Not only that, they’re using those devices to consume entertainment (watching TV on their phone, for instance), and texting is still huge, with 72% of Americans texting at least occasionally, and regular texters sending an average of 41.5 texts a day.

In many candidate pools, computers are not part of daily life; this is especially true for industrial and hospitality candidates. However, mobile devices are proving to be a great substitute for computers in terms of web browsing, plus, they have the communications capabilities of calling and texting.

So how can you use mobile media to help with staffing and recruiting?

Make your website mobile-friendly. Keep your layout simple and easy to view in one column. Don’t let your text get too small, and if you have links or buttons, make sure they’re long enough or large enough to be clicked with a finger.

Use social media regularly. Most mobile devices are extremely well-integrated with social media; some even have platform-specific functions or buttons built in. Facebook alone had 50 million mobile users in the U.S. last year.

Make the most of texting. Many job candidates screen calls, so the process of calling, waiting through the rings, listening to the message and then leaving one of your own is not only time-consuming, it’s often pointless. Instead, you can text your clients (who will check their texts because it’s a one-way communication with no obligation of reply) with information about a job, then have the ones who are interested call you.

Texting is a fantastic savings of time and effort. If you need to supply, say, 25 banquet servers for a job, and you’ve found that you have to call 8 people to find one person who’s interested and available, you’d have to call 200 people.

At a conservative estimate of 20 seconds to find a number, 4 seconds to dial, 4 seconds of rings, 3 seconds of outgoing message and 9 seconds of your message, that’s 40 seconds a call, that’s 133 minutes, or almost 2 hours and a quarter spent on the phones—and that assumes you’re doing nothing else that whole time.

How long does it take to reach those same 200 people by text? At a generous estimate of 10 minutes to select the candidates you want individually, 3 minutes to type the message and 2 minutes to click the various buttons in COATS and then in Outlook… 15 minutes. Then, you can sit back and let the interested applicants contact you.

If that sounds like a great use of mobile media, we agree! We’ve got a whole eBook on the subject, in fact; you can click here to download it.

What other uses of mobile media have you found? Let us know in the comments!

Once you’ve received a completed application and a resume from a candidate, it’s easy to get caught up in job orders, interviewing new associates and all the other hundreds of things staffing professionals do every day. However, if you really want to stay in touch with one candidate (or even a group of them), social media can make it a little easier.

Just as you regularly contact prospective clients, send occasional messages to your favorite candidates using social media. An email signals professional interaction and a potentially long reply. Instead, you can send candidates a quick message over Facebook or LinkedIn that asks about their job search and lets them know if you’ve got any positions that they’d be a good match for.

Also, if the candidate made a real effort to apply for a particular job but wasn’t chosen, you can send them a quick social-media message saying that they didn’t get that job but that you’ll contact them if something similar comes up. This simple message will be appreciated by applicants who have become cynically used to hearing nothing after applying for jobs.

We’re in the personnel business, true, but we need to remember to keep it a personal business too. Touching base and following up with candidates is good business, and social media makes it easy.

How have you used social media to follow up with candidates? Let us know in the comments!

But we’d like to take a day to say, in a totally platonic, non-squicky and professional manner: we love you.

Truly, we do. We know how much trust is involved in the relationship between our companies, and we appreciate that you place that trust in us.

We also appreciate the ability to help you when you need us. Oftentimes, we hear from you when you’re stressed out, and we like to think that we can make things better.

We want to help your company grow as much as possible, so your success is as important to us as our own.

So in the purest, most classical sense possible, we love you. (In the snifter-of-brandy, Barry White way… you’re on your own.)

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Social media is, of course, a means of communication, allowing you to put your messages in front of an audience that has consented to receive them. But unlike most means of communication, in social media, your audiences can communicate right back to you and let you know what they think about your messages, your company, your photo, anything.

So a better way to use social media for communication is to ask your audiences what they want, what matters to them and what would help them, as well as offering your own messages. You can also use it to share content from other sources: job-interview tips for your candidates, news about local business issues for your clients, etc.

And remember: the greatest strength of social media is the fact that it consists of networks of people, their friends, family members, co-workers, former co-workers, networking buddies, etc.

What proportion of your candidates come from referrals? Well, social media networks are referral machines. When referring a friend for a job is as easy as copying and pasting a link to their profile, or “sharing” a post from Facebook, the referral strength of your candidates is increased tremendously.

So don’t be afraid of social media. It’s not out to get you, or to render staffing obsolete. Like most technological tools, it’s a little tricky to learn at first, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you’ll wonder how you got by without it.

What have your experiences with social media been like? Let us know in the comments!

Trying to speak to both audiences at once using one channel results in the communications equivalent of a mullet. You may think it’s working, with the business in the front (your B2B client marketing) and the party in the back (your B2C candidate marketing). But what you’re really doing is creating confusion and putting everyone off. (Just like a mullet. Look at it.)

Instead, customize your social media to match what each audience is doing, and pay special attention to the ways they use that social media channel. For instance, most people use Facebook on their “personal time,” when they’re interacting as themselves, while people on LinkedIn are more likely to interact as a representative of their company.

