Walking us through the value of strong talent communities in this episode is the vice president of customer experience at Staffing Referrals, Rachelle Arnold. Rachelle’s rich professional history in staffing makes her the perfect candidate to define what a talent community is and to explain why it’s important to fully understand the term.
Our conversation journeys us through the work done at Staffing Referrals, why it’s vital to have a unique talent pool to pull from, how to assess a recruiter’s quality and credentials, and the incredible power of referral placements. We also discuss how failure opens doors of opportunity, why the candidate experience matters, why trust and transparency are essential components of recruiting in today’s climate, and everything that the industry is doing to boost and streamline recruiter productivity.
[0:01:15.5] DF: Hello everyone, thank you for joining us for another episode of The Staffing Show. Today, I am super excited to be joined by Rachelle Arnold who is the VP of customer experience at Staffing Referrals, super excited to have a guest that I get to talk to three to five times a day on the call and be digging deep into referrals, what’s going on in the staffing industry, we’re going to be talking about talent communities, recruiter productivity, jumping into candidate experience.
Rachelle, I feel like you know everybody in the staffing industry already but for those of you that do not know you, could you share a little bit about your background and also how you got into the staffing industry?
[0:01:54.0] RA: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m excited to be here. I had no idea that the staffing industry even existed. So, whenever I moved back to New Orleans, which was eight years ago already, I was referred to a healthcare staffing agency, shocker. It was the first job that ever hired me because I had a college degree, fun fact, which I thought was so interesting. I was like, “Yay.” So, I did all of that.
[0:02:20.8] DF: That is prophetic.
[0:02:22.1] RA: Yeah, right? And then, I was there for a little over five years and held so many roles. I was in HR, marketing, and then director of recruitment, and then throughout my experience there, I would go to like, the trade shows, met tons of other people in the healthcare staffing space, and then on the vendor side, I met you, and then almost three years ago, I switched to Staffing Referrals.
And so, when I was at the agency, we used Staffing Referrals and had a ton of success with the product. I used to live in Denver, for those of you who do not know that. So, I used to hang out with Dave when I would go there, and the rest is history as they say.
[0:03:02.2] DF: Yeah, and then we met the first time at like a happy hour at Trav Con.
[0:03:06.7] RA: Yeah, Trav Con, at happy hour, yeah, at 2019, the year of like, I was the only girl in the room for some reason and it was great recruiters, you all, Cabana, it’s like the whole shebang that came out that year.
[0:03:17.3] DF: Yeah. that was a great one, it’s been a fun and crazy ride since you joined, and super excited to have the conversation today. You know, a lot of times we’re talking about what’s going on in the industry and talking about kind of forward-looking or from trends that maybe I’m not as close to. Today’s going to be a little bit different as I mentioned, so we’re going to be talking deeply about what you do in the industry and digging into Staffing Referrals and referrals as a whole.
One of the – actually, we’ll just go down the normal format for this. So, why don’t we start off, why don’t you tell me a little bit about Staffing Referrals?
[0:03:49.3] RA: Staffing Referrals is an automated referral management platform and I am excited to say that we are helping our customers take their talent and turn it into their competitive advantage and it’s been really incredible to sit alongside and help our customers become their partner and their ally with allowing them to pull money off of job boards and kind of nurture and nourish the relationships that they have.
With not only their internal staff but their field employees, and making them little digital recruiters out in the universe that we help automate, track, manage, and then scale referral programs.
[0:04:27.9] DF: Awesome, awesome. Well, I appreciate the background there. So, I know we’re going to jump up a little bit to some of the things that are going on in the industry today. I think the first category you and I had discussed was jumping into we have the concept of talent communities, you know, in terms of what they are, why they’re important, and how ultimately they can impact the profitability and growth of a staffing agency.
So, I think to start, maybe you could just tell us a little bit about why you think staffing or why talent communities are critical or important to staffing agencies today.
