Yet very few have suggested 21st Century upgrades to the veritable fire swamp that is your inbox. A few companies have aggressively decreed internal “no email” policies, but the best serious alternative I’ve seen thus far is a series of private social platforms that look a lot like Facebook.

Yammer is Just One of Many “Private/Enterprise Social Networks”
This year at TempWorks, we’ve started using Yammer – Microsoft’s answer to email overload. We can join groups that pertain to our departments and visit those “feeds” at-will. What sets the tool apart from email is its visual, bulletin board-like organization and public nature.

I recently talked with our TempWorks Support Center Supervisor Kevin Prow about why it was implemented.

“I was getting too many questions directly, and I was repeating the same answer multiple times to multiple people. [We’re using Yammer] mostly to ease the burden of my IM load and to allow others to answer collaboratively and to learn from the questions of others,” says Kevin, who estimates that 50% of his incoming mail is irrelevant.

An Answer to the Reply-All Nightmare
Another way Yammer could outpace email is in the context of “revisioning.” When a bunch of individuals need to collaborate to decide on a single thing, all too often the threads of reply-alls and CC’s snowball into a nightmare of several variants. It’s much easier to offer input when the responses are all updated in one spot.

Prow has also used it as a platform for optional department-wide polls. He expects the responses to increase as the site becomes a familiar go-to.

Should Company Networks Really Be “Social?”
Though there isn’t really a consensus about what this type of collaborative communication tool will be called, many (such as Chatter) are throwing “social” into the title, as in “private social network” or “enterprise social network.”  But would they be necessarily social in nature?  While some companies think the social aspect is not to be feared (and even increases productivity), others are clear about laying down ground rules.

“I gave them the directive not to use it that way. It’s not Facebook… I don’t want to wade through pictures of somebody’s dog to find what I really need to see,” says Prow.

“Noise” and Barriers Still Remain
Think about how the platform could grow in usefulness over time. All of the information posted on Yammer is only a keyword search away. However, Prow cautions, “It will increase in efficiency to a point, but it has its own limitations, because it doesn’t help filter out the noise. What I mean by that is if I have to sort through 600 conversations about payroll, I might not be able to find the relevant question and answer.”  (Although apparently there is a function that allows users to categorize and tag posts, which may help if people use it correctly).

I also wonder whether the barrier to communication is lower or higher on these networks.  On the one hand, it feels less formal than a direct email, and less like you’re bothering someone. On the other, users could be intimidated by the public nature of the posts, fearing their question will reveal their ignorance.

“They’re more apt to post what’s on their mind, but they may also be intimidated and think others might think their question is obvious…” says Prow. “So it’s also stigmatized. It balances out.”

Collaboration and the Future
Here at TempWorks, we’re not regarding it as email replacement. But perhaps it’s representative of a major shift away from private one-on-one messaging to open, collaborative environments. They’re technological solutions to technology-created problems.

I was surprised though with Richard’s comment that the “U.S. economy is sputtering”. Yes, there are pockets of bad news and through the lens of leftist governments like the current administration those problems come from a lack of government demand.

I’d like to present an opposing view. For those who are flexible, for those that are freelancing and managing to avoid or help others avoid the huge pain in the patutie that employment in the U.S. has become, the sun is shining.

As one of our staff writer’s on Staffing Talk, David Gee, writes, although the workforce is undergoing its biggest shift in more than a decade, “bad news for some creates opportunity for others”.

I have to agree because as I look at the landscape of the Tempworks client base, companies that are doing so many innovative things to help employers escape from the misery of regulations, taxes, and inflexibility, the numbers are looking really good. I’m seeing clients with offices spread around the country, doing mostly commercial staffing, with revenue numbers a healthy 25% of where they were a year ago.

Anyway, I hope that some of you that make it to our blog here will take Richard’s suggestions to heart and make it to New Orleans and also take advantage of the Tempworks hospitality evening as well as checking out our new software releases.

Companies Represented at Staffing World 2011

@Work Franchise Inc.

