Let’s say that you’re house hunting and looking for the perfect house for you and your family. Ideally, for this situation, you would have come up with a set of criteria for what you would want out of this life-changing purchase and asked yourself a few things before looking.
House hunting can be a long and difficult process, but hopefully, you’ve given it enough thought and established a clear plan so that you’re prepared for this next big step in your life.
I’m using this house analogy because it turns out that shopping for a house and deciding to build or buy custom software for your staffing firm have pretty similar types of decisions. Over my decade of experience in the talent and recruitment industry, I’ve seen many companies grapple with whether they should build their own custom talent and recruitment software in-house or buy a pre-built solution from a third party.
Questions to Ask Yourself Building or Buying Software
Just like in our house analogy, you need to ask your business a few questions to understand what exactly it is you need out of the software you’re looking for:
- Are you trying to create something unique for your business that gives you a competitive advantage, or are you looking for something that just does the job?
- What problems are you trying to solve?
- Then ask if there is software out there that solves 80% of the problems you’re facing.
- What is it going to cost you, and where is the value?
- Who can you trust to help inform your choices when making this decision?
What it Takes to Build Good Software
Historically you were always advised not to build your own software because it was too difficult and costly to maintain that software. That was then. Now the technology has evolved, and you’ve seen new platforms like Salesforce enter the talent services (aka staffing/recruiting) space, making it easier than ever to build a custom solution in-house to meet the needs of your business. That’s why way back in 2009, we started to build our own software solution for the staffing and recruitment industry named Talent Rover.
We had the vision to make Talent Rover be one platform that fully managed the operations of the staffing and recruiting firms globally. We built something purpose-built because we knew our industry inside and out. Salesforce was the platform for Talent Rover, and since then, it has only evolved to expand its suite of offerings to the staffing and recruitment industry.
What the Staffing Industry Should Build for Themselves
Back in the day, I remember that one of the first things they would ask you to build when earning your Salesforce Development Certification was a recruiting application. This is because building a recruiting application within Salesforce has a lot of similarities to that of a CRM.
Through Salesforce, you can record all sorts of data on a candidate (email, calls, calendar dates, etc.) from the various interactions you have with them. The data can then be leveraged to build a profile of the candidates to seamlessly push them through the recruitment funnel.
Salesforce has allowed us to see the holistic digital picture of a candidate’s capabilities and has given us the tools to sift through that data to find exactly what we’re looking for. In the past, we could only see what the candidate put forward on paper (forget it if the candidate was terrible at writing and selling themselves), but Salesforce has made this issue moot as you can see the trees in the forest, so to speak.
Just the other day, I was at a friend’s house, and we were talking about how she found her old paper resume in a file folder. It had the resume, a cover letter, and five different letters of recommendation, all of that just to be placed into a job position. I find resumes comical nowadays because a candidate’s digital footprint is a much more efficient way to get placed into a position.
A staffing/recruiting firm will need more than a basic recruitment application. One main needed feature is the heart of these firms- finding candidates for jobs.
Building a search and match engine from scratch is probably the most challenging part of building custom software for the industry. Still, the benefits of owning and utilizing the data in-house and understanding your relationship with the candidate’s data are enormous.
Off the shelf, Salesforce doesn’t have a native search and match solution to accomplish some of these tasks. Still, some companies offer solutions that can help with a lot of the above, like Daxtra or Textkernel, that you can use to integrate into your custom solution. Keep in mind that if you choose to buy a solution, many of the products you’ll end up finding are just white labeling the services of companies like the ones I mentioned earlier. However, if you choose to build, you need to think about how you will solve many of the problems that come with creating an end-to-end solution.
You can build your own solution, which could be a significant competitive advantage. Finding the right partner who understands what is involved in searching and matching candidates goes beyond just the technical development capabilities. It takes understanding what recruiters are looking for when doing the match. It’s not just the keywords on a candidate’s resume, but extends to how likely is that candidate to call you back, or show up to the interview, have you placed them before, how did they do, etc. LinkedIn has made finding potential candidates easy, but the real magic is a recruiter’s relationship with one.
Bringing It All Together
A customer recruiting solution and a search and match engine are two of the most powerful pieces of software that staffing and recruiting companies can utilize. The technology has reached a point where it’s easier than ever to implement this tech into your organization, but no matter how easy it is to build, it still helps to have an excellent partner to help you every step of the way.
I learned at Talent Rover and carried this lesson onward to Blueprint that our customers always had the best ideas, but they looked to us to know how to deliver those ideas in the best manner.
Finding a trusted partner who can advise you on what you need, not someone who will just build what you ask, is key to this process. That’s why we built Blueprint, to provide our experience to those who needed it.
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