[0:05:00.6] RA: Yeah. So, I think that from an agency perspective, it’s really hard to navigate like what is the talent pool in the different job boards, right? So, not only are you competing against your competition for talent on like the Indeeds, Ziprecruiter, right? You’re spending more and more money because the options that they give you when you tell them you’re not getting the right talent is to spend more money.
But also, one of like, the alarming statements that one of our customers made was that sometimes the recruiters are actually fishing the same people from also that source, which I think that was something I didn’t even think about. So, your community is your access to like the highest quality talent and your competitors don’t actually have access to that. So, it gives you that leverage where you can get the right type of people from the right type of people, who want to send them to you, you know?
[0:05:54.6] DF: Yeah, it is, if I may add, I think it maybe was at, it might have been the Cell Staff or Integrity.
[0:05:59.7] RA: Yeah.
[0:05:59.9] DF: Webinars where, they’re like I will say, “All right, well, you are buying the same talent as your competitors.” And he’s like, “Yeah, and then we’re also sometimes buying the same candidates that we have in our database too.” You know, we’re competing against ourselves because we already have the records in there. We’re competing against the same people that bought the, you know, the Indeed record or the resume off of the…
And ultimately, having a unique talent source can be a way to create a competitive advantage because you have access to candidates that are you know, only you have access to that others can’t reach, which is – that can be a really critical thing, you know?
[0:06:35.0] RA: Yeah, and it’s something I totally forgot about. Like, I can remember recruiters, like, having the same person and us being like, ownership fighting going down. Like, people who have them first or who has the better connection. So yeah, definitely like, leveraging the community that you’re building within your agency is the money that’s well spent there.
[0:06:56.4] DF: Yeah, and I – we talk about this a lot, I mean, pretty much every day when it comes to having conversations with customers but just the idea, the concept of reducing dependency on job boards as well where you’re just like, “All right, well, next time that we have a spike and the prices go up 2X, 3X, whatever that may be, the larger of the percentage of placements that are coming from referrals today, the less that’s going to impact you.”
The more that you’re going to be able to weather that storm. So, if the prices go up by 2X and 95% of your placements come from Indeed, that’s going to have a huge impact on your business. Now, if you’re one of the – we have agencies we work with that are 45, 50% of their placements come from referrals today. That’s just not going to impact them nearly as much. They’re going to be able to weather the storm, their costs are going to go up some.
But ultimately, they’re kind of in a better position when that happens. So, we kind of talked about the “why” when it comes to talent communities, how do you define a talent community?
[0:07:53.1] RA: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think as it relates to staffing, it’s basically just the extension or the extended network of your agency or people who are involved with your brand.
[0:08:03.2] DF: Yeah, absolutely.
[0:08:03.9] RA: Pretty, pretty basic.
[0:08:05.3] DF: And I think that’s cool, yeah. It’s pretty straightforward but I felt like a lot of people think of the talent community and it’s like, “All right, well, it’s just the candidates that we have on assignment” or some will think it’s just the people we have in our database and the reality is, the true talent community is not just people in your database but the extension of them. It’s the network of your database, which is where I think that the real power of this can be generated from a talent community perspective.
[0:08:31.2] RA: Totally.
[0:08:31.4] DF: What are some of the ways that you can tell if a staffing agency is doing a good job with kind of fostering or building a talent community?
[0:08:40.3] RA: We get asked this all the time when people are trying to define like, what kind of referral program to build out and if they’re going to make any changes and like, what to expect, and so I think, like looking at currently your referral rate, like, what’s going on, like are you getting referrals, are you getting candidate referrals but are you also getting internal employee referrals, right?
That people want to work for you. People are out in the community making sure that other people are wanting to come and work for you. So, referrals, in general, looks internally at candidates. I would take a look at your NPS score, look at your reviews, see what people are saying about you to see kind of what type of community is you, as like a leader or an executive might have this vision of what you think you’re fostering from like a culture perspective but it might be a little bit different once you start digging into it. I think that’s probably where to start for sure.