So it might make sense to pitch your candidate social media conversations to Facebook and your client social media conversations to LinkedIn. However, when high-end candidates are job-hunting, they’re likely to interact on LinkedIn as themselves (but in a way that promotes themselves as a business asset, rather than the more casual presentation people use on Facebook).

To make sure you’re using the right channels for your social media, think first about who you’re trying to reach, what they’re looking for, how they use social media and what kinds of conversations they respond to. Treat social media like the major marketing instrument it is and put the same level of thought into it that you’d put into an advertising campaign.

Keep the business with the B2B channels, and the casual with the B2C channels, and you can avoid a lot of ugliness.

What social media channels do you use? And have you ever rocked the mullet? Let us know in the comments!

(If you haven’t seen Groundhog Day, this video condenses it pretty nicely.)

But folks who use COATS Staffing Software know: you don’t have to go back and forth between front-office and back-office data, because it’s all the same data. The COATS interface wraps itself around your data while handling every aspect of your business, from employees to payroll to general ledger. It’s all right here, no endless repeating, no nightmare-with-no-escape, no Sonny & Cher, not even a cute little groundhog (unless you supply your own).

Now, the six more weeks of winter? We can’t help you there.

Early in the month, President Obama made three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This might not have been a big deal… had he done it when Congress was in session. But he didn’t, and a couple of business groups have already sued. The NLRB wasted no time in issuing a ruling that will probably also engender challenges from business groups: that employers cannot require employees to go through arbitration instead of the courts for workplace claims.

While the NLRB might be unpredictable, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) wants you to have some idea of what it’s planning for the next few years. So it’s posted a draft strategic plan for fiscal years 2012-2016. Happy reading! While the draft plan doesn’t mention background checks, the EEOC is continuing to monitor their use. Pepsi recently agreed to pay $3.13 million after the EEOC charged the company with discriminating against job applicants by checking their background arrest records rather than just conviction records.

Another area the EEOC is focusing on is the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), having filed at least two ADA-related lawsuits in the past few weeks. Perhaps anticipating more scrutiny from the EEOC, the U.S. Department of Education issued an advisory letter and FAQ to primary and secondary schools on compliance with the ADA. Recent cases have dealt with the specifics of the law, including whether or not obesity and migraines are covered by the ADA.

And while we’re on the subject of weight gain and pain, a recent ruling in a case about a pregnant employee who applied for Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave before she was eligible, but for a future leave during which she would be eligible, had her employment not been terminated. It’s very confusing. Good luck.

Another source of confusion continues to be Facebook (FB), and how much access employers can have to their employees’ social media activities. A United States District Court recently ruled that employers cannot “rummage at will” (great phrase!) through employees social media information if that information has been limited from public view.

And finally, we conclude with two tales of legal woe, proving that even icons can fall afoul of employment law. Chuck E. Cheese (CEC) was recently fined more than $28,000 for violating various labor regulations, including child-labor laws, in California. Meanwhile, across the country, Lady Gaga has been sued by her former assistant for working 7,168 hours of unpaid overtime… in just 13 months.

So, it’s certainly shaping up to be an interesting year, legally. Have an opinion to share on these rulings, declarations, lawsuits or challenges? Let us know in the comments!

Wait, come back!

Dealing with these manuals is to business resolutions what cleaning out the garage is to personal resolutions: you know it needs doing because who knows what-all is in there by now, but it seems like such a tedious task and there are always more important things to do, and really, it’s not that important, anyway.

Until there’s some legal action involving your employees or candidates. (The garage equivalent is a leaking hot water heater or a trapped skunk.) Then, a clear, well-written, up-to-date manual becomes the most important thing standing between you and a horrible mess.

First, consider creating a mini-manual for your candidates:

Step 1: Make a list of everything you need candidates to know about staffing and working with your company. This could be your “pre-assignment” portion. It includes stuff like how to dress for an interview, how staffing works, how often they need to call in available, the best way to reach you, how your health insurance works (if you offer it), reminders to connect via social media, etc.

Step 2: Make a list of everything you need candidates to know once they’ve been assigned to a job. This includes safety, how to report injuries on the job, how worker’s compensation works, the level of professionalism that’s expected of them, how to do the best work possible, etc.

Step 3: Make a list of everything you need candidates to know after a job ends. This includes returning badges or uniforms, exit interviews, unemployment, updating their resume, etc.

Step 4: Write all of that up using the simplest language possible.

Step 5: Ask your legal counsel and some of your staffers to review it, and revise it as necessary.

Step 6: Make it accessible on the web or through a series of emails, or both. If it’s a really short document, you could print it out and make it part of your application pack. But having it online gives it a much better chance of actually being used.

Now, the employee manual for your staffers:

Step 1: Read your existing manual. If the thought of doing so makes you long for dental surgery, think of how your employees must feel about the manual. Now resolve to make it better and more accessible.

Step 2: Flag the parts that are no longer correct or out of date. Those can be corrected or simply deleted.