The A Team

Abacus Recruiting

ABACUS Staffing

Abbtech Professional Resources

ABL Employment

ABR Employment Services

Acclivity Healthcare

Accurate Personnel LLC

Acrobat Outsourcing

Action Associates

Adecco Group North America

Advance Service Co.

The Agency Employment Services Ltd.

All-Star Personnel Inc.

Allegiance Staffing LLC

Allegis Group Inc.

Allied Resource Group LLC

Allied Resources Staffing Solutions

Allstates Technical Services LLC

American Staffing Association

American Staffing Inc.

AMN Healthcare Inc.

Apprentice Personnel

Ascend Personnel Services

ASG Renaissance

Atlas Staffing Inc.

ATR International

Automation Personnel Services Inc.

Award Staffing Services

Baker Tilly Search & Staffing

Barnes Personnel Management Inc.

Beacon Services Inc.

Belcan Staffing Solutions

Berks & Beyond Employment Services Inc.

BG Staffing

Bob Gibson

Bonney Staffing Center

The BOSS Group

BSI

Burnett Staffing Specialists

C.R. Fletcher Temp Inc.

CalTek Staffing Inc.

Career Adventures Inc.

Certified Employment Group

ChangeLabs

CHG Healthcare Services Inc.

The Choice Inc.

Ciett

Clarius Group Limited

Classic Temporary Services

Cobb Pediatric Therapy Services

Complete Personnel Solutions LLC

Cornerstone Staffing Solutions Inc.

Corporate Services Inc.

Counsel On Call

Covent Garden Bureau

Creative Management Consultants

Creative Solutions Services LLC

Crown Services Inc.

CTS North America

Cumberland Environmental Resources Co.

The Custom Group of Cos.

Custom Staffing Services

Dakota Staffing Inc.

The Daniel Group

Delta Dallas Cos.

Delta Global Staffing

Dingu Blue

Diversified Personnel Services

Diversity One Inc.

Doherty Staffing Solutions

The Dynamic Sale

Eh Inc.

Elwood Staffing Services

EmployBridge Holding Co.

Employee Solutions LP

Employment Plus Inc.

Employment Solutions Personnel Services Inc.

Encadria Staffing Solutions LLC

Energy Services Group

Engineering Staffing Services LLC

Essential Personnel Inc.

ETS Inc. dba 1st Choice Personnel

Excel Staffing Cos.

Express Employment Professionals

Financial Additions

Find Great People LLC

Foremost Staffing Inc.

FrankCrum Staffing

Frazee Recruiting Consultants

Friday Staffing Services

FutureStaff Staffing Services

G Palmer and Associates

G-TECH Services Inc.

Gage Personnel Services

Gainor Staffing

Gateway Group Personnel

GL Staffing Services

Global Employment Solutions Inc.

Graham & Associat

es Employment Consultants Inc.

Greater Talent Network

Greene Resources Inc.

HCCA International

Helpmates Staffing Services

High Profile Staffing Services

Hire Dynamics LLC

Hiring Partners Inc.

Horizon Staffing Services LLC

Hudson

Hughes Resources

The Human Resource Department Inc.

Human Technologies Inc.

Hutco

IK Hofmann USA Inc.

Imagine Staffing Technology

IMKO Diversified Workforce Solutions

Impact Employment Solutions Inc.

Incepture

Industrial Staffing Services Inc.

Innovative Employee Solutions

Innovative Recruitment Solutions

Innovative Staff Solutions

Intermountain Staffing

The Intersect Group

JFC Staffing Associates

The Job Shop Inc.

John Galt Staffing Inc.

Joulé Inc.

Keepers

Kelly Services Inc.

Kent Legal

Key Staffing

Kineticom Inc.

L.J. Gonzer Associates

Labor Finders International Inc.

LaborWorks Inc.

The LaSalle Network

Link Staffing Services

Lofton Staffing Services

Lutech Resources Inc.

M Force Staffing Inc.

Madden Industrial Craftsmen Inc.