[0:09:31.9] DF: Yeah, that’s kind of like the referral rate, like, how referrals per candidate or referrals per ambassador is one way we measure it. Your online reputation, then your kind of your NPS, which is very standard. One thing that we have – you and I haven’t talked about this as it relates to measuring the effectiveness of your talent community but this kind of measures the effectiveness of your brand as a whole is redeployment rate.
And then, I think that ties into this concept that we’ve been talking about a lot about candidate lifetime value, which we won’t dig into in depth here, we will have a webinar on soon, but kind of just digs into like how much are you actually – what is your profitability on that candidate based off of the source and also their redeployment rate. When you kind of combine all of those things together, that ties back to again, like, are people having good experiences with their brand?
Do they want to stay on contract longer, do they want to redeploy with you, do they want to refer friends to you? You start to get all of those same data and kind of have a pretty big impact. So, I think we had a recent webinar with Bullhorn Automation and Heitmeyer Consulting. Toby Ackman was saying that his team found that referrals were staying on contract, five months longer than non-referral placements.
I think it was a – it ended up being like a 96% improvement in gross profit for referral placements versus non-referral placements, which is just insane when you think about how much of an impact that has. I remember, if you could – it’s like, for every referral placement, it’s worth two regular placements at an organization like that, which is pretty incredible.
[0:11:05.5] RA: Yeah.
[0:11:05.8] DF: And I actually want to jump, I jumped in with an example before I asked it too, what are some other examples of agencies that are just doing a great job building the talent communities? I know you’re working side by side with a lot of our customers and helping them do this. Do you have any stories or examples that you like to dig into?
[0:11:23.3] RA: Yeah, well, going back to Heitmeyer, they are a great example of building that community. They had success early on, which was really amazing but it was really no surprise I guess, to me because internally, their culture was so great. Like, I can always tell like, right when we get to the recruiter training part of our onboarding when the recruiters like, have their camera on and they’re jazzed and they’re like, super excited.
I’m like, “Okay, this is going to go well.” It’s a really good representation of like, how we can expect the results to be but yeah, we’ve had a couple of different webinars and a couple of different customers on those but I do talk to a lot of our customers, sometimes every day but you know, like, Uniti Med, I think was a really great example. We did that webinar last year and Uniti Med, you know like their mission is that they are an agency with heart, which is like, they have the little heart in the logo.
And internally, their culture is just so ingrained and you can feel what it’s like from a candidate, what it’s like from an internal employee, any time you talk to any person at Uniti Med, and I think that that is really important because that means that candidates are feeling it, even if they don’t go to work, right? And then, they talk about that with each other. Same with like Cell Staff. I think they were just recently on a webinar with us and that team loves what they do.
They’re excited about their clinicians that are on assignment with them and they even send them like an onboarding box, right? That they can feel like they’re part of the community, maybe from people they have never even talked to before because everybody wants to be part of something else, right? We all yearn for that as human beings especially when you’re walking into a situation for like a contingent staffing, right?
You’re walking into a place where you don’t know anybody, you probably don’t even know, you know, where to go. I mean, when I used to do job interviews, this is a fun story, even when I interviewed at Gifted, I like drove by the building the day before my interview, so I knew where to go because I’m super type-A, right? And so, you think about talent, when they go to take an assignment, like they don’t know anything.
They don’t know what they’re signing up for really and so them, feeling supported by the agency that they’re working for is so important, and then, Alyssa, when she talked to us from Integrity, you know, they have an ambassador for them that went into the community and like, really radiated about their referral program, and ended up helping put a ton of people to work and they recognized her on social media.
And it’s just like the little things I think that you don’t really think about, like, how you’re making someone feel when you talk to them, even if you’re not putting them on an assignment or even if they’re having a bad day, which sometimes, that’s all you get in a day as a recruiter. You’re talking to people constantly that are having a bad day but you can change that narrative for others internally. So, those are just a few examples of some that we’ve recently done webinars with.
