As we wrap up 2021, we want to ensure our customers are empowered to streamline and accelerate their businesses headed into the new year, with the best recruiting and staffing software out there. To support this, December is one of our most powerfully rich releases ever, from timekeeping and invoicing enhancements for staffing teams, to burden rate management tools, to adding candidate data enrichment natively within Crelate and via our free chrome extension for fast, flexible sourcing.
Below is a transcript along with short video overviews from our most recent webinar covering everything that’s new in Crelate, for easier navigation. Enjoy!
December Release Webinar And Product Highlights with Ian Remington, Crelate Customer Success Lead
Contact Data Enrichment
For contact data enrichment, the goal here is that without ever leaving Crelate (and hopefully in just really a click or two), you can enrich contact profiles within your database to give you more data than ever – right at your fingertips. So no need to leverage out and externally use third parties and import that data later to Crelate – we wanna give you the capability to embellish and enrich profiles directly within Crelate. Really excited about that. And that’s based on customer feedback, so we’re excited to announce that.
Certainly one of the keys to any recruiter’s business and processes of course, is data. I know I’ve spoken with many of you on the call throughout the course of the years who have used not only one, not two, but maybe even three different sourcing and enrichment tools. And while, maybe three or four might be on the more extreme side, it’s certainly not uncommon.
I know I’ve spoken to many of you using one (if not two) where you obviously need the power that the data provides. Having accurate and up-to-date information on all of your contacts undoubtedly makes your life easier. It cuts down on time to hire and allows you to start sourcing and calling more quickly. So what this integration will provide is the capability to source and enrich up to 2.5 billion profiles – that’s with a ‘b’ – for contact, social, and demographic information. We unlock more information directly at your fingertips with just a few clicks.
This feature will unlock the ability – right within Crelate – to enrich profiles. So you don’t have to leave and start sourcing and scouring for information. The data here is refreshed quarterly. So it should be very accurate and up to date or as accurate and up to date as feasibly possible to ensure that the contacts – as their lives change, as their job titles change, and emails change – the data that you’re receiving is correct too. So simply enriching a profile will update information like a phone number, an email, a work history, and a ton more. Information that comes in can actually map directly to the fields now that you’re familiar with in Crelate today, but will also create an enrichment activity within Crelate as well.
So not only will it store as much as possible on the contact record within the native Crelate fields, but an activity will also save on a contact profile and will always be available for review. So you’ll have the capability to come through and review information and expand upon information that just maps simply to a field. So this is an awesome option to grab as much data as possible directly within a contact record; you’ll always have that option available.
And perhaps my favorite part of this feature is the capability to use this within the Chrome extension. So the Chrome extension is of course, I’m sure, familiar with nearly all of you, but it’s a great tool to quickly and easily import profiles into your database. However, as many of you are aware, it’s always gonna be limited to what the particular social site will display, but now you’ll actually have the capability through the contact data enrichment tool to grab additional information. Hopefully this will save you ton of time and steps where you no longer need to import the contact to Crelate, go look them up through some other source that you’re using, enrich the profile, and copy and cut and paste that data back into Crelate.
We imagine that many of you start with a parse and an import (just like you do today) and now have the capability to use that enrich button that you see on the screen to begin. Our constant effort is to bring you as much information in one place where you have the option to seamlessly import. And with just an additional click here, you’ll enrich the profile to find new information on these contacts. So we envision many of you on the call using this tool to enrich and immediately then begin emailing and calling the individual prospect or client that you’re importing. So in what otherwise might have been a four to five step process, we’re really hoping to cut that down to just one or two.
This feature, Contact Data Enrichment, will be available as an add-on based on the enrichment credits. Essentially, each profile enrichment will incur a small cost. We’d certainly be happy to discuss this for anyone interested – just drop Kyle a note. We can take down your information to give you some of the specifics regarding plans and pricing, so simply connect with us in the chat for now or reach out to a support team after the call if you have any questions for more details. So this is something, again, we’re excited to bring to you. And with that being said, I’d actually like to transition us so we can get a quick high level view in regards to what this is, how it looks, and how you could use it.