ManpowerGroup

Mark Staffing Solutions Inc.

Mary Kraft Staffing and HR Solutions

MAU Inc.

MBL LLC

Medical Personnel Services Inc.

Medical Staffing Services Inc.

Medrec Inc.

Mee Derby & Company Inc.

Merrill Lynch

Monroe Staffing Services

Morales Group Inc.

MPS Staffing

Neeyamo

Nextaff

NHIC

NMS Staffing

Northwest Staffing Resources Inc.

Olympic Staffing Services

On Assignment Staffing Services Inc.

Osborne Recruitment

OSI Staffing Services Inc.

The Party Staff

Peoplelink Staffing Solutions

Personnel Connection

Personnel Partners Inc.

Personnel Resources Inc.

Pinnacle Staffing Inc.

Pinnacle Technical Resources

The Plus Group Inc.

Portfolio Creative

The Power of Laughter – Insightful Women Speakers

Precise

Preferred Healthcare Registry

Premier Staffing Inc.

Pridestaff

PrimeSkill Staffing Services

Priority Personnel Inc.

Property Management Personnel Inc.

ProStaff Search LLC

Protingent Staffing

QPS Employment Group

Quality Personnel

Quality Staffing Specialists

Quanta Inc.

Quantum Strategic Personnel Services

Randstad Holding NV

RealStreet Staffing

Recruiting & Staffing Solutions Magazine

ReliaQuest

The Reserves Network Inc.

Resource Staffing Services Inc.

Ridgefield One

Robert Half International

Rolinc Staffing

Ron’s Staffing Services

Rotator Staffing Services Inc.

The Rowland Group

Rusher Rogers Recruiting

Rylem

Search Services

SelecSource Staffing Services

Selectemp Corporation

Set and Service Source

SFN Group

Shuart & Associates Legal Search & Staffing Inc.

Sirius Technical Services

SITE Staffing Inc.

SK Services LLC

Snelling Staffing LLC

Softworld Inc.

Solutions for Hiring

SOS Staffing Services

Spencer Reed Group LLC

Staff Connection

Staff Management

Staffchex

Staffers Inc.

Staffing Dynamics International LP

Staffing One Inc.

Staffing Resources

Staffmark

StaffMasters Inc.

STAFFpartners Inc.

Stand-By Personnel Inc.

Stanley Staffing Inc.

Stark

Sterling Engineering Inc.

Summit Technical Services Inc.

SwissStaffing

Synergy Employment Group Inc.

TAG 44

Talent Circles

Tallann Resources LLC

Taske Force Inc.

Team Staffing Solutions Inc.

Techstaff Inc.

Temporary Resources Inc.

The TemPositions Group of Cos.

Think Impact Solutions

Tidewater Staffing

Tiger Personnel Services Inc.

TOPS Staffing LLC

Total Technical Services Inc.

TPI Staffing Inc.

TransHire

TRC Staffing Services Inc.

Trialon Corporation

TRUE Group

True Talent Group LLC

TrueBlue Inc.

Two Roads Professional Resources Inc.

TYS Temporales y Sistempora Ltda

Unified Staffing Inc.

Uniflex Sverige AB

United Personnel Services

United Talent

United Temps Inc.

Unitemp Temporary Personnel

Universal Personnel LLC

University of Tornto

USA Drivers Inc.

Verigent LLC

VIP-Staffing

Vision Staffing Solutions Inc.

Volt Workforce Solutions

VTR Inc.

w3r Consulting

Wendy Benning

Winget, Spadafora, & Schwartzberg LLP

Winter Wyman Financial Contracting

Wood Personnel Services Inc.

Wood Temporary Staffing

Woods Labor & Staffing

Workco Staffing Services

WorkForce Carolina

Workforce Employment Solutions

Working Solutions LLC

XL Staffing Service

Yoh

The York Cos.

A decade ago we placed people on assignment and actually made a living out of it with no (none, zero, zip, zilch) technology.  My offices had no computers at all.  How did we do it?