[0:14:15.6] DF: Yeah, I think those are great examples. I’m going to go back to the question beforehand, I hadn’t thought about this. One of the – our most successful customers, very consistently are using ClearlyRated or Great Recruiters and I actually think, that which is a kind of a symptom of the fact that you care about your candidate experience and you care about how you’re showing up in the world.
And if you care about that, you should be measuring it, and two great platforms to measure that are ClearlyRated or Great Recruiters. If you’re winning Clearly Rated or Great Recruiters awards, there’s a good likelihood that you are doing well with referrals and also, even higher likelihood that if you’re using our software, you’re going to have a ton of success with it. So, it’s part of a…
[0:14:55.4] RA: Yeah.
[0:14:56.0] DF: Another component of that, that ties into going back to the previous question but those are some great examples that you shared there as well.
[0:15:02.9] RA: Yeah. Absolutely, and with the Great Recruiters side of things, it gives you insight – even just reviews in general – it’s going to give you insight as to even some of the negative experiences, which allows you to then take the opportunity to change that narrative. So, definitely, don’t shy away from – and we talked about that in our referral culture consulting side of things. Like, if you get a negative review, it’s an opportunity. Negative things in general are always an opportunity to like, change what’s going on.
[0:15:30.5] DF: Yeah, and I think with that if you’re measuring it, identifying the negative things to fix the negative things and then, identifying the great moments and figuring out where, I think, Cell Staff did a really good job with this but like, the referrable moment is like, at what point is it the opportune time to ask for a referral. One of those very easy ones is right after a positive Net Promotion, you can get a promoter, great opportunity to ask for a referral.
But also, there’s a ton of other moments that happen throughout the candidate experience, right? Right when they go on assignment, that’s usually a pretty good time. You can do it maybe right after they get an offer potentially but there’s a lot of moments where – and I think, Cell Staff, you mentioned earlier but they’re sending out gift boxes and like, that’s another time where it’s like, “Hey, this person’s excited, they’re happy with what you…”
They’re like, “Oh, this is cool, I just got this thing.” Great opportunity to put a QR code and drive them to a referral program. So, I think, there’s a whole bunch of little touch points throughout the candidate experience that really help with making you feel like you’re part of a bigger community and then also, and when we tie it back to referrals, a little more specific in what we do, those are the referrable moments and which you can ask for a referral and also, drive and build your community further.
[0:16:40.0] RA: Yeah.
[0:16:40.4] DF: With that, I know I jumped the gun a little bit and started talking about candidate experience, which I know is our next topic but we’re going to kind of go down the same path here and I want to know from your perspective, why is the candidate experience important?
[0:16:52.6] RA: Oh yes. I feel like, it is like, so important because me, like as a consumer, like if I have a bad experience, I’m out. You really get like it’s a quick opportunity to deliver a great experience and if you don’t deliver it, you’ve lost the talent, right? Like, it happens so quickly and I can personally attest to that. Like if I – I say this in my trainings, but there is a news website here in New Orleans and they always have the best headliners, right?
It’s like, one of those eye-catching, appealing things where you like, click on it, and they bring you to their website which is, I don’t know why, it’s like an online news, like, situation. It’s a bad experience and I’m like, “No, I’m not going to read this article then.” And so I always, like, I’ve just completely bypassed it. So, it’s so important because you get that opportunity and it’s usually not a recruiter talking to them, right?
It’s an online situation and if they don’t like it, they’re going to bounce, and to try to get that person back is going to take way too much effort, way too much time, and way too much money.
[0:17:54.5] DF: Yeah, and I couldn’t agree. We live in that kind of the consumerization of staffing, where everybody expects things to be easy and expects them now, and if there’s any friction at all, whether it be in the application process, I mean, I think that I’ve talked about this quite a few times on the show but if you’re listening to this and you haven’t applied for a job on your website and just go through the process and see how it feels, see if you get annoyed, see if it bothers you. If it does, if it bothers you it’s going to bother your candidates ten times more.
