All posts by Morgan Hennessy

Pereless Systems builds all career pages and applications mobile-responsive. New clients get their first 5,000 text messages free!  Request a demo today.

According to a Glassdoor survey, 9 in 10 job seekers report they’re likely to use a mobile device during their job search in the next 12 months. Once you ensure a mobile friendly application, don’t lose applicants after they press submit. 

Text Your Job Candidates

Utilize text messaging for easy communication as well as interview scheduling. An estimated 77% of Americans own a smart device and use it to text twice as much as calling someone.

Making communication easy and convenient for both recruiters and candidates is an effective way to get things done quicker while creating a positive and innovative experience.

The Pereless platform is equipped with SMS text message functionality allowing hiring teams to contact candidates on their mobile device. Use the ATS to instantly send a text using a generic phone number to introduce yourself to applicants, ask additional questions, and send interview invites.

All conversations are stored within the ATS and can be accessed at any time.

Send Interview Invites Based on Schedule Availability

One of the major benefits of an applicant tracking system is that you can create and manage schedules within the platform. Pereless System’s scheduling feature includes an innovative invite functionality that sends applicants text messages and emails with available dates and times for interviews based on your schedule.

Candidates can then accept or reject their choices and continue to connect with you via text message.  Have multiple team members involved in the interview process?  You can assign them to the confirmed interview date and send them reminders via text and email too!

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Pereless Systems builds all career pages and applications mobile-responsive by default. New Pereless clients get their first 5,000 text messages free!  Request a demo today.

Sifting through paper and emailed resumes is tedious and unorganized.  An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a software Human Resource tool that automates this and all other aspects of the recruiting process.  Here are 3 ways how an ATS will make your HR department more efficient.

Reduce the Amount of HR Tasks

When hiring, the HR department is weighed down with many tasks.  From creating the job details, posting on job board, reviewing candidates, and interviewing.  It can get pretty hectic.  With recruiting software, the workload lightens as an ATS does all of the hard work like posting on job boards and organizing applications for you.

Find Quality Candidates

With the help of an ATS it is easier to find high quality candidates.  There is nothing more frustrating than bringing in unqualified candidates for interviews.  This could be a big waste of time and money while looking to fill an open job opening.  With features that help sort through candidates by automatically removing unqualified applications to seamlessly sending candidates to co-workers for approval, it has never been easier to increase the efficiency the quality of candidates.  

Optimize Onboarding Process

Once you have found the right person for the job, it’s time for the onboarding process to begin.  This could be a headache for both the new employee and the company.  There is usually a lot of stress to get all the necessary paperwork filled out and submitted before the first day of work.  

Sending the paperwork via email or giving hard copies could be delay the process.  With an ATS, an onboarding portal eliminates this by sending e-forms that can be filled out online and submitted in real time, ensuring that all forms are taken care of prior to the employee’s first day.

Modernize your recruitment process by investing in an ATS.  All of the reasons why an ATS is right for your company listed above are available on Pereless Systems’ easy to use Applicant Tracking System.  To learn more request a free demo today!

Our team works tirelessly to expand and improve our software capabilities. This year alone, we’ve had some major additions that we are excited to share.

Internally, we’ve developed new portals across the hiring process to streamline tedious tasks for clients. These portals include:

Employee Referral

Candidate Texting  Reference Check

Our integrations team has been working hard to expand our services far beyond recruitment. This year we’ve added more payroll and skill assessment partnerships.

Finally, we’ve launched in four new countries and languages. Our reach now expands to Canada, Germany, China, Hong Kong, and Bangladesh.

There’s already so much  more in development for 2018!

The referral portal is a useful resource for any client! This new feature not only gives system users the ability to track and report on important information like referrals—but also allows the employee to actively recruit.

Any existing employee is able to create an account with the portal, by company email or social media. Once they have created an account, they can easily add friends and their skills and send them jobs that they believe they are a good fit for. Not only do your employees have the power, but the portal is able to match the friends to the best fit job for them!

The referral portal offers a user friendly and interactive way for your employees to view the open positions for your company and refer their friends or family to that position. There are a few different ways the employees can do this, depending on their preference.

Best of all, all functions are fully reportable in the ATS.

Create an Account

When first logging into the Employee Referral Portal, an account must be created. With a simple sign up, employees can also link their social networks for ease later on.

Add Friend

This section allows users to add their friends or family members to the portal so that they can receive referral notifications.

After entering basic information, the user can now “tag” their friend with skills. These skills match to the job keywords and calculate how much of a match the friend is to the job.

Find Jobs

The Find Jobs tab is a running list of all the currently active jobs inside of the ATS. The user can easily filter and narrow down the jobs list by typing into the search fields at the top.

