The Covid-19 pandemic has hastened the transformation of the industry and brought to the forefront how companies engage their workers in a virtual environment — a far cry from the in-person interactions that staffing professionals prefer. Operating successfully in today’s virtual climate requires understanding your temporary workers and how to get the best out of them. As a result, staffing firms need platforms that facilitate engagement and ensure the emotional connection that people crave. Ultimately, this is what helps the company’s bottom line.
Enter Sense, a system of engagement that sits on top of your system of record, such as an applicant tracking system, and talks to it. Sense co-founder Pankaj Jindal discusses how the company facilitates engagement with clients and candidates, increasing staffing firms’ profitability while ensuring the talent’s productivity and well-being. Learn how staffing firms big and small are utilizing this platform to stay competitive.
Pankaj Jindal
Co-founder, Sense
Sense was founded long before Covid-19. What was the thinking then and how has the pandemic changed the engagement paradigm for both staffing firms and workers?
We started Sense in January 2016 with the goal of transforming the staffing industry. The staffing industry can come across sometimes as an impersonal business, as a place where it is really hard and expensive to care for your workers. I wanted to create a software that would enable every single staffing company to act like they were one of SIA’s Best Staffing Firms to Work For or Best Staffing Firms to Temp For. Adopting this kind of thinking would allow them to reduce their attrition and drop-off rates, increase redeployment, and so on. That was our paradigm until Covid came along, when some pretty transformative things happened rapidly.
First, Covid essentially precipitated digital transformation for every staffing company. Wherever you were in your digital transformation journey, March 2020 ushered in a new era. Your workers were remote, your staff was remote, your customers were remote and you had to rely on technology to continue engaging with all of them.
Using Sense, you can engage with folks using an email or a text message. Overnight, we saw those volumes doubled within Sense. So, when this pandemic hit, people actually started engaging much more to make sure that not only did they stay in touch with talent, but also customers and their internal staff. So, it’s changed staffing firms, forever.
And workers expect a very personal outreach nowadays. Workers expect you to meet them where they are. Some people like email, others like a text message, other like a survey. So you have to have an omni-channel approach, which technology can enable for you.
What are the two biggest benefits of a next-generation engagement platform like Sense?
The two biggest advantages in my mind are profitability and productivity. Profitability is at the heart of every staffing firm owner.
Profitability comes in two different fashions: increasing your top and bottom lines. We increase your top line by helping you make more placements, adding more candidates to the top of your funnel, reactivating your database. People whose information you have already paid money for, how can you refresh your database and make sure more and more placements are being made from those folks?
Here’s how it works: You are a staffing company, you have an applicant tracking system, you have 100,000 candidates sitting in there. Today, a typical recruiter does not go to the ATS to look for the next worker. They go to job boards such as CareerBuilder, Monster, LinkedIn, Indeed, because they believe the data in the ATS is stale. What Sense will do is automatically refresh that data because as an autopilot, we are reaching out to those 100,000 people and saying, “Hey, so and so, are you still in the same zip code? Is this still your same email address? Do you still want $80 an hour or has your rate changed?” Because all of that information is current, recruiters can now self-source from the database first. When they self-source by tapping the database, they generate all these people and their cost per hire goes down.
So that’s top of the funnel. The second thing that helps with the bottom line is because of engagement, you’re able to reduce your drop-off rates, reduce your attrition and increase your redeployment. So you’re able to make more money from the people who you already have engaged. “So and so is just finishing her assignment. Let me make sure I line up a second one for her so when she finishes on Friday she has a new one to start on Monday.”
That’s profitability.
And then the second big advantage is productivity. We do that using two different paradigms. We call them copilot and autopilot. So copilot would be things where Sense is helping your recruiters along the way. It’s a consultant’s birthday. We wish them happy birthday. Another’s assignment is finishing in 30 days; we’ll send them a reminder and say, “Set up an interview … set up a meeting with your recruiter. Let’s find you a new job.”
Sense helps recruiters ask people for referrals, ask for a sales lead. The tasks the recruiters had to do before as part of their daily lives are now automated. As a result, they can spend more time doing what we refer to as human stuff, which is either talk to a candidate or talk to a client and convince them to work with their staffing company. That was copilot. And then there is autopilot. Say a recruiter leaves your company today; 500 people who were associated with that recruiter are now orphans in your ATS. Sense can automatically go in and change settings and say, “Hey, John left. Put Stephanie in his place.” And now Stephanie owns these 500 candidates, so the database is always up to shape.