[0:18:28.8] RA: Yes.
[0:18:30.0] DF: And the companies that are winning, I think they’re putting in place this strategy of where they’re really focused on candidate experience or what the candidate cares about and making it easy to work with, making it easy to apply, and making onboarding simple, and there’s still a lot kind of clunky systems and processes out there and I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to just improving the process to make it simple and easy.
One of the guests that we have on, Justin Clarke with F|Staff, he talked about this subject and this simple thing, and if somebody that comes in the customer experience, candidate experience with just measuring the time it takes to get something done. So, just go apply and see how long it takes you to get to the completed application, and then compare that to your competitors, see what that looks like from a comparison standpoint.
But do that with all of your processes from a – and do it from the lens of the candidate. So, one of the other areas that you talked about this extensively, maybe your favorite topic or at least one of your favorite topics, there’s a lot out there.
[0:19:27.4] RA: Yeah.
[0:19:28.1] DF: But the value of transparency I think is something you always get really excited about, the trust and transparency component. Maybe if you could just touch up on that a little bit.
[0:19:36.7] RA: Yeah, absolutely. So, you have to think about like where I came from. So, I came out of healthcare staffing, and seven and a half, eight years ago, however long it’s been, it was such a new concept for me like coming into staffing and us talking about transparency. I was like, “Am I back in therapy? What’s going on here?” But trust and transparency are two really big buzzwords in staffing.
We hear that a lot and at every conference that every time someone speaks, they always talk about how this is what candidates are saying that they want, yet agencies also say that they deliver it and there is a big variance of a gap and like, we all should be trying to fill this gap because like me, even as a customer in every situation I feel like in my life, I want to trust in what’s going on and I want people to be transparent with me.
And so, of course, people who are applying to jobs want to have that experience as well. So, just like you said, like how, like apply for your – like go through your application process. Go through what it’s like as a candidate, go through that journey. That is some low-low-hanging fruit but how do you ensure that your candidates feel like you’re trustworthy and that you’re being transparent? Like, what are you doing to make sure that talent feels this way?
Like, what are they saying? There’s no harm in you having a conversation with some of your top talent, people who are already referring people to you, that’s a great person to go to and say, “Well, how do you feel about us?” Like, dig a little bit deeper. Like, you need to have tools in place to make sure you’re measuring that and ask questions and have technology and automation to lessen the load on the recruiters.
But to cultivate that because transparency will drive more trust and in both of those components, you’re cultivating more of your community and so yeah, it is one of my favorite topics because I think it is – it’s kind of just like something that I feel like everyone says that they’re doing but we know that if there’s a big gap there.
[0:21:29.6] DF: Yeah, I think there is a big gap in it, and also as you’re talking about that, the thing that popped in my head is, I follow, I started following this like six months ago, it is kind of hilarious, I use Reddit maybe more than I should but there is a Reddit, a sub-Reddit called Recruiting Hell. They complain about the lack of transparency in the process, about ten interviews, and then being ghosted with no response at the end.
I’ve even – there is one I saw just yesterday about it was an AI text, like telling the – explaining more about what’s going on than they should, letting them know that like another recruiter is already giving the position to somebody else automatically, deliver that via text message to him. There’s all kinds of these moments that I think from a – where we’re trying to get to a spot of transparency and I think that ultimately, people finding the job is a big deal.
And it is a huge thing and momentous moment for them and sometimes I think in recruiting, the rush or kind of push to go for speed over humanizing the experience can be maybe good at moments but I think it’s just important to make sure that you are being transparent of where people are at in the process, letting them know, and I think that goes even deeper. We always talk about it on the referral side of things.
But I think it’s just that a critical element and in – it was healthcare staffing, was that where it was like one of the number one rated things that travel nurses are looking for?