Employees can then see, based on the information they filled out about their friends, how great of a match their friends are for a job posting. If none of their friends fit the job, they also have the option to share a job posting to their social media.

Send Referral

This section is where the user can send emails to their added friends with the jobs that they believe are a good match.

There is also the option to send the direct job link to the candidate they wish to refer. They can choose which friend and which job they would like to match and easily send out the referral.

As seen in Forbes

In business, it is generally taught that a good product will bring a good return. Usually, as that business continues to grow, so does a product’s list of capabilities. As a product gets better, an upward correlation between consumer loyalty and the size of the customer base is expected.

However, I have been in the software industry for 30 years and have worked with thousands of clients across a variety of industries, and I have noticed a very common yet startling recurrence: “Lack of functionality in our current system” is the No. 1 reason clients switch to a competitor.

At first glance, this may seem like an obvious and understandable statement. However, the striking part of this statement is that, more often than not, the functionality they are looking for actually does exist in their current system. So why aren’t they using it?

This leads me to one conclusion: A product is only as strong as its user adoption.

The cost of acquisition for a new client is far higher than the cost of losing a client. This is especially true if the reason for client loss doesn’t even require any new developments. Furthermore, the cost of losing a client is far greater than any solution for client education.

So What Causes Poor User Adoption?

I have been on countless demonstrations where the potential client is looking to leave a provider because they are only using a fraction of the software’s capabilities. This is obviously a communication issue, which is highly relevant in the cloud-based product industry.

User adoption can be correlated to the training platforms that companies deliver for the end user.

Due to increased pricing pressures, cloud-based companies have shifted to a self-training model during implementation. This approach requires the user to self-educate and self-discover all functionality within the platform. Additionally, the rise of competition has shifted client bases toward non-committal attitudes. If a client becomes unhappy, they can easily move to a competitor platform.

How Can You Make A Stronger User Adoption System?

It is crucial to take time to create and implement both training and account management programs. Providing clients with an easy and intelligent training program allows them to easily navigate feature functionality. Incorporating real business cases can provide the perfect example of how your product will augment and enhance their processes.

Aside from the initial implementation, account management reps should regularly engage with clients. This is especially important after each new feature release. Communication is key to ensuring clients will think twice about shopping for competitors.

At the end of the day, the most important part of your product isn’t the product itself — it’s how you communicate with and train your customers.

So I urge companies to take a step back and realize how these self-learning and self-training models can impact their businesses and the bottom line.

Reference checks are essential in verifying the qualifications of a potential hire. However, it is tedious to sit and dial multiple phone numbers and spend hours trying to reach references.

We recently introduced a portal that automates the process of collecting candidate references.

The portal works in three simple steps:

1. Candidates receive an email from the portal in which they enter or confirm their professional references.
2. An email is then sent to each reference asking for feedback.
3. Finally, the reference is asked to endorse or reject the candidate.

After the first launch, we received great feedback from our clients. Our goal was to eliminate tedious reference checking. Now, we’ve made it even better.

We’re happy to announce that you can now add job specific questions to reference checks.

Instead of simply receiving positive or negative reviews, clients can now include specific questions related to the job opening. This will result in a much better response from candidate references regarding a potential new hire’s ability to excel in the position.

Pereless Systems and Indeed have teamed up to make it easier than ever to reach the right talent, fast. We’re excited to announce that you can now sponsor your jobs on Indeed directly from Pereless!

Pereless Systems launched a new integration to help you quickly sponsor jobs on Indeed from within Pereless’ platform.

About Indeed

Indeed is a job search engine available in more than 60 countries and 28 languages. Every month, more than 200 million people search for jobs, post resumes and research companies on Indeed,* and Indeed is the #1 source of external hires for thousands of companies.**

Employers can post jobs on Indeed for free.^ However, you also have the option to pay for prominent placement in the search results. This is useful for hard-to-fill positions and jobs that need to be filled quickly.

While all of your open roles within the ATS are already on Indeed, sponsoring your job is a simple, cost-effective way to make sure it is seen by the most candidates.

Why sponsor a job?

• Sponsored Jobs receive up to 5X more applicants than free listings
• You’re in control: Set, adjust, pause, or end your budget at any time
• Pay only when candidates click on your job(s)

Sources:
*comScore, February 2017
**SilkRoad Source of Hire Report 2017
^Terms, conditions, and quality standards apply

As seen on NJBiz

For the longest time — and still today in some cases — when a company decided to do its own job recruiting, it meant that someone was tasked with putting advertisements up on job boards galore.

What came next was impossible to prepare for: the manual filtering of a thousand-email flood.