So from some of these screenshots– we’re actually gonna go to the same record we were just looking at – Tim, on the screenshots in the demo – but you’ll notice the enrichment option right on the profile. So I don’t need to go anywhere else – all I need to do is use the dropdown and enrich the profile to grab new information. What that will do is add this enriched activity which will always be there, right on Tim’s record. I can scroll through and look at contact information. I can go back to previous places of employment. So back at Crelate – back prior to education information. The nice part, is I can also see information about the company. So, “Hey, here’s information about Crelate, the year it was founded, headquarters address, LinkedIn URLs.” There’s a ton of information, not only on the contact, but also their prior places of employment. So you’re just equipping and enabling this if you’re using it on potential sales contacts to track a little bit about their experience and history for potential clients that you are looking to engage with, to grab a little bit of size and scope and more information about the company.
So, a ton here within this enrichment activity, all right at your fingertip, just a click away in the contact dropdown menu. Now, as I mentioned before, it’s also exposed and usable right within an advanced version of our Chrome extension. As I come in to Jamey’s profile and look to use our Chrome extension, I’ll have the option to import, but right here will be this option to enrich. So again, if the particular vendor that you’re using is only exposing so much information about me here, I will have the option to – just with a click, after I import – to enrich Jamey and then move on.
So we could easily see people pumping through, you know, hundreds and hundreds of these, every single day as you come through, whether Jamey already exists in my database or not. Right. I could simply enrich Jamey as a new contact, or if I stumbled upon someone who was already in my database, I’ll have the capability to enrich directly here.
There’s a lot here, I know, we’re really excited about this. W’re hoping to give you more data in one spot, just a click or two away. So I hope you are all excited too. And this is certainly one of features that I am the most excited about for this release.
Import Data Plus
Import data plus – which actually might be our largest to-date feature request that we’ve been able to execute on – I know customers have been asking for it for quite some time, so we’re really excited to start introducing new solutions that don’t exist today because of the import data plus features. So this is for customers who receive new lists of data that have new contact information that they wanna update, or maybe I just wanna bulk update a field or a phone number or a tag across a number of different contacts. You’ll be able to take a spreadsheet to not only create new contacts, but also update existing profiles in your database.
All right. So for import data plus, this is actually – as I mentioned at the top – for those of you who maybe were joining a little bit late – one of, if not the single largest source of feedback that we have received from customers over the years.
Whether or not it was our sales team or our support team, you name it – we’ve heard this request left and right. And I’ve been working really hard over the course of actually, not only the fall, but also this summer, to provide a seamless experience to update records in mass directly from a spreadsheet.
So what you can now do with Crelate’s Import Data Plus tool, is take existing records in your database and update their profiles with new information from a spreadsheet. Whether it is overriding old data or simply injecting new data where no data exists. So let’s say you’ve received a list of contacts containing new records, new candidates that don’t exist in your database, and contacts that already do exist in your system. With the old experience, you would import the list and only the new records would be added, the others would be flagged as duplicates and simply ignored. In the new experience, you’ll actually be able to import – and not only add the new – but also update the existing.
This should not only act as a major benefit for, of course, those looking to update, but we’ve also really revamped and improved of the entire import process. You’ll notice an entirely new UI and design of how you go to import a spreadsheet. We’ve really hoped to make this process much easier. And we’ll dive into that in a little bit of greater detail. This will actually show an exact match of the contacts that you’re importing and the exact fields that you’re mapping to. This is actually not in Crelate – you’re looking at a context view here – but you’re actually looking at the import view, prior to officially importing.
We hope this solves two existing problems:
- One, this will definitely alleviate any concerns of overwriting data. “Oh, did I map this phone number field to the email field or did I make a mistake there?” You’ll actually be able to directly see a preview right in front of you to see where any mistakes may lie. So you’re always able to have a full visual in regards to the import prior to officially confirming.
