needs, this saves businesses money compared to a traditional software approach. Businesses may benefit more from this variable pricing approach by being able to manage user counts as needed. With staffing software that is cloud-based, a firm may use what they need when they need it.

Our recommendation

Switching from a traditional to an automated process is a big decision to make for your staffing organization. At Bilflo, we understand the needs of staffing agencies. That’s why Bilflo works with your existing applicant tracking (ATS), payroll, and accounting systems through open APIs to save time, reduce errors, and minimize data entry.

With Bilflo’s back office automation, you can transform your staffing company, by replacing labor-intensive back-office tasks while fueling the business intelligence you need to scale your company.

About Bilflo

Bilflo tracks sales and recruiting activity, consolidates time and rates from various systems and unifies sales and gross profit data. With all of this data in one place, you get an accurate overview of your contractors, team members, and organizational health.

Schedule a demo today to learn more about how Bilflo can help you streamline your staffing process!

The Advantages of Electronic Invoicing

Electronic invoicing is more efficient than paper or digital invoicing in terms of cost, speed, and accuracy. It also integrates more seamlessly into your accounting process and is more environmentally friendly.

It is becoming increasingly probable that some tasks and procedures that are currently completed manually will eventually be automated. Sending invoices is no exception to the general rule that automating manual procedures enables you to optimize your business and get it closer to operating at full efficiency.

What exactly is an electronic invoice?

An electronic invoice is electronic throughout its entire life cycle, which means that all aspects of its creation, sending, payment, and financial bookkeeping are handled by computer systems from start to finish.

Nevertheless, this should not be confused with a digital invoice, which is just a paper invoice that has been converted to digital form—probably in PDF format. Digital invoices are different from electronic invoices because they require human workers to enter the information from the invoice into the books—a procedure that is neither totally electronic nor automated.

Electronic invoices can be sent online or in a variety of file formats. For example, Bilflo provides a gateway for electronic invoicing that allows users to send client bills via email with only the click of a button.

The Benefits of Electronic Billing

When you contrast electronic invoicing with conventional paper invoicing, you discover that electronic invoicing performs better than traditional invoicing techniques in a number of areas.

Cost

As opposed to paper or digital invoices, adopting an electronic invoice allows you to save a sizable sum of money. With a digital invoice, you won’t have to pay for the paper your invoices are printed on or the postage you’ll need to use to mail them to your clients. In terms of a digital invoice, in the long run, you’ll save money because it will take less time to enter your data into accounting books. Data input for a digital invoice still needs to be done by a staff member, which takes time and demands payment (time is money!).

For instance, the US Treasury predicted in 2013 that the adoption of electronic invoicing would result in yearly cost savings of $450 million and cost reductions of 50%. It is probable that these numbers have increased since the report’s publication.

Efficiency

Most people who use electronic invoices discover that doing so makes their company and consumers’ lives easier. Electronic invoices often integrate seamlessly with your accounting software, eliminating the need for the labor-intensive and (sometimes) costly data entry procedure. They can be automated to send out recurring bills, can be paid by your customer with a single mouse click, and they can be sent out automatically to customers who have signed up for your service.

Speed

The pace at which these operations take place can significantly shorten the time it takes for your invoice data to be entered into your accounting system. Compared to paper and digital invoicing systems, electronic invoices can be delivered, received, paid, and settled considerably more quickly. This eliminates the time (and cost) required for an employee to manually enter the data from the electronic invoice format into your accounting systems by simply uploading or automatically syncing the information.

Accuracy

Compared to digital and paper invoices, electronic invoices are more likely to be correct. The process of creating an invoice is simplified when you utilize an electronic one, which reduces friction. There are various processes in which mistakes might occur when an employee is in charge of data input and transmission, such as during invoice production, client payment, and data entry, as in the case of paper and digital invoicing techniques. However, there is only one time in using an electronic invoice when a mistake can be made, and that is when the invoice is first created. In conclusion, employing an e-invoice reduces the possibility of errors in your billing procedure and accounting records.

Environmentally responsible

Environmentally speaking, utilizing electronic invoices is preferable to using paper ones. Using an invoicing technique that doesn’t include paper will demonstrate that your firm has taken social responsibility when it comes to protecting the environment, as the production of paper goods has been known to considerably contribute to deforestation.

The better approach to doing business

Due to the numerous advantages that electronic invoicing offers, an increasing number of businesses are using or developing electronic invoicing systems. Comparing paper-based billing to digital invoicing is more cost-effective, quicker, more accurate, and better for the environment. Additionally, you may save a ton of time and money by simply integrating electronic invoicing into your accounting books, which will help you keep your financial records organized and current.

Users of electronic invoicing have witnessed the benefits it may have for a company.

It would not be unexpected to see an increase in the number of manual operations becoming digitized in the future, given how much commerce is done online. One of the simplest ways to improve a generally laborious process is by using electronic invoices. Automated invoicing is also the more effective way to issue invoices. So, if you haven’t already, you should consider adopting electronic invoicing, especially if you want to be a pioneer in your field.

If you’re a staffing company, Bilflo is a great option for automating client billing and managing hundreds of contractors at once.

Source: TechRadar

7 Reasons Why U.S. Businesses Are Experiencing Staff Shortages

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.

4 Staffing Automation Tools to Increase Back Office Capacity

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.

Best Practices For Tracking Contractors’ Hours And Payroll

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.

Top 6 Hybrid Work Trends for Staffing Agencies

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.