In the coming weeks, we’re launching our most significant product update ever: Crelate Omni™, the end-to-end solution for the modern staffing agency.
Omni pairs our award-winning front-office recruiting platform with a fully integrated middle and back-office offering. Each module of Omni – Recruit, Hire, and Deliver – combine seamlessly to support every critical part of the recruiting and staffing process.
To learn more about Recruit, our award-winning, fast and flexible front-office recruiting platform, we spoke with Crelate Sr. Product Manager Kristi Harris. Kristi’s background as a product manager for a Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM), focused specifically on partner relationships, reporting, and UX and UI, gave her fantastic insight into improving our Recruit module for our customers.
Incorporating Customer Feedback
Crelate: Kristi, we know a big part of your work is talking with customers and incorporating their feedback into our products. Can you tell us a bit about what that process looks like for you?
Kristi: Absolutely! Any good product manager is going to talk with and listen to their customers. Understanding their business and needs is a crucial part of the discovery process. And with respect to any one recruiting agency compared to another, there are going to be some similarities, but there are so many differences and the nuances between how each runs their businesses, too.
It’s crucial to understand how each recruiter’s workflow happens, so we can help to streamline it or possibly provide an alternative solution to help increase productivity. I meet with customers at least once or twice a week, learning about their needs for upcoming features and compiling feedback regarding recently released features. It’s really important to seek out customer input and feedback as we’re building our tools and features. Otherwise, we’re building in a vacuum, and what we build may not actually meet their needs.
Customizable Workflows
Crelate: That’s excellent. You just mentioned that recruiting agencies all operate similarly, but there are nuances to each. Can you speak a little more about how you account for all those unique workflows?
Kristi: One of the things we’re proud of at Crelate is the flexibility we build into our products, which lets our customers adapt the tools to their workflow, and not the other way around. One of the most amazing things about Crelate is that we do build workflows into our products, but we build them in such a way that each of those pieces and each of those components can be broken apart and reconfigured or reconstructed into ways that we never even conceptualized.
And that goes back to listening to our customers. They’re going to tell us the best way for these tools to work. It’s challenging, but it allows us to build tools that work for single-desk recruiters all the way up to larger recruiting firms. We’ve done an exceptional job of building in those core pieces and elements recruiters need without locking in any kind of archaic workflows. We don’t want to tell you how to do your business. We want you to tell us how you do your business so we can help you make it better.
Committed to Recruiters
Crelate: Recruit is Crelate’s first product, and I know we’re proud of and committed to our relationship with our more than 1,500 recruiting customers. How have we improved Recruit for them, and for our new staffing agency customers who’ll likely use the module as part of Omni?
Kristi: Absolutely. Our recruiting customers will always be near and dear to our hearts! And we’re 100 percent committed to making Recruit even better for them as we launch the broader suite of products with Omni.
Specific to Omni, we’re really focusing on the core platform and making sure that the new elements and components we’re adding don’t introduce brand new workflows, brand new forms, etc. We want it to be a very familiar, very seamless flow for all our current customers.
On top of that, my favorite project right now is finalizing our list of features suggested during our ‘Summer of Love’ event. During Summer of Love, we’ve really focused on Recruit customer requests, the things that they absolutely need or must have for the Recruit platform. We’ve received some really great ideas, and we’re hoping to add many of them soon.
What Does Recruit Make Possible for Staffing and Recruiting Agencies?
Crelate: What does Crelate Recruit make possible for our customers, both in recruiting and staffing?
Kristi: Succinctly, every touch point with an applicant, and every opportunity to connect them with a great opportunity, that’s what Recruit surfaces for talent professionals. Beyond that, we provide tools to automate the repetitive processes, allowing recruiters to focus on what is most important.
The features I’m most passionate about – partially because of my professional background – are our recruiting CRM tools. On top of that, I do have a passion for UI and UX specifically. Getting those elements right helps make the whole experience a lot better.
What’s next for Crelate Recruit?
Crelate: Can you give us a preview of some of the upcoming features you’re excited about?
Kristi: Ha! Sure. I mentioned we’re working on a lot of requests from our Summer of Love event, and many of those focused on our Chrome parser. It’s a tool you can add onto your Chrome web browser, and it allows you to collect potential applicant details from some of the job board sites. Right now, it’s primarily targeted towards applicant tracking, but the primary requests we’re hearing are that we should expand the functionality into the customer relationship management (CRM) side of the equation, as in being able to scrape company details of potential clients.
After that, we’re working on expanding the functionality of our import tools, which allow you to take a spreadsheet and import contacts, companies, or jobs into Crelate in bulk.
Crelate: That’s great. So, with all these improvements in mind, what would be your dream feedback from a customer as far as how Recruit is helping them, or how it’s improved their process?
Kristi: I’d love for our tools to enable our customers to double if not triple their number of applicants. Because getting a new job is life-changing for a lot of people. That’s what lights my fire. That’s what makes me happy to be here. At the end of the day, I love building software, but I really love helping people. And that’s what our customers do every day.
Front, Middle, and Back Office, All with Crelate Omni
Crelate Omni is designed for all types of agencies: big, small, regardless of industry, contingent, retained, contract, whatever.
If you are in the business of aligning people with opportunity, we are in business for you.
Learn more about Crelate Omni from a Crelate product expert.