- Two, you’ll actually be able to correct mistakes, which I just alluded to before the import. Previously you’d run through the import process but not really know what you’re to get until the import is complete. It’s not at all visible until that import is finalized. Today, through the summary screen, you’ll be able to review all of the fields you’re mapping and exactly where you’re mapping to. So instead of having to go through the process of importing only then to realize, “ah, I need to make a change or I made a mistake.” You actually have the capability to write from this screen, revert, and actually make changes prior to officially importing.
So import data plus should really not only have the benefit of, of course, adding the ability to update, but also make the general process of importing records a whole lot more smooth and efficient.
And I’ll show you before I do the spreadsheet that I’m gonna import now. And in this case, I’m updating – so John and Whitey already exist on my database. In addition, there are three contacts that don’t. So I’m gonna go through and do a little bit of a blend of both. I’m gonna update some information on John and Whitey and I’m gonna import entirely new contacts as well. I am in a staging environment, so this is just a test account here. This is not yet live within your Crelate account, but we will go through and preview what this experience will look like in your account after the release. It’ll take a second to analyze the file just like it does today, and then give you the capability to analyze and review the file to make your selection. So I’ll have the capability to really select my mappings just like you can today. So not a lot up to this point should be really a whole heck of a lot different.
So I’ll choose my mappings – let’s say, you know, I do really wanna get the phone number in here and I’d like to import some tags. Now, what I can do is say, “Hey, am I importing new contacts only? Or am I actually gonna import and update?” So in this case, again, as I noted, there are not only new contacts on the sheet, but there are actually existing contacts I wanna update. So I am going to map based on the email address field. So make this selection and Crelate will then generate a preview of this import for me. Now, in this case, what we can see here is, “Hey, three contacts, two are gonna update. One’s gonna insert, but we actually have some invalid contacts. So, hey, what, uh, what’s going on here?” I can see in row five and six, we’re unable to find the user Andrew Hokee. So if I actually go back to my sheet, I will notice that – ah, it just looks like there was a little bit of a typo. So we accidentally added an extra ‘E’ so just giving us clarity, like, “Hey, this user does not actually exist, and this cannot be an owner of that contact in Crelate.”
So we’ll go through what the experience would look like. But let’s say as I review looking through the different columns that are actually going to import into my database, this tag doesn’t look quite right. There’s an issue here where it looks like the semicolon, you know, just importing as one tag. And I don’t want that experience. So what I can actually do is go back, confirm and say, “oh, you know what? I actually forgot. I want to create: ‘if a new tag doesn’t exist, I wanna map to my ranking category. And I actually wanna split values based on a semicolon, forgot to make that change. Glad we exposed that. Now I can go back to re-review the particular changes to make sure that my import experience looks clean prior to importing. So you have the easy capability without actually having to physically import the sheet itself, to review. These now look great – these tags are now split based on that semicolon and everything looks good.
We’ll worry about the two invalid [later] (I’m actually gonna leave them there for the sake of this example). So we do have a confirmation option and a ready to import. We have a full dialogue here to understand for specific customers that when you do update, there is no capability to undo an update. So you can undo a newly created contact, just like you can in the import experience today. However, for any contacts you are updating, you want to triple check, which is why we not only have the preview screen, the confirmation check box, and the dialogue here, just to make sure you’re not overwriting valid data. So we add that as an option and as a warning, just to make sure that you are certain, the changes you are are making are accurate.
So let’s go in and import. When the import screen is completed, we’ll then have the capability to actually review those errored records. So again, in today’s experience, you make an error – there’s not a whole heck of a lot that you can do. In this experience, I can actually view the records that did not import, “Hey, who are those records? Ah, here they are. It’s with the misspelling on Andrew’s name.” It’ll tell us again, the row and reason. I can directly export this list, open it right from this screen without actually ever having to really leave or take an extra step, I can pull my sheet back in. It just opened on another window so I’m gonna grab it so I can slide it over. Okay, great. So I know exactly what I need to do. I have actually the reason listed there, so I’ll go right in and I’ll adjust Andrew’s name. I’ll do the same thing here and I can come back and import the two contacts that I would’ve otherwise missed. So easy capability to make quick adjustments and corrections with hopefully a very clear and concise error listing to give you that ability to come back and see exactly what mistake you’ve made.