Step 3: Using the information you’ve learned in your SWOT analysis and metrics measurement, determine what crucial information and policies are currently lacking in your manual. Social media policies will probably comprise the bulk of the new info to fill in, as they’re the source of a lot of new legal precedents.

Step 4: Make a fairly detailed outline of your prospective revised manual, including the parts of the old one you’re keeping and the new stuff you’re adding. The outline helps ensure that there’s no overlap and that the sections of the manual make sense.

Step 5: Write it (or delegate or outsource someone to write it). Keep the language as simple and clear as possible. You’re not turning this in to your eighth-grade composition teacher, you’re hoping that people will get useful information out of it as quickly as possible. Write it to that purpose.

Step 6: Ask your legal counsel to review it and make sure it’s legally correct, comprehensive, clear and relatively bulletproof, then ask employees across the company to review it to make sure it’s easy to use and understand. Make revisions as necessary.

Step 7: Make it accessible online. Whether over a company intranet or via an interactive PDF, the best way to make sure your employees use the manual is to make it fast and easy to use, and that means links and clicks. Feel free to give everyone a hard copy, or assign one hard copy per department, but most of the use this manual will see is via electronic searches, and that’s as it should be.

Have we left out a step? Have any fun, wacky employee-manual stories to share? Let us know in the comments!

Like management guru Edward Deming said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” For instance, it’s easy to say “We’re doing pretty well in employee retention” based on a general feeling of success in that area, but if HR data shows that your turnover rate is 30% higher than the average for your industry, that’s another story.

It’s always good to know where you stand, even if it contradicts a positive impression you’d had. For one thing, your impressions are now based in reality. And once you’re aware of a problem, you can begin figuring out ways to fix it.

So what key metrics should you be measuring?

Every business needs to measure these:

Financial: Net cash flow, gross margins, operating margins, profit margins and SGA (sales, general & administrative) costs.

Employee: Productivity, training participation, career development and turnover.

Marketing: Marketing impacts are trickier to measure, but online marketing, including web analytics and social media mentions, can be quantified fairly easily.

But staffing firms have additional indicators metrics to think about:

Customer relationships: Look at the regularity with which you reach out to a prospect and the number of points of contact required before a prospect becomes a client.

Client mix: What percentage of your business does each of your top 10 clients bring in? If your client base is too dependent on one client or one industry, that’s a good indication that it’s time to diversify.

Employees: Internal and external training programs, including CSP certification.

HR Costs: Worker’s compensation costs and claims, unemployment insurance claims, health care costs, FUTA payments.

COATS Staffing Software can help you track many of these metrics automatically. Financial metrics can be viewed using our Management Business Advisor, making them easy to understand. Contacts with your clients can easily be entered and tracked, and HR costs are handled as well. To learn more about how COATS Staffing Software can keep you on top of the metrics that matter, contact us today.

Of course, you can’t accurately determine where you want to go without understanding where you are right now. The classic method of doing that is performing a SWOT analysis: determining the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of an organization.

And while it’s always helpful to analyze your business as a whole using the SWOT method, you can break it down even further, by departments:

Clients: How are you serving them well? How could you serve them better? What new services could you offer? Who’s competing for your clients? And what other competition is there: not hiring through staffing, not hiring at all, offshoring, etc.?

Candidates: How are you serving them well? How could you serve them better? Where do your best candidates come from, and how can you increase your activities in those channels? Where do your weakest candidates come from, and how can you decrease or cease your activities in those channels?

Employees: What are the greatest strengths of your workforce? In what areas could they use some additional training or education? Are there new ways you can energize your workforce? And are your incentives and culture strong enough to keep your employees loyal to you?

Operations: What areas are functioning efficiently, and how can you duplicate those results? What areas could use a tune-up? Are there new technological or operational developments that could further improve your efficiency? And are there also developments (price increases, legislation) that could compromise your efficiency?

Finance: Review your business’s balance sheet, cashflow and financial ratios. Which are healthy… and which aren’t? Are there ways of buying, selling, trading, leasing or refinancing that could improve your financial fitness? And are there also new or potential developments (interest rates, balloon payments due) that could harm your financial standing?

Marketing/Sales: This one might be trickier, because many businesses don’t have mechanisms in place to measure the success of marketing efforts. This article, among thousands available online, offers a good starting point for developing measurement tactics for marketing and sales. Evaluate the campaigns and tactics that have worked, and the ones that haven’t, and be sure you understand why in both cases. See if you and your team could use additional training to stay on top of the latest developments in marketing and sales, and be aware of what your competition is doing in these areas as well.

Once you know where you stand, you can chart a course for the new year. Set goals for the year and for individual quarters, and let your employees know what these goals are and why they’re important. Once employees know what the company is shooting for and why, they tend to be much more engaged in meeting those goals. (And tying employee bonuses to those goals doesn’t hurt, either.)

What might surprise you is how many of these areas COATS Staffing Software can help you with. Having the most comprehensive staffing software possible can measure your client and candidate efforts, keep your operations efficient and organized, track your marketing and sales efforts and keep your financials strong. Contact us today to learn how we can help make 2012 your best year yet.