[0:22:56.5] RA: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, we saw that a lot before COVID and then when COVID hit, right? And it flipped everything kind of upside down, all these agencies were coming out of nowhere and they were all over social media and to your like Reddit situation, you know, I was a part of Gypsy Nurse back in the day when it wasn’t quite what it is now, right? But people are on there talking about all the experiences they were having with agencies.
So, during COVID, if you are a clinician and you wanted to work for somebody, there was like way too many options. So, they were just looking at each other going, “Well, who do you use? Who do you trust? Who do you use? Who do you trust?” And then it was just that like people were just coming in from referrals and so now, like the post-COVID world is still a little shaky, right? They still want that because I feel like it’s harder now, right?
It’s way harder to recruit especially in healthcare staffing now that the billing rates are shaking themselves out but recruiters during COVID, the whole submission process, you know Kyle Schmidt and I talked about this when we were doing our BluePipes Podcast, it was so much easier. The barrier to entry was so much lower and now, it is like the opposite, right? You have to do all of these submissions to even get one call back.
But like you letting your candidates know that like, “You know, I’m going to submit you for this opportunity but here’s what we’re finding from so and so, you know, MSV VMS.” Like letting them know like what to expect so you are setting the foundation for them to not get let down because think about like you if you apply to a job and you’re really excited about it. You have this really great conversation with a recruiter.
And you’re like, “Yes, I’m going to work for this person.” And then it falls flat and instead of this great experience, you now have this negative experience. So, being transparent, and especially in the healthcare staffing space, is so-so-so important. And that’s the one where they’re like voted at the top what they want from an agency and then agencies say they do it, but then it varies from I say is that the gap is like this big for actually delivering.
[0:24:52.6] DF: Yeah, and that’s great insight and probably – I mean, I think it makes sense across the board but for sure in healthcare.
[0:24:59.1] RA: Totally.
[0:24:59.5] DF: And healthcare is over the last year and a half, it went from like submit like maybe a 50, 75% submittal to hire rate or something. I don’t know the exact numbers but I know it was wild – it was like, “You want that job, we’re going to get you that job.” And now it’s like, “You want that job? Well, we’re going to have to submit you four to eight times. So, just know that this is going to be a journey.”
And I think communicating that upfront is way better than having them be continually disappointed of like, “Oh, you can’t even get me a place where I want to be placed.” Which is a big transition from where it was and also –
[0:25:31.5] RA: Right.
[0:25:31.9] DF: The rates are down significantly too. So, it’s like, “Oh, you can’t give me the job anyway or pay me what I want.” Which is crazy, just wreaking havoc in healthcare a little bit today so – but that –
[0:25:41.8] RA: Yeah.
[0:25:42.4] DF: The things returning regressing to the mean, which helps. It will be happening through the end of the year.
[0:25:47.1] RA: Yeah, but definitely something to take forward in all the different verticals because just because we’re talking about healthcare in that specific scenario, everybody is feeling that. So, you want to make sure that you’re letting your candidates know what to expect during the application process.
[0:26:00.9] DF: Absolutely, and one other area that – that’s going to go back to the reputation management but also I think from a transparency perspective the – your online reputation from just a candidate experience like I think people are looking that up. They’re seeing, I don’t eat at a restaurant without looking at Yelp. Like, I am obsessed, I am like a maniac with IMDB and also Yelp.
Like, I don’t watch a show without knowing the rating, I don’t eat dinner with – I don’t have a meal out without knowing the rating. I’m not like a – got it honed in on what’s going to be good and what’s not.
[0:26:33.3] RA: Yeah.
[0:26:33.4] DF: It is not always right and I probably miss out on some good stuff because I am a little bit too targeted on that front but I know that it’s the way the world is moving and agencies that are getting on board with that early are going to be ahead of the game as well and from a candidate experience perspective, you want to know who you’re working with and that is going to be a good, you know, the right people.