Vendor Management System Integrations
For firms working with a client’s a VMS provider, we can now allow the capability to automate the process of job collection. No more manually entering jobs from your client – we’ll actually fully leverage the automated process of being able to have VMS records, instantly created. So for a lot of contingent firms, where speed might be the name of the game, this will be a total game changer. So for VMS integration, what we are – and for those of you who might be asking – you know, what is the VMS? VMS stands for a Vendor Management System, and it really helps to facilitate the procurement of jobs and reqs between employers and recruiting and staffing firms. So the intent is really to solve problems for a lot of contingent firms with regards to how quickly they can begin receiving and working job orders.
So for our VMS integration – the answer to this question should be instantly – “how quickly can I start working?” Well, right away. So for any Crelate customer who has clients using a VMS, this can definitely provide a solution. There’s a couple of big name vendors that we’ve partnered with for the initial release – Fieldglass, Beeline, Wand.
There’s a ton out there, but you’ll be able to plug in the VMS job req emails that you’re likely already receiving and then expedite the process. So instead of receiving an email to your inbox, tapping your recruiter on the shoulder, having them go into Crelate and create that job, alerting the rest of the team that the job’s created and that we can finally begin working it – instead, you’ll now actually be able to use those job alert and notification emails to have those automatically forward and created directly within your Crelate account.
We realize that especially for some of the contingent folks, that speed is really the name of the game here. And we want to allow you all, especially those who might be dealing with a high volume, to automate the process around job creation. Why waste and spend time manually creating data that I don’t need to? Let’s have a system do it for me.
Customers using the VMS integration will have a full VMS dashboard. For those who are setting up jobs that often quickly come in, you can have those jobs automatically created and assigned to a default owner. So you can have a specific owner on your team who you can make sure is owning and assigning the VMS reqs that are coming in. Not only can a job come in and be entered by default into my system, but I can also have one of my team members assigned. Our hope is that these high volume firms can really look to reduce their time to hire / increase the win rate by getting started quicker.
All right, so this is just a mock up example of the VMS dashboard. So you have the capability to come in– and I can quickly run filters as well. This will give you sort of a sample of the req itself as it comes in. So, “Hey, this is a Crelate job for an application developer. All the information will populate here in regards to when the job and the opportunity is created. I can set that default owner.” So this is gonna come across really as a standard recognizable job which would have your description and information about the position itself. A lot of this will be a really familiar experience as you come in to Crelate where not a lot in your process needs to change.
The only thing that hopefully changes is giving a lot of time back to actually getting to start working on the job as opposed is to tracking it down, making sure someone’s responsible for creating the job. I can (right away from this menu), come in and begin reviewing.
There are preset filters to hopefully align your view, whether you’re looking to see recently created VMS opportunities, those that are still pending, or have officially processed. And there is a full settings-based dialogue as well where you can set up a lot of the rules behind this. Do I wanna create this as a specific opportunity? If you have custom opportunity types, you have the capability to create this as a specific unique type. And an owner, who should own these jobs as they come in – you can set the owner based on different clients and VMS so the same owner doesn’t have to own every single VMS job coming in, you can customize that. So for Client X who uses Fieldglass, John needs to own that while someone who uses Beeline – we’ll need somebody else to own those. So it’s very fluid, very flexible and customizable, and should hopefully cut down a ton on some of the manual steps and processes that you may be taking.
Billing Portal
As a result of some of our own growth and expansion, we are migrating as a part of this release to a new accounting software. And as a result of this change, we’ve updated our billing portal to support that experience. It’s actually a new and seamless widget experience. It’ll keep you right in the app to give you all the same information you have today, but hopefully also with a nice, easy-to-use experience. Again, as a result of our own internal growth we are transitioning to an entirely new billing portal as part of this release. This should come by the way of a new and easy-to-use widget, which you’ll see on the screen here. So we’re hoping that this will make things easier than ever for customers to use within the billing portal.
