Staff Incorporated, a recruitment company in the engineering sector, experiencing extremely rapid growth as the economy demands progressively more engineering skills, uses GoldMine, the customer relationship management application from FrontRange Solutions, to match more than 3 000 candidates to jobs.
"Good skills are scarce and candidate churn is high," says Staff Incorporated senior consultant Malaika Willemse. "So it's essential that we track job candidates not simply in relation to the specific adverts to which they reply, but to any subsequent positions that become available.
"That way we can be much more accurate in the way we match candidates to jobs - and, accordingly, help build careers for the candidates and ensure that our customers trust us to always offer them the most appropriate skills.
"With so much infrastructure development going on in South Africa in the run-up to 2010 and government's general emphasis on developing technical skills, there's an enormous volume of jobs available. Each consultant receives a daily minimum of 200 e-mails in response to the ads we place. It's crucial, therefore, that the six of us don't get confused about which candidates have been put forward for which jobs.
"We need access to one another's work so we can see who said what to whom when - and don't accidentally duplicate or interfere with what the others have done. Each of us must be able to pick up a ball and run with it if, for some reason, the original person working on a project is not around.
"It means that our available system has to be able to operate easily over an extended period of time, with a huge database of both candidates and customers - live.
"All of which GoldMine gives us - in an incredibly easy-to-use format."
Willemse is particularly pleased with the way in which the search facility on GoldMine reduces the time needed to find records or make links between documents, candidates, and jobs.
"We can link each candidate's curriculum vitae (CV) with an enormous range of details such as the industry he or she is in, what their last salary was, what their notice period is, what part of the industry they're in - civil, electrical, or mechanical. We can call those details up simply by typing in the first few characters of an address or name or telephone number.
"GoldMine's speed and ease of use gives us a distinct edge in the industry, because we don't waste time, we don't waste paper, and more importantly, we don't waste the customer or the candidate's time or opportunities."
Dale Jordaan, managing director of Wyred, Staff Incorporated's implementation partner, says of the mid-market CRM packages available, GoldMine is the most user-friendly and provides more functionality per rand than its competitors.
"Another advantage is that the product is never static. FrontRange is always freshening and enhancing it with new capabilities - and making it available via an extremely easy upgrade path. For smaller companies it really is hard to beat."
FrontRange Solutions (SA) product manager for Africa, Paul Bornhutter, agrees. "GoldMine was one of the first CRM packages brought to market and, over the years, has never lost its appeal or its position as category leader. There are two reasons. One is that it has retained its focus on the mid-market and continually refined what it can do in that market. And the other is that its original designers understood that the real value in information technology lies in its unique ability to automate and integrate routine tasks - and found ways to optimise that ability."
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