Seamlessly Manage Hiring and Onboarding with Crelate Hire

Crelate Omni Hire

We’re about to launch our most significant product update ever: Crelate Omni™, the end-to-end solution for the modern staffing agency.

Omni pairs our award-winning front-office recruiting platform with a fully integrated middle and back-office offering. Each module of Omni – RecruitHire, and Deliver – combine seamlessly to support every critical part of the recruiting and staffing process.

To learn more about Hire, which provides the ability to seamlessly manage your onboarding processes, manage compliance, and track every step of the eSignature process, we spoke with Crelate Sr. Product Manager Lisa Zhou. Lisa has an impressive background in software development and product management in HR, giving her a unique skillset and knowledge base to develop the tools and features staffing agencies really need to grow and thrive. She’s also passionate about user experience, a passion she’s bringing to Crelate’s Hire module.

Lisa Crelate
Sr. Product Manager Lisa Zhou

Delivering a World-Class User Experience

Crelate: Lisa, your background includes time at startups and a long stint with Amazon as a Product Manager and developer, specifically working on Amazon’s compensation tools. How does that experience help you now, as you’re working on Crelate Hire?

Lisa: Yes. At Amazon, I worked on automating their compensation processes within HR, both for core employees and also for fulfillment center employees. There are certainly some parallels between working on that product and working on Hire. But I made a point of speaking to our customers when I started at Crelate, understanding all the pain points that they experienced with other systems, and figuring out how we solve them with Hire.

What Does Crelate’s Hire Module Make Possible for Staffing Agencies?

Crelate: And now that you’ve done all that research and incorporated your solutions into Hire, what does the module make possible for Crelate’s customers?

Lisa: Well, for one thing, after speaking with our customers, I found they spend a lot of their time setting up interviews and looking at different stakeholder calendars in order to set up an interview loop. Then, in parallel with the interview loop, they need to be able to record all the interview notes and pertinent information in order to be able to accurately compare different candidates.

Having come from a corporate environment at Amazon, where there are thousands of interviews happening in a single day, I’m familiar with what it’s like to manage a large number of interviews. The interview management process is a repetitive step, but there is so much opportunity to make it faster and smarter. And that’s what we’re doing at Crelate.

Recruiting and Staffing with Crelate Hire

Hire simplifies the process, and there are three main components of Hire that help that happen. One is the ability to set up a question bank. In my experience, when I’m doing an interview, I receive a word document with a number of standardized questions. Hire lets you create a question bank, where you can keep all your interview questions for future interviews and select the most relevant ones to assign your interviewers.

Within that question bank, Hire lets you tag each question to indicate what you’re evaluating about the candidate. For example, does this question speak to technological ability, or is it more to do with cultural fit?

Then, Hire lets you create scorecards with a set of questions that you can assign interviewers for feedback and/or ratings. This allows recruiters and hiring managers to really compare candidates in a fair way, based on the categories they’re evaluated on.

Another useful feature is the ability to create interview loop templates that you can reuse when hiring for similar roles. So, whenever I have a new candidate I’m considering for the role, the loop is already set up for me, and I can easily assign it to specific interviewers. It simplifies the day-to-day of a recruiter and saves a ton of time by taking a lot of the monotonous steps out of their process.

Streamlined Onboarding

Crelate: That’s fantastic. Tell us about the onboarding features.

Lisa: The key feature is capability to create an onboarding checklist to manage the myriad steps involved in bringing on an employee. Once a candidate accepts an offer, all the steps of onboarding begin. For example, when I started at Crelate, I had to complete a direct deposit form, I had to complete a background check, I had to sign a number of contracts and other paperwork, etc.

So when you consider everything that has to happen to get an employee ready to work on day one, the onboarding checklist allows you to create a customized, templatized list of your own, so you never lose track of everything that’s needed. And for different roles, if there are different requirements, you can create different templates for each role. It also shows how far along in the onboarding process each new employee has advanced, giving you visibility into which employees need a little reminder to get their paperwork in before their first day.

Organized Compliance

Crelate: You mentioned that compliance is another aspect of staffing that the Hire module really helps with.

Lisa: Yes! With staffing agencies there, there’s such a large number of employees to keep track of. And there are a lot of things that they need to check off, including compliance. As part of the onboarding checklist, Hire reminds you to verify forms of identity, make sure any licenses or forms are current, and generally stay on top of everything you need to confirm.

We also integrate HelloSign, which lets our customers digitally sign basically anything they need.

 

Crelate: Awesome. So, Hire pulls all of these steps together and lists them out to track progress. How did our customers manage everything before this?

Lisa: Good question. Prior to Hire, there really wasn’t a way for them to do everything in one place. There wasn’t really a clear way of setting up all these tasks in a fluid process where they could assign an onboarding checklist and know exactly what’s needed so their new employee is ready to start the next day. Hire solves for that.

Crelate: All up, what do you hope Hire does for our customers?

Lisa: My goal for Crelate Hire is that it allows our customers to do as little work as possible when that work could be done by a machine. Instead, I want them to be able to spend their time focused on hiring the right talent.

Front, Middle, and Back Office, All with Crelate Omni

Crelate Omni is designed for all types of agencies: big, small, regardless of industry, contingent, retained, contract, whatever.

If you are in the business of aligning people with opportunity, we are in business for you.

Learn more about Crelate Omni from a Crelate product expert.

Filed under: Crelate Updates, Relationship Management Software, Staffing Agency Management