And so that information I think is becoming a bigger factor in talent’s choice and also making it just more important that you are delivering a good experience end to end because the word is going to get out one way or the other, that transparency is not just something that is a trend, it is the way of the future and where the end is driving us.
[0:27:12.4] RA: Oh, absolutely, and yeah, I mean, like I know what I am going to get at the restaurant by the time I walk in, right? Like, I am even extra.
[0:27:19.2] DF: I do look up that, at Yelp I always look at the popular dishes. So, I’m like –
[0:27:24.4] RA: Yeah, I go to Instagram. I’m like, “Well, what are people tagging?” Like I want to get that. I’m willing to go and be like, “What is this thing?” They are putting it in the comments, I’ll want this one but yeah. I mean, people want to be able to see that and if you don’t have, if you Google your agency and you don’t have anything popping up, like let’s focus in on that for sure.
[0:27:42.4] DF: Yeah, yep, own your reputation. I think that’s a key element as well. So, last category we’re going to jump into is the recruiter productivity. I think we’re living in a – this feels like it’s across the board not just staffing but I can tell you that almost everybody I talk to feels like they’re expected to do more with less, that there’s more pressure for productivity, for output, for new sales targets in the staffing space specifically.
Huge rounds of layoffs last year and it seems like things are you know, normalizing returning to the mean, kind of getting back to where they used to be but in the meantime, there is a lot of agencies that simply have smaller teams than they did a year ago. I don’t think the goal has decreased in proportion. So, there’s this whole concept of doing more with less. What are some of the kind of trends or areas of productivity that you kind of see that you talked about with recruiters?
What are some areas where you see people improving productivity and getting – doing more with less effectively?
[0:28:42.6] RA: Yeah, everybody wants to take a look at what they’re using, leverage technology to bring in some of that automation. So, what we see is like mundane kind of like remote tasks, like what can you automate there, allowing the recruiters to work more effectively. So, utilizing like a calendar booking tool so that candidates can book on their calendar and they don’t have to chase somebody to get time with them.
I think like check-ins, I think that’s a great one, right? The recruiter doesn’t need to be reaching out, remembering when to do that, like set up some type of automation for that. Reviews, right? To our point, and then you know, bringing it back to Staffing Referrals, like referrals for sure. We know, I can remember recruiting and like, when is the right time to ask, “Oh, did I remember to ask?” Oh, there’s all these other things you need to remember to do.
And so, we know that recruiters are going to forget to ask. So, automating that so that people are being asked to join the referral program without the recruiter even having to think about it. I mean, I love when I am on a call with somebody and we’re just doing like a check-in, and like Cody from TOPS Staffing, he was like, “You know what I love so much is like I was training somebody and I came back and I have three emails and three referrals to call, they booked time on my calendar.”
It’s like, that’s what I’m talking about. Like, yeah, it’s like recruitment dreams coming true, right? You didn’t even have to – this is just happening behind the scenes and then you get to call these high-quality candidates. So, looking at what they are doing and what’s on their plate and then figure out where you can use technology to automate some of that but that’s just –
[0:30:11.5] DF: Yeah, absolutely.
[0:30:12.5] RA: Some that I think are good.
[0:30:13.7] DF: I think there’s so many used cases and you know, I’ve been a HubSpot Channel partner for years to manage HubSpot for different businesses and I think that looking at all of the communication workflows, any wrote or redundant email text, anything that’s like, “Oh, well, I got to do this but I don’t necessarily have to – it doesn’t have to be super personalized” or you know, it doesn’t have to be extra where you can say this is automated but I want to make sure things are going right.
On the referral side, obviously, I think there’s a – we love and have a lot of used cases there. The one area where I think a lot of people don’t think about is going back to kind of the transparency I think with Cell Staff, I’ve heard they’d call this a few different times but the concept of like the Domino’s tracker of automating the updates of the referral status to the candidates themselves so that they can see where things are at is something that we found to be quite – it’s helpful.