How did we manage resumes?  Skills?  Applications?  How did we dare go into the field with nothing to connect us to the office?  How did we find people to go to work, let alone find qualified people to go to work?

I remember… applications were color coded for skills and availability, one stack was for clerical, another for light industrial and … oh, my, what do you do if a person falls into both categories!

At night and over the weekend my trusted employee list was in my back pocket or my purse.  I would erase numbers that were no longer working numbers.  When I was on call I always had to be near a phone.  Heaven forbid I visit a friend in another area code because if I had to call people to fill a position I would have to use my friend’s phone and place long distance calls!  UGH!

Now, 10 years later, just look at the technology we have!  Not only do we have databases to house candidate’s records but we can match the qualifications needed for a job with the qualifications a Candidate possesses.

We have Mobile solutions which make the beeper look as archaic as… well, as archaic as beepers really are.  TempWorks Mobile lets you connect to your data base from anywhere using simply a web enabled cell phone… instead of desperately searching for a pay phone (remember them??).

TempWorks Doc Center lets you electronically fill out, sign and store all onboarding documents… instead of handing the Candidate a stack of paperwork!

TempWorks email allows you to personalize and pretty up email blasts… have you seen our Newsletter lately?  Wow!

I can search out just about any and everything in the TempWorks database!

Resume searching has reach new heights.

A fully integrated database lets the front office staff communicate with the back office staff without talking to them! <– and not using telepathy!

Delivering information electronically is becoming the norm – paperless is a reality. With all these incredible tools we have at our disposal it almost makes me want to go back into staffing!  With all this technology we can truly work smarter and not harder.

The staffing business is constantly evolving which makes it easy to lapse into commodity hell, the dwelling place of so many national staffing companies that have long since abandoned the entrepreneurial ethos not to mention the profitability that drove them to success in the first place.

How to avoid commodity hell?   As I look around at our most progressive clients, one pattern of success stands out.   Although on one end these successful companies also have their share of commodity clients, on the other they are constantly looking to disrupt the status quo with high-margin, innovative services.

They disrupt by constantly pushing the envelope on how to better help their clients win.  These approaches take the form of better service models as well as technological innovation, and invariably they arrive at solutions because the listen really well to clients.  High touch.  High technology.   High profits.

Easy to say.   Harder to do.  I know because I’ve been caught flat-footed myself many a time.  When Apple ran its now famous Super-Bowl ad (above) for the MacIntosh in 1984, I didn’t know what to think. I had spent the previous two years building my business with my nose down writing mainframe assembler code for a French airline cooperative (SITA).

My day of reckoning was about to come, however.  The day after the commercial ran,  the director of this French group, Claude Avignon, hauled me into his office and declared that the Mac would soon put me out of business.

Fortunately, Claude scared me enough that I went out and bought one of the first Macs.  The Mac made it simple for art class flunkies like me to create marketing and training materials that wowed almost everyone in the staid airline software world. 

The ads helped win business from several airlines around the world, and I’ve admired Steve Jobs ever since.  When I went back to graduate school in 1988, I spent a lot of time with Jobs’ NeXT operating system which eventually underpinned the Apple platform in the decades that followed.

Lessons Learned

• Balance your commodity business with high-touch, highly-customized business
• Watch Super-Bowl commercials!
• Listen really hard to clients when they complain or tell you that your business is threatened.
• Take a page from the Apple handbook and look at how to disrupt your market.

You can see why from this somewhat NSFW (Not Safe for Work) video ad in which Jason Schwartzman, directed by Roman Coppola, teaches how to use the new New Yorker app on the iPad.

With each passing day, my fascination obsession with everything mobile grows.  TempWorks Mobile looks great and works great on the iPad, but I’m bothered that we’re not pushing it harder and am up nights trying to figure out how to do that.

We’re in an age of transformation no less great than that of the 1840s when the telegraph and railroads disrupted every industry from agriculture to manufacturing, creating fortunes from almost nothing for the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Morgans and others.