“There was no rhyme or reason to it,” said Art Pereless, who founded a software firm after seeing what a need there was to streamline that process.

The former software engineer’s namesake company, Pereless Systems, was brought online in 2000 and today offers a full range of applicant tracking and on-boarding software through the cloud.

“What we saw were a lot of different functions that were broken,” Pereless said. “We developed a way to have an interface that brought all that information into a central application.”

The company combines content from third-party job boards such as Monster or Glassdoor with ways of managing the hiring necessaries, such as background checks and skills assessments.

But the Red Bank firm hasn’t entered this niche alone. Although it predates many competitors, the amount of startups marketing similar services — all involving the convergence of recruiting tools onto a tech platform — has ballooned.

The narrative is this: It’s a good sector that has gotten way too crowded.

“In last five years, there has been so many players entering this market,” Pereless said. “The space has gotten very convoluted. I think that’s going to lead to some consolidation, but it’s going to take time.”

The experience Pereless has in the software space tells him that this is not a new phenomenon.

“This happens with a lot of software,” he said. “It goes through a period of getting popular and a lot of people jump in at the same time.”

Regardless of it coming with the territory, the local business owner isn’t at all pleased with the claims of some of the sector’s newcomers.

“You have companies coming online in the past year or two that market the same type of full suite as us, but there’s no way it could be,” Pereless said. “We’ve been building modules based on client needs and adding them into the suite after testing (for years).”

But one thing is for sure — the platforms all of these companies are developing are making an impact on business overall.

Pereless said benefits are particularly felt by companies that experience a lot of employee attrition, such as call centers.

“Systems like ours really benefit those companies because they can have a bench of people who they can plug right in,” he said.

Pereless went as far as to say that unemployment numbers being kept so low today might have a connection, however tangential, to the influx of affordable tools streamlining recruiting.

“It’s all relevant — it’s a reflection of how successful companies are in their recruiting process,” he said.

Written by Brett Johnson

As seen on Forbes

The backbone of every company is the manpower behind its development. Therefore, recruiting is paramount to every company’s strategy and long-term success. Think about it: How can you have stellar support without great customer service reps? How can you achieve record-breaking sales without great salespeople? How can you create great products without the best engineers?

There is a massive amount of pressure on human resource (HR) professionals to find, screen and hire the best talent available in the market. A company is only as strong as the people it employs. That all boils down to one department, and it creates a crucial need for a strong and efficient recruiting process.

If you spoke to a recruiter a couple decades ago, their day-to-day tasks would be extremely different than those of an HR professional today. Although the end goals of the job are the same, the ways in which those goals are reached have drastically shifted.

In the early days of recruitment, most companies tracked the status of candidates through Microsoft Excel and email. This tended to be very laborious for the recruitment team and demanded that staff be constantly logging into third-party applications to achieve the results they needed. There were a lot of moving parts in the old days of HR — and a huge lack of technology — compared to 2017.

The rise of technology, particularly cloud-based tools, disrupted the recruiting industry. It provided an opportunity for entrepreneurs and software professionals to enter the space. HR professionals now had access to software that centralized their recruiting process from job board distribution to candidate pipelines. The space became flooded with applicant-tracking systems aimed to streamline the recruiting process.

The key to surviving in the early software market was flexibility. A lot of these emerging systems did not remain on the market long due to their lack of functionality and increasing competition. As technology continued to evolve, mobile capabilities and a variety of web browsers became huge challenges when creating a centralized platform.

Prescreening questions, auto rankings, employee referral portals and background checks expedited the selection process. Payroll, calendar management, tools and electronic form integrations simplified onboarding. Some applicant tracking systems (ATS) can host up to 15 distinct integrated portals to streamline the recruiting process from cradle to grave.

The cloud also allowed for access to a large distribution network in real time. Job boards and search engines became very powerful tools for reaching candidates actively searching for employment. Social media then presented the opportunity to get job openings in front of candidates who were not actively searching.

Human Resources quickly moved from a regional scale to a global one. It soon became possible to reach the best candidates no matter where they were in the world.

Finally, integrations were key to recruiting toolkits. Early players that integrated with other companies in the HR space turned their software into a powerhouse. The consolidation of third-party integrations brought opportunities like payroll and skill assessments into that single platform. ATS systems completely revolutionized recruitment.

So what else could possibly develop?

Artificial intelligence is a crucial addition coming to most cloud-based systems. AI is the future of technology and especially important to the future of HR. There has never been a more exciting time in HR, as AI will be the ultimate tool for deeper insight when it comes to recruiting job candidates.

Proactive companies that integrate AI into recruitment will become the next generation of shining stars.