Many staffing companies struggle with selecting a good applicant tracking system (ATS). When companies are small or have a small sales team, the focus is on recruiting functionality (as it should be). As they grow and begin to have a lot of direct client sales activity, they begin to struggle with maintaining good customer data (contacts, activity, follow up tasks, pipeline status).

The first attempt is to use the CRM functionality of the ATS to track sales activity, but it is usually not that fruitful because the CRM functionality was not paramount when the ATS was selected. The salespeople were probably using outlook or some other (virtually) free tool that keeps a calendar and contact info, but not much else.

The second attempt is usually the purchase of a more robust CRM tool that satisfies most of the sales/client issues and makes the sales management happy with pipeline reports and activity analysis. The problem soon arises that the data from the two systems is redundant and often out of sync. Many employees must now log on to two systems (2 license fees) and often enter the same data multiple times.

Trying to integrate the two systems, is sometimes a nightmare, not only for data synchronization, but also setting alerts and schedule changes.

The perfect solution, of course, is to find one product that satisfies all the CRM needs of a growing staffing company and also have the powerful features of a premier ATS (strong search & parsing capability, seamless integration with job boards, social networking integration, web crawlers, etc.).

If you think you know of this product (or two products that integrate seamlessly), please let me know.