What are your thoughts on mobile?  How is it impacting your staffing company?

Now what?

Who do you turn to?

There are dozens of credible time and attendance software vendors, but you may have already heavily invested in a front and back office software system, and these providers don’t integrate with what you have in place.

The TempWorks Time & Attendance solution is different in that respect.

It was designed around an industry-standard staffing software platform, developed by programmers who are familiar with the most common staffing databases, and built specifically with the contingent labor provider in mind.

With the TempWorks Time & Attendance solution you get Cost Efficiency.

We will purchase third party hardware devices that fit your needs exactly — we can even finance them for you.

We offer unmatched depth by customizing our time and attendance report library to meet the specific needs of your client.

Lastly, we offer control.

The database hardware and software are hosted by TempWorks.

You have the option to feed data back to your staffing software or your payroll provider….

And you can even have the payroll processed internally by TempWorks.

Slick…streamlined…time and attendance solutions.

For more information, please pick up the phone and call David Dourgarian at 651-452-0366.

The article touched on issues like proper URL naming and the importance of separate pages.

This advice was all well and good because if you don’t have good content, you won’t get good SERPS.  But if you want to rank with the pros on more competitive searches, then good content is not enough just like a healthy diet isn’t enough to help you win an Olympic medal.

So what more do you need to do to get that coveted #1 or #2 rank?

Many things, but in this post I’m just going to focus on how to strengthen the most important differentiator: good links from highly reliable, relevant sites.

You might question the importance of links but I assure you the search engines don’t, and if you think about it for a minute without links that point to your site, how is anyone searching ever going to get there?

Here are three link building exercises that you can pursue:

• Buy links. This one is obviously going to cost you money but it can be the most direct way to improve your rankings. Buying links is no simple matter however because there are a lot of link-selling hucksters out there and the quality and price of the links being offered varies widely. Consider that a Google search of link building services yields more than 54 million hits and choosing between them can be as complicated as arranging any other technology or marketing purchase. My advice: find a local SEO expert you trust and pay him/her to do it.
• Write articles. Search engines love content, and getting a nicely written article about your market is a key to exposure. You can submit the article in many places like Wikipedia or Ezinearticles. Best of all, you can use and reuse a well written article. It can make for better newsletter. It can be attached to emails to prospects as a lead-nurturing tactic. And you might succeed in getting it republished in local business webzines as well. Every link back to your site embedded in your published article offers a chance for a search engine to find it and thus increase your site’s credibility and thus its SERPs.
• Press releases. Although there are free press release services, Google News tends to regard paid press releases like those issued by PRWeb much higher. Don’t issue a lame press release such as “Acme Staffing Services announced today that it is the leading provider of quality industrial services in Chattanooga”. Make it something with news value.  Chronicle a Horatio Alger story you helped create. Describe some crisis that occurred and how you helped provide the people that resolved it.

These are standard tactics you can quickly employ to improve your search rankings.

If you focus enough on your niche and target search terms that aren’t overly competitive, then you might well find them sufficient to get your site at or near the top of SERPs.

On the other hand, if you are targeting highly competitive terms like “call center” on a national scale, then you need to pursue a much more aggressive plan (read: hire me).

But for most staffing companies, getting that rank up can happen easily if you focus on your market. That means candidates and prospects will start finding you instead of you having to search them out.

After all, CRM promises “high-quality customer care” with “24×7 customer access through web and wireless connections.”

CRM promises to transform your fuddy-duddy staffing business into an agile powerhouse — bypassing the organizational inertia of your IT staff!

Sound too good to be true? It is.

The actual practice of CRM has proven to be a disaster. With the exception of a few market niches such as call centers, CRM has routinely suffered spectacular failures despite the support of some of the mostly highly regarded consultancies.

I could substantiate this with examples of failed projects, but a search for “CRM failure” on Google generates some 85,000 hits.

Read through a few of those hits, and you will invariably find expensive consultants who claim that their CRM projects failed because of “misunderstood business objectives” and the “failure to establish metrics” or “poor methodology.”

