We’re about to launch 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 about Deliver, which supports the delivery of talent, time tracking and invoicing, we spoke with Crelate Sr. Product Manager Sarah Koss. Sarah’s a former staffing agency operations manager, which gives her invaluable insight into the tools and features staffing agencies really need to grow and thrive.
What’s Does Crelate’s Deliver Module Make Possible for Staffing Agencies?
Crelate: Sarah, as the Sr. Product Manager for the Deliver module of Crelate’s Omni – our end-to-end solution for staffing agencies – how would you describe the benefit of Deliver’s features
for modern staffing agencies?
Sarah: Our Deliver module empowers agencies to customize and streamline their back-office processes. Easily put workers on assignment, track necessary time and expense information, pay and get paid with internal workflows that make things quick and easy.
We’ve built tools that provide incredible transparency into processes that historically ATS users haven’t had access to. Our customers are really excited about this.
Both Omni modules are built on a strong foundation to allow us to grow quickly and efficiently to continue to add new features and functionality. When it comes to specific features we don’t build natively, we’re working with integration partners to build solutions that are incorporated into Crelate’s existing workflows.
Valuable Features in Deliver
Crelate: What are some good examples of tools within Deliver that really make it easy for agencies to back office?
Sarah: For timekeeping, we built a mobile-optimized experience allowing users to quickly enter time with a click of a button. During our planning process, we empathized with staffing agencies that had workers that needed both mobile and web experiences for timekeeping depending on job and industry. With this in mind, we chose a mobile-first tool that lets employees out on assignment submit their hours on their phone every day, as well as enter time through a web experience if they choose.
Along with that, we’ve made timecard approvals seamless for your client. Clients can easily review submitted time and expense entries, and then all they need to do is click a link to approve. We’ve taken away the barrier of logins and having to remember passwords, and we’ve made it super straightforward and easy to use.
In general, our UI is really intuitive and easy to understand. We don’t force you to navigate the software or open lots of different windows. We give you everything you need in one place, and you can literally do everything you need to right there.
Optimizing Redeployment Rate
Crelate: That’s excellent. I know that because of your past experience running operations for a staffing agency, you’re passionate about optimizing redeployment rate. How does the Assignments feature in the Deliver module of Crelate Omni help make redeploying workers easy for staffing agencies?
Sarah: Absolutely! Being able to efficiently redeploy your workers keeps them happy, and it saves your agency time and money at the same time. That’s why building our Assignments feature was such an important project for me.
Assignments surfaces information around assignments that many agencies have never had in the past. For example, when you talk about redeployment, the first thing you have to know is, ‘Who’s coming off assignment?’ So we help you track not only end dates, but also estimated end dates, and we show it all front and center on quick-filter tiles. It makes it so easy to see who’s coming off assignment soon and ready for redeployment.
That’s just an example of one of the fields we built in to Deliver so our customers can build out their reporting and gain greater insight into the health of their business.
Invoicing with Deliver
Invoicing with DeliverCrelate: That’s awesome. What about the Invoicing feature? How does that help make life easier at staffing agencies?
Sarah: We found it was common for agencies to have a timekeeping system and an invoicing system that don’t talk to each other. And that means a ton of manual work moving data between systems. (When I was at an agency, I had to manually enter timecards for hundreds of people coming out of a VMS, and it was brutal.) We built our back office so that timekeeping and invoicing are connected. As soon as you finalize that timecard, your billable items flow into invoicing, and then you can just go ahead and create an invoice right there and send it to your customer.
Crelate: It’s great that your past experience gave you such a solid understanding of staffing agency needs.
Sarah: Absolutely. When I was in that role, I actually went through the process of researching and implementing an ATS and a CRM. I went through the process of migrating systems. And having that experience allows me to empathize with our customers. It helps me ask better questions. That’s why I want to automate as much as possible, because I’ve been there!
There are some features that I snuck into Deliver that I would have loved to have had this in a previous system of mine, and a lot of it revolves around reporting. That’s why we’re working so hard to surface so many different fields and to build a single dashboard where you can see everything in one place. Because the last system I had, I always had to hunt for information. Even finding your own candidate in your own system was difficult.
Listening to Our Customers
Crelate: You spoke with our customers all the time while you were building Deliver. What sort of interactions have you been having? What sort of feedback have you been receiving?
Sarah: We started our early adopter (beta) program a couple months ago, and we’ve had a number of customers actively using all of our middle- and back-office features for Omni during that time. Not only have we received a ton of positive feedback, but after listening to those customers we’ve actually already made several improvements to our features based on that feedback.
One thing we’ve done really well, and has been validated by our early adopters, is we’ve worked really, really hard to make our tools and features integrate seamlessly. That is, hands down, the most consistent feedback that we’re getting from our customers.
Recently, based on feedback, we added an External Approvals feature, which provides the ability for agency clients to approve and reject time. We’ve also built in notifications for timekeeping, which remind workers to submit their hours on their mobile phone.
We’ve also built in notifications for timekeeping which reminds works to submit their hours, and approvers to approve based on company set due dates.
Crelate: What is it you hope our customers gain from Deliver and Crelate Omni in general?
Sarah: At a high level, I hope Deliver – and Crelate Omni in general – helps our customers gain a newfound understanding of their business.
I hope that being able to surface so much information in an easy-to-understand format helps people understand the ‘why’ behind what they’re doing. And I hope that we’re taking away roadblocks. We’re definitely providing more insight than our customers have ever had before, and that lets them be more strategic and independent. Which makes them more efficient and successful. And, hopefully, it lets them have more fun!
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.
