Ultra-Staff Staffing Software: Manage Assignments Easily and Get Results

By ABD

August 6, 2012

Years ago, Automated Business Designs recognized the importance of automating processes to propel staffing firms into using quicker and more streamlined business practices to meet their goals. One common goal that not only resonates in the staffing industry but for any business owner is, “How can things be accomplished more efficiently in both time and effort?” At ABD, our answer is “through automation.”

For those of us who started in the staffing industry years ago when staffing and recruiting software was new and in the developing phases, we can still remember relying on manual back-up methods and the use of cards and board systems to fill our job orders and track our daily activity.

The use of Ultra-Staff software to manage job orders and assignments has really cut back on the time needed to get the job done right. Not only are assignments used to associate employees with certain jobs, they can also be used to track the entire process from start to finish regarding a certain order.

Historically, you might have sent out a few resumes, on an individual basis, to present applicants for a position. To speed up this manual process, Ultra-Staff added the Submit Resume for These Applicants / Employees. You can run a search, from any job order, for all qualified applicants, and then with a few mouse clicks create an assignment record for each one of those applicants indicating a resume was sent to your job contact. This assignment creation occurs simultaneously with the emailing of the resumes themselves.  In this example, the assignments would have been created with an ‘R’ code to signify that a resume was sent out. Alternatively, there is another item called Assign These Applicants / Employees where any type of assignment status code can be used to signal a certain action.

Another way to manage your assignments through automation is the Batch Edit Assignments feature. It’s a great way to change an element in an assignment record, but to change it for hundreds of assignments all in one swoop. Let’s say you would like to extend the end date for several hundred assignments at once. Retrieve those records through a search, use the Select All to highlight all of those assignment records and then make your change.

Adding to your list of assignment status codes with codes unique to your business is also a great way to use assignments for viewing your daily activities on jobs.  It is very useful to pull up your job orders and then click to view the assignments. A concise listing of the associated assignments is then viewable and each assignment status code indicates all the actions taken on that job thus far. All the same great tracking can occur for Direct Hire job orders, and in Ultra-Staff, we refer to those records as Interviews (Assignments for the Temporary Job orders).

While we have only highlighted a few of Ultra-Staff’s tools for managing assignments through automation, you can see how much quicker and easier it makes the process so that more time can be allocated to other projects.

Laura Ponzo is a Systems Engineer at Automated Business Designs, Inc., software developer of Ultra-Staff staffing software for the staffing and direct hire industry. Ultra-Staff is a staffing software business solution with components for front office, back office and the web. Laura’s email address is laura.ponzo@abd.net. for more information on Ultra-Staff go to www.abd.net