But rarely will you find the truth plainly stated: CRM has failed because, by definition, it mistakenly attempts to serve the customer by divorcing the information needs of sales and service from those of the entire organization.

This just doesn’t work, because as your back-office manager would be happy to remind you, everyone from the star sales person to the payroll clerk is involved in serving customers.

This is especially true in the case of cash-oriented and margin-sensitive businesses – such as staffing – where speed is critical and only a fully integrated strategy will deliver real customer success.

Consider what integration means to a staffing company and you’ll understand why a CRM system cannot help but fail to make the grade.

Let’s start with order fulfillment. Most mature CRM systems do a fine job of allowing you to enter a new job order or set up a new account, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

You need to quote a rate, but to do that you need instant access to information: contract rates, receivable data, shift differentials and safety information. Your back-office staff tracks this information on a back-office system.

At this point, a CRM advocate might say that such access can be achieved via data importation or “XML integration” with the back-office. Or perhaps the back-office staff could enter the data by hand into the front-office system.

In some cases, this might relieve the constant demand for real-time information, but in staffing – like many businesses – anything short of access to real-time integrated information is too slow and too expensive to set up.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say you’ve made it through the order intake process and are trying to fill the order. You’ve got the right person on the phone, but before the employee will talk about the assignment, she wants to talk about a problem with her last paycheck. Unfortunately, your CRM system doesn’t connect to your payroll system.

But again, let’s just say you ran a search and made the match. The employee starts the assignment. Time slips start flowing in, and the assignment ends. But your front-office CRM system does not immediately transmit the completion of assignments to your back-office, and the employee decides to send in a bogus time card. Another “Gotcha.”

Now the seasoned CRM sales rep asks, “You’re only talking about operational issues. What about sales force automation?”

True, CRM packages offer rich functionality like opportunity management, prospect tracking, pipeline analysis, e-mail campaigning, etc. But the better, fully integrated systems of today offer the same features!

Lack of data integration is a critical CRM issue. What happens in the back-office when the prospect turns into a customer? Trouble.

A separate customer structure is established in the back-office; a structure with a large account will undoubtedly encounter compatibility issues with the CRM system. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, to measure things like the true success rate of a sales campaign or accurately tracked commissions. And how can a staffing sales person make an effective client call without knowing about recent problems like the details of the employee no-show the week before?

So, for virtually every aspect of the staffing business – invoicing, online time cards, vendor management systems, unemployment claim processing, customer reporting – the difficulties of maintaining multiple systems can easily erase the profits necessary to stay in business and manage customer relationships.

The solution to this dilemma involves maintaining a single enterprise database that serves the entire organization and accommodates the implementation of CRM’s promises. The investment community has taken this strategy to heart as it has boosted the capitalization of enterprise players like PeopleSoft and SAP.

Meanwhile, niche enterprise players like TempWorks Software have thrived on this strategy. Staffing companies that ignore newer, aggressive IT solutions are not keeping up with their competitors.

The scene in which a townie literally “punches” a time clock as a way of telling his boss to shove it is why I bring this movie to your attention.

TempWorks is punching the obsolescence out of manually tracking employee time. It’s time to plug this huge sinkhole of back-office expense. We offer a comprehensive set of solutions that puts an end to time-card handling as we know it.

Unlike the many, many different time and attendance solutions on the market, we believe ours is the first that truly works without any manual intervention.

Problems with existing time clock and web time systems.

Although there are many elegant, highly suitable time-keeping systems on the market, they do not integrate with the staffing company’s back-office.

These systems also are expensive: license fees for acquiring these systems; installation fees; set up fees or additional equipment fees; and staff time to set up and coordinate the system with customers.

Is it any wonder that most of the national staffing companies offering such services cannot afford to actually implement them?

In addition to expense, there is the issue of data quality. If you’ve been in staffing for long, you know that customers are very sensitive to billing mistakes, errors in job codes, cost-center codes and the like, which can cost a capable agency a good contract.