This transition itself has been planned for the better part of six months. This has been a long time coming, something that we’re excited about. I know our accounting team is more than thrilled to have this come through.
So this should allow for more self-serve options for customers within their portal. Both of our finance and development teams have been working incredibly hard to develop this experience, so this is something that we plan to continue to develop with our vendor and continue to iterate on.
We’re really excited to bring much more here in the future and hoping that this experience is easier to use in general – keeping it within the app and within a nice consolidated widget for everyone to take the same action and have the same information as before. Just easier to use and review.
Timekeeping
So what’s coming in CRE deliver? A lot is the answer. For those of you who might have missed our September release, it unveiled our Crelate Hire and Deliver modules. The Deliver module focuses on the back half of the process.
So for those maybe on the temporary and contract side – you can control the timecard process and enable your contacts to submit time within a mobile app, allow your clients to review and approve or reject that time.
For those on the direct hire side or those on the temp and contract side – you can leverage invoicing and reporting on the invoices that you’re sending out. So whether you’re invoicing based on weekly time or on the direct hire side, or maybe based on a milestone – “signed agreement, invoice #1, candidate start invoice #2. And then reflect back and run aging reconciliation, invoicing reports all within the system.
Easily export this data, send to my payroll, or import it into my payroll solution, and streamline the back half of the process while really adding more robust data and reporting to help you effectively run your businesses.
Now let’s talk about timekeeping. So specifically for those who on the start on the temp and contract side, we’ve completely expanded the concept of what customers can now report on when reviewing time cards. Now customers can track and expand growth of their timecards out on active assignment. Through these reports you’ll have the ability to see how many hours are being approved on a per pay period basis to ensure that there aren’t lapses or lulls, or to be able to track and manage for seasonality of hiring. You can better forecast year over year based on seeing how many hours you’re going to have out when some of that seasonality dip and lull may occur if you’re in a more seasonal business, but also to help you stay on top of timecards and ensure things aren’t slipping through the cracks.
We want to bring awareness to customers and your respective teams ultimately to help you capitalize on maybe timecard that’s not getting timely, submitted or approved, to help you leverage this report, to maintain transparency around some of the active contacts that are out on assignments. To really just ensure you’re not missing revenue due to contacts of clients maybe forgetting to submit or approve time.
Invoicing
The next step, both on the direct hire and more on the temp side will be for invoicing reports. So for invoicing reports, we will have a pre-built dashboard, just like we will on the time keeping side. So this will hopefully unlock a whole lot. I’ll take us through a quick little overview of the invoicing and time keeping reports, but whether you’re looking to run reports based on status, unpaid balances, or “Hey, what do we still have sitting in draft that that just needs to get sent out?” And of course, as always with all Crelate reports, always giving you the capability to customize.
So for those maybe on the temporary and contract side – you can control the timecard process and enable your contacts to submit time within a mobile app, allow your clients to review and approve or reject that time.
You’ll always have the capability just like you do with other reports to come in, configure, embellish, and customize. So let’s take a look. I’m gonna highlight some of the quick reports on timekeeping, just show you some of the different charts, graphs, tables – everything that you can create here.
Some of the screenshots that we had looked at earlier on timekeeping, looking at those finalized timecards, reviewing the nice, pretty picture of timecards based on particular statuses, the hours, and approvals. You know, “Hey, what unclaimed timecards are still out there? What, is actually sitting out there that we might still need to claim on an actual invoice?”
There’s a lot here, both on timekeeping and on invoicing where I might wanna take a look at and give my HR rep a tap on the shoulder. “Hey, don’t forget, an accountant we have still has four draft invoices that need to be sent out. And that’s about 18K in revenue that we still have outstanding. So let’s make sure we get to work on that.”
Just having that serve a single value, a sort of a call to action to actually see how much is is left sitting there. So you might try track that on a weekly or monthly basis. Seeing what’s upcoming – what are the invoices that are actually due this month, and when they are due? Looks like we have two upcoming due this month. One that’s partially paid one that is still in a draft. What might be the subtotal of all draft invoices? Can I actually see what those invoices are?