What are the biggest challenges to implementing and maintaining such a platform?
The staffing industry has seen more technology in the last five years than we saw in the 20 years before that. So I think people are really starting to use and rely on technology. The biggest challenge is really making these staffing firms understand the benefits of implementing a platform like Sense. When we talk to potential customers about Sense, the number-one reason why somebody does not choose Sense is always “no decision.” It’s never that they found a new product or this product was not affordable. It’s just that people are slow to move and make a change.
So the biggest thing we do in our conversations with potential customers is talk about ROI. That’s what every staffing owner is motivated by … We focus on the hard dollars that you can add to your bottom line.
How do you track engagement?
Engagement is pretty much tracked using what is referred to as marketing automation software. So the idea is, how many people are you reaching out to? How many people are opening your messages? How many are responding? How quickly are they responding? We can also use artificial intelligence for sentiment analysis. For example, say you reach out to 1,000 people, and 50 of them come back and say, you know, “I don’t like my compensation”; 30 of them say, “I have a job mismatch”; and 20 of them say, “I don’t like my hiring manager.”
So you can say to the key engagement teams, “Here are three macro problems that you need to worry about.” At the same time, the software is detailed enough that if even one of those 1,000 people responds with a pre-determined hot-button issue, which one can flag in Sense — e.g., they have Covid or they got sexually harassed, or were discriminated against — those responses take priority. So Sense works like a classic marketing automation product, but the platform has built-in triggers that will immediately notify the recruiter or the account managers. It’s about keeping a pulse on your workers at scale while making it feel personalized. It’s certainly automated, but it feels personalized.
Can you give an example of a company that has used your platform to build relationships and increase ROI?
There are a couple scenarios that stand out to me where Sense enabled companies to completely change their business models during the pandemic. For example, you’re an IT staffing company, and you’ve just figured out that the IT staffing jobs are going down, but Covid contact-tracing jobs are going up.
The idea is that today you can get 100,000 candidate profiles downloaded into your ATS from a CareerBuilder, from a Monster. And those 100,000 people can get the exact same automatic messages (via Sense ) asking if they are interested in a job. How much money do they want? Which zip code do they work in and can they do contact tracing? And just like that, with Sense, you can reach out to these people. And let’s say of these 100,000 people, roughly 500 — a dismally small percentage — come back and say, “Yeah, I’m interested.” And your county or city is probably looking for contact tracers; you go to the county and say, “I’m a staffing company. I know how to do this. Let’s do this.” And, boom, you have a new business.
So we’ve seen customers go from just having an IT staffing business, to doing something on the professional side, on the Covid contact-tracing side. That’s just one example.
Another thing that’s become very easy for people to do is to expand their business. You’re a regional staffing firm that only works in the San Francisco Bay Area, but Covid has opened doors with remote working. Because you’re engaging workers in an automated fashion using text messaging and AI, you could essentially say, “I can give everybody in Chicago the same experience as San Francisco.”
What do you see happening for worker engagement once the pandemic ends?
The industry has changed forever. I mean, one of the things that customers talk about is if you post a job today, chances are that you will get three to four times the number of applicants that you were getting nine months ago because of more people now seeking jobs.
But you are not going to have three to four times the number of recruiters. So first of all, you have to have technology in place to make sure that you can screen these applicants. Then figure out 90% of them are not a good fit for you. But the 10% who are, they immediately need to talk to a recruiter. So technology is going to become the big differentiator once the pandemic ends.
And secondly, workers today expect a very personal outreach. They expect you to remember their preferences. They want the recruiters to know the kinds of jobs they like, whether they want to be contacted via a text message or a phone call, how much money they expect and so on. Any company that is actually able to keep those worker preferences in mind and engage with the worker is likely to do much better than the ones that don’t or are starting from scratch.
For more information on how Sense can help you transform your business, please contact Pankaj Jindal at pankaj@sensehq.com.
To discuss featuring your company or executives in a sponsored content article, contact Hugo Traeger at htraeger@staffingindustry.com