When data is maintained in two or more different places – which is the case with external web time systems – it is exposed to the possibility that one set of data will be updated/corrected and not another.

Finally, if you are tracking time on a system other than your live back office, you’re playing a waiting game. You wait until you get data to generate an invoice. You wait to get your sales and profit reports.

Worst of all, your customer waits to get complete and accurate billing information. All of these things add up to lost profits, poor customer service and ineffective decisions.

Beating those problems with 100% integration.

Integration lies at the heart of overcoming all of these problems. In addition to providing a fully integrated front and back office, our time-management solutions provide the integration necessary to keep costs down, maintain security, assure data quality and increase speed.

The two cornerstones of our solution are our integrated web timekeeping and the paperless timecard system.

If you are familiar with our WebCenter, then you already know that we make it a snap for employees and customers to access the data they need.

WebCenter is a live, fully integrated tool that helps you make decisions and eliminates the complications associated with web sites that are not integrated with your database. Unlike most web time products, ours offers a fully featured time entry system. No bridging. No guessing.

Immediate availability of data for everything from customer reports to invoice generation.

Despite its advantages, we know there are many situations where web time is not the answer.

For that, we offer our Paperless Timecard System. The system digitizes the time-card image and eliminates the manual labor associated with its handling, yet allows most of the external people involved to continue working as they always have.

Perhaps best of all, the timecards automatically print with the invoices and that saves sorting, storage and retrieval costs. Today we have both a national healthcare company and a large daily pay player using the timecard system as their exclusive method of acquiring time data.

Breaking Away

Technical solutions like the ones I am describing are no longer toys that marginally improve back-office processes.

As a solid ROI stepping stone, they pack a tremendous punch for breaking away from the pack, positively impacting your client relationships.

I’m convinced that this sort of empathy played a big part in their business success.

These professionals could analyze needs in ways that their clients couldn’t even express. And perhaps more importantly, they learned how to work with their clients’ complex change processes.

They were decades beyond their peers who were stuck in 1970s-style feature/benefit sales, and they knew intuitively how to avoid the presentations that inevitably lead to price discounting and no-decisions.

Most of this, I suspect, isn’t a revelation to those of you that have successfully navigated through the staffing depression of the last two years. In fact, if you’re still standing, you probably could write a book on the subject. And those agencies that sold staffing as a commodity – they are long gone.

The issue then is no longer whether you should empathize with your customer, but how? How can get not just yourself but your entire organization to empathize with your customers?

How can you and your entire organization empathize with your customers?

This is a big topic – much too big for a techie like me – but I would like to share a process that TempWorks has successfully used to build this empathy. This process anchors our support system, and it has helped our sales and profits surge to record levels during this last year despite a drought in the technology business.

Our technique is to “eat our own dog food.” That is, we conduct our business almost exclusively using our own products, so when a customer calls with a trouble report or a business process question, we’ve likely already experienced that issue and are able to offer solutions that we know will work.

For example, we used to have a mediocre solution for e-mailing documents, which caused us pain and inspired us to innovate.

Have you ever e-mailed a client ‘See attached résumé’ and forgotten to attach the document? Have you ever sent the wrong résumé to a client? Or forgotten whether you sent it or not?

If you haven’t, hats off to you. But if you’re like most people, then executing e-mail with finesse can be a challenge.

These issues drove us to build a document management system and an e-mail engine into the core of our enterprise product. Today, a full range of similar CRM features in our core product allows us to better serve our customers.

These solutions will allow you to do the same with some profound implications for the recruiting process.

For example, with our Enterprise version, you can manage large numbers of résumé documents and do a full-text search combined with criteria such as location and salary range. Search results return to you already ranked, so you can quickly choose the top candidates and a click lets you e-mail them to your client.

Without time-consuming busy work and error-prone processes, you have more time to focus on your client, which puts you in the position of adviser and cost-reduction expert.

Goodbye, 1970s-style feature/benefit sales. Hello, partnering!