iPad and iPhone Staffing Software Powered by Microsoft CRM

In a recent feature rollout, Microsoft added cross browser support to Microsoft Dynamics® CRM. This is exciting news for 1Staff, our Applicant Tracking System for staffing and recruiting companies. 1Staff built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM now also supports multiple browsers including Chrome, Firefox and Safari on an iPad. The beauty of the iPad support is that it isn’t a different program written specifically to support an iPad. It is running the full blown application. This means that any new fields you have added will be included automatically, your dashboards will be available, even your SRS reports will run from your iPad.

It looks just the same as it does on a PC running Internet Explorer (except somehow the fonts look just a little bit nicer on an iPad).

Here is a screen shot of a dashboard in Microsoft CRM on an iPad. All of the dashboards, views, filters, etc. are easily changed to meet your needs.

On a customer call this week they asked about mobility and if their recruiters could do things like view a resume from their phones. That got me thinking that I hadn’t actually tried to connect my iPhone to our Microsoft CRM based staffing software since the latest update. It worked exactly the same on an iPhone as it did on an iPad. This gives the user another option for mobility. For a number of years there has been a basic version of mobility where you could search/view/edit pretty much anything stored in CRM. From there I could also easily pop open the candidate resume we have stored in SharePoint.

Here is a screen shot from my iPhone of a cover letter/resume that was parsed to create a new candidate in our 1Staff ATS.

Using the new functionality I could also search for new candidates – in this case I selected to use our Boolean search to find a list of candidates, and from that list I was able to send a personalized SMS message from my iPad to a list of possible candidates. My iPhone was set up as the mobile phone of one of the candidates and I was able to receive the text message on my phone and indicate with a one letter response whether I was interested or not.

Because we are leveraging the power of Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the platform for our staffing software all of these activities are stored against the Candidate record. The screenshot below illustrates the outbound SMS Message, the reply from the candidate, and the Outbound phone message following up in the candidates interest in the position. We could have even set up a workflow to send an SMS message to the recruiter for Brian to let them know that a call needed to be made quickly. Click here to see how easy it is to create workflows in Microsoft CRM.

There are also no shortage of VOIP and other phone integration options when you build your business on Microsoft CRM. For example, click here for a link to a Cisco telephony integration.  There are also many other options from Shoretel and other organizations. Inbound phone calls can automatically pop open the relevant contact in Microsoft CRM as well as create a new phone call activity.

Here are some questions to ask if you are evaluating a new online staffing and recruiting system:

• Is your iPad application running your product natively or is it a separate application
• Can we add new fields to the product ourselves
• If we add a new field to the product do we also need to have you change the iPad application so we can see it or does it just work?

Here is a grid from Microsoft showing supported browsers in the Microsoft CRM Rollup 12 release:

You can give your company a major competitive advantage and help future proof your business systems by selecting a solution based on a Microsoft CRM platform. While we provide a solution for the staffing industry based on Microsoft CRM there are also other solutions that we compete with available that run on Salesforce.com. The market is rapidly changing and while you still have an option of selecting staffing software a company has built completely themselves you should really take a close look at products that leverage the massive development investments of a company like Microsoft or Salesforce.com. Because we build our product on the Microsoft CRM platform when CRM runs on an iPad our product runs on an iPad.

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/31274959@N08/5595566620/”>Siemens PLM Software</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>cc</a>