Bring Front & Back Offices Together On Staffing Software Selection

Front and back officeYour front office finds, manages and places the candidates that drive the success of both your clients and your staffing agency as a whole.  Your back office helps to manage the fiscal impact of these actions, whether its coordinating payroll or managing billing processes.

It could be argued that the front office focuses more on people while the back office focuses more on numbers.  But regardless of primary focus, what both sides of the house need to run smoothly is processes that are easily managed and adhered to.  This is where staffing software comes into play.

Unfortunately, it can oftentimes happen that a staffing software selection is made that helps to streamline front office processes while completely ignoring the back office, or vice versa.  In the short term, this creates communication and integration issues. Worse, in the long term it necessitates additional spending on new modules – or even an entirely new staffing software platform.

Implementation of staffing software is simply the last step in a successful front and back office integration initiative.  Before thoughts of using staffing software to integrate front and back office processes even enters into the picture, front and back office ideas need to be integrated.

Building Front & Back Office Unity

When a new staffing software platform that both the front and back office will be trusting to ease their worlds, both the front and back office need to be consulted on just what parts of their worlds need to be eased.  In other words, the front office and back office worlds need to unite.

Final decision makers need to be acutely aware of not just what the back office wants – but what the back office truly needs.  For instance, the back office will appreciate the ability to configure hundreds of different types of reports.  But what the back office absolutely needs is the ability to consolidate payroll and billing into one system.  The front office wants to be able to integrate with mobile – but absolutely needs a better way to find candidates.

Keep in mind that the specifics may change across each agency – and nearly any platform can be configurable to a very specific set of features and needs.  Because of this, it is important for decision makers to adhere to a discovery process involving both sides of the house early.

When conducting this discovery process, steps I recommend include:

  • Identifying who the key stakeholders are in each side of the house
  • Scheduling a live session with stakeholders to determine what processes the current software is supporting, what processes the software is not supporting at all – and what processes will need to be supported in the future
  • Leveraging stakeholder feedback to create a checklist needs analysis, clearly identifying what features need to be implemented

Not only will this needs analysis provide you with a staffing software selection checklist – it can quickly become a use case as you can leverage when finalizing – or asking for more – budget.

Apart from the steps above, what have you found to be helpful when bringing your front and back office together on a project as critical as staffing software selection?  I encourage you to share via a comment below.

If you are ready to move past discovery and needs analysis, I encourage you to request a free demo of staffing software by Bond.

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