So I can take a look right from this screen who the companies are. What’s older, what’s outstanding, that maybe we just haven’t sent out – or maybe there’s some sort of negotiation with ABC company that we need to continue before actually beginning to prepare to send out that invoice. So a lot here that you can do, a ton of configuration and measurement capabilities where you have complete control over what exactly it is that you wanna measure and what the visual presentation is. Also, the capability to filter down, just like any report in Crelate, we wanna give you a ton of actionable reports, so you can come in and choose specific filters, owners, time periods, anything and everything. Companies – what are the clients that might be holding us up here? Discounts, who or which of my employees is discounting, or how much are we discounting on a quarterly basis? There’s a lot here that you can review and track and take action on to hopefully not to just create stagnant reports, but actually give yourself action to draw on that you likely don’t otherwise have today.
Burden Rate
And then, I hate to say it folks, but this is actually last – certainly not least – but the final item that we’ll be discussing on the call today will be burden rate. This is going to be a default field, both for burden rate and percentage. The nice part about this is you’ll have the option to set default calculations and then later come back and report based on burden rate.
So as of today’s world, an experience when you might be running a particular revenue based report, well, revenue’s great! It’s a big shiny number. But it obviously doesn’t tell the full story that burden does.
These fields will have the capability to be added on an opportunity you can set up again – default calculations, so you can use pretty custom formulas, just like you would in Excel to set up whatever sort of equation that you’d like for your burden and gross margin. And then of course have the ability to come back and report on that, so you might run this side by side with the revenue. Of course you’ll have opportunities that presumably offer an increased burden rate than others. So you can really track and measure this based on industry. There’s a lot that you can take away based on these reports and this field.
Other Goodies!
You’re really never quite done with a release without throwing in a little bit of extras. So we’re sneaking in some additional items in this release that we’ll show at the conclusion of the recruit section.
So what what else is there? Workflow stage deletion dialogue – for a while, there hasn’t been a really automated and easy way for customers who are looking to delete a workflow stage to do so. Because we haven’t provided the capability to really review who’s actually in that stage. So we have changed that experience entirely where we allow you to review contacts in the stage and navigate to the record to remove them from the stage. You can do this in bulk.
You also have the capability for contacts that might be duplicates or blocked, (that would otherwise have prevented you from deleting the stage) to now to make sure that those will display – even if they’re blocked or a duplicate – and still give you the capability to remove those records. So thus you can then update the particular stage by deleting it. So just a quick little goodie there.
We’ve also improved the user invite experience. I know we’ve gotten feedback from many customers and from our own professional services department who typically deal with new customers signing up that the links are expiring too quickly.
That a lot of times when you’re inviting new people to your account, whether you’re signing up for the first time or you just hired a new team member, that the links will often expire before they get the opportunity to review it.
So we’ve elongated the time, just making it easier, and hopefully cutting back on some of the back forth between the user tapping you on the shoulder, “Hey admin, I can’t get in. Can you send me another invite?” and going through that whole ring around. So now that experience will be much improved, where the experience on the invite will last up to 24 hours as opposed to the 15 minutes it was previously. So this should give you ample time when inviting new team members and colleagues to to make sure that they have access to the account and take one more roadblock off your plate.
One more. I wanted to just sneak this in, a little, “did you know?” item. I thought of the idea when I was talking with our team about how there’s always so much in these releases, why not bring something small back from a prior release that customers might not know about? Cuz we have a ton of cool shortcuts that not everyone on the call might be aware of.
So I wanted to pose the question: Did you know that within a search you can filter within that search to find a specific field that you might be looking for? So just in case the screenshot doesn’t doesn’t paint the full 1000 words that I’m trying to get across – really what I’m alluding to is if I’m in search and there’s a big field that I need to find and I can’t remember where the heck it is in this long list. I can actually just, ah yeah, there’s the record type. That’s what I wanted. Let me go ahead and make sure that I’m searching just for candidates. This can be really helpful for new new employees who might not know some of the layout of Crelate. You don’t need to bother to scroll through all those fields. Just type and look exactly for the one you’re looking for.