I mean, it saves recruiters time, when we talk to our customers and the recruiters, like one of my favorite things is I don’t have to – I don’t get any questions about the status of the referral or the status of referral payout. I just know that I can go view it out on my dashboard. So, that is another area that I think can be pretty impactful.
[0:31:16.0] RA: Yeah.
[0:31:16.6] DF: One other story, I think Heitmeyer, do you remember Heitmeyer said something about productivity at some –
[0:31:22.0] RA: Yeah, like our tool was basically like two recruiters, like the productivity of like two recruiters because of the automation behind the scenes because it’s not the asking for the referrals, right? When somebody is referred in, we’re also going to pick that up and make sure that before it lands on the recruiter’s desk, it’s the right type of referral. So, you know in healthcare you’re not getting truck drivers.
And in IT, you are not getting healthcare workers and you know, just vice-versa. So, there is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that allows the recruiter to move – work more efficiently. So, Heitmeyer had said that, and then one of the things that I love that Tiffany from the Vision Company, she had told us that Staffing Referrals is one of the first tools she puts her green recruiters on because she is hiring them because of their ability to connect with people.
Their relationship building, which I think most of us who has been on, like a director of recruiting role, that’s what you’re doing, right? You are hiring somebody that you know will deliver great candidate experience and will follow up with people effectively and she said that she puts them on Staffing Referrals first so that they can start building their pipeline because there is no like implementation that they have to do, right?
It’s just like, “This is running behind the scenes from an automatic perspective, so you just talk to people, right?” You just build those relationships and this will be happening behind the scenes and one of their top recruiters is, if she leveraged her, she was super green and she leveraged her relationship building and now, she’s one of their top recruiters. So, I love that.
[0:32:45.4] DF: I love that story as well. With that, we’ve already made it to the speed round, that went fast so –
[0:32:50.1] RA: I know, that did go fast. We’re so good on that.
[0:32:53.0] DF: It’s like we’ve talked, we’ve never talked before and so with that, we got two last questions then a closing comment for you. What is the advice that you wish you were given before entering the staffing industry?
[0:33:04.4] RA: To really, really absorb everything because I can think back when I was too hyper-focused on like trying to understand what the difference between an RN and a LPN and a CNA was at the time, so I could effectively be on the marketing side of things. I wish I would have absorbed more from the very, very beginning but then also to network. One of the greatest things that I did was just put myself out there constantly.
So, that would have been – since I had no idea what staffing even was, I would have approached somebody and be like, absorb everything and network.
[0:33:37.1] DF: I think that’s great advice. It seems like so often we spend time learning the details years later than we could have if we just spent the time upfront.
[0:33:45.5] RA: Yeah.
[0:33:46.5] DF: In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life?
[0:33:51.5] RA: So because I have been in the – like on the yoga community for 14 years, I’ve been teaching for eight years now, forever, people have been giving me journals and I’m like, “Great, cool. I’m not going to do that. Great, cool. I’m not going to do that.” And then I started journaling and it has been a real game-changer for me but you definitely have to be ready to tap into that tool.
You’ll know when it’s time, it’s not something you can force, and I love to journal now. I like to take all of this chatter in my brain and just put it out into paper. So, I definitely recommend that.
[0:34:23.5] DF: I love that. Last stop, so any closing comments for the audience?
[0:34:27.0] RA: I guess, I’ll just say like, you know our industry is quite wonderful. I have met some of my best friends, amazing, amazing humans through the staffing industry and I think that you know, we’re lucky to be in it even though right now, times are a little more challenging than they have been in the past but I’m happy to be a part of it and it is a community, right? We’re part of this bigger community and I look forward to keep expanding that and it’s just what life is all about, it’s building that community.
[0:34:54.7] DF: Well, Rachelle, so good to have you here. Loved having you on the show, enjoyed the conversation as always, and thanks so much for joining.
[0:35:02.0] RA: Thank you.
