Why You Shouldn't Buy or Build an ATS with Frank Mullett
Frank Mullett is building his staffing firm's tech stack. He decided not to buy an off-the-shelf ATS and won't be custom building an ATS. What else is there? Well, listen to how Frank is leveraging flexible technology to configure the automations and processes his company needs to be successful.
Connect with Frank on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankmullett/
Transcript auto generated from video above
Brad Owens
What's up everybody welcome back to another episode of the transform recruiting podcast you know in my day-to-day world I get to come across some people who are doing amazing things in the recruiting and staffing space and some of those people are actually interacting with technology and. There are very very different thoughts on how technology should work within recruiting organizations and I was having an email thread with our guests today and they had mentioned how they're approaching their technology philosophy and I thought oh my gosh more people need to hear this so welcome to the show. Mr. Frank mullet.
00:41.50
Frank Mullett
And thank you very much for having me and happy New year
00:44.69
Brad Owens
Now of course so I want everyone to know a little bit more about where you're coming from and kind of your background. So how in the world. Do you end up in this crazy recruiting staffing space.
00:55.65
Frank Mullett
That's a good question. So I've been in staffing probably 11 years or 12 years now back in 2011 I started I primarily been in healthcare had the better part of 2 years spent in it of done recruiting and sales and. Training and management and now I found myself in operations pretty heavy on the it side for implementation and integration stuff. But um, how did I find myself here. It was just kind of like luck of the draw ended up. You know, moving to a new state and fresh out of college wanting to get my. Heat wet and something and helping people out with finding the job that they want seemed like a pretty good idea so that's all she wrote history is ah is there? Yeah, it is.
01:36.25
Brad Owens
Yeah, and isn't it great like us as like Brand New recruiters were like all right? Our job is to find people this awesome new roles that they're going to be loving forever and we fell into it because we didn't know what we wanted to do? Yeah no.
01:49.78
Frank Mullett
Yeah, we just found our own job. You know then help others do the same thing is great.
01:55.00
Brad Owens
Exactly it So walk people through what you're currently undertaking.
02:00.61
Frank Mullett
Right now I'm just primarily focused on integrating new systems that can be interoperable so meaning that data can be used in both and then you know, updating recruitment lifecycle processes. Developing a sales lifecycle process and kind of perfecting both of those and all along the way doing our best to more or less take a page out of the book of Amazon right? So there's a reason why their logo is that smiley face that has the a connected to the z and that's exactly what they handle a through z and. Across a lot of industries I don't know if a lot of them have that a through z mentality or that process and something that could be improved upon within the recruiting world is certainly that you know handling everything from the beginning to the end and. Giving real-time updates to the people who are looking for jobs and you're actively working with them so really focusing in on what technologies we can leverage and how to do that while also allowing the recruiters to spend their time doing what's most important which is. Working with the candidates and developing the relationships especially because I particularly kind of um in the world of travel and so travel definitely requires a lot of trust because a lot of these individuals are going from 1 state to another. So.
03:23.14
Frank Mullett
Having these conversations and just knowing that your recruiter isn't only a recruiter but somebody you can be fully relied upon and they know kind of what to expect and what's in the area and what the hiring crew looks like at the particular organization that we might be staffing. All of that I think is really Important. So it's It's good to have subject matter experts. But also to be able to utilize their time in that regard So getting all of the details from them and that can happen whenever you alleviate some of the administrative more tech. Processes that they would otherwise be spending their time doing if they didn't have something semiautomated right? So That's in a nutshell kind of what we're working on right now.
04:04.26
Brad Owens
I think that's incredible because I've always felt for the longest time like we've got all this crazy tech in other industries like things that normal atses are normal kind of just prepackaged what people call normally an Ats all of those. Systems are fantastic for like tracking what has already happened but they're really lacking in some of the ways that you can leverage technology to do it. Technology is best at while freeing up those recruiters to do the things that they're best at like you said like building those relationships building trust. So. Like that you're approaching things that way and it seems like you had to move out of the standard kind of tech stack realm and you're kind of creating your own sort of integrations among different ones.
04:47.12
Frank Mullett
Yeah, and I mean to some degree I think you hit the nowil in the head there. It is kind of unfortunate that you can't as a staffing organization just go online and look at what can we get off the shelf that on the frontend is configurable with already prebuilt customizations. That would be a huge game changer I think that that's probably what the industry needs the most and instead what most companies are doing. They're either building their own proprietary system from the ground up which if you have the time and the money to do that. Go for it. But. If. You don't and you need a system so that everything can be tracked and analyzed and you can have trends and all of these other things that come along with having all your data in 1 succinct spot then you get 1 of these off- the-shelf crms or atss and then from there you're spending a year 2 3 4 5 even on customizing it. Specific to how your business wants to operate within the recruiting industry and granted there's a lot and in recruiting I mean you're talking about manufacturing and late industrial. You have it. You have healthcare you have name the industry and then there's verticals within that. So. There's a lot of nuance. There's a lot of play within the joints there. And each company is going to want to have some type of specific process kind of curated for themselves which is you know their competitive advantage arguably so it just is a lot of time in r and d research and development and then putting those things together. Um.
06:16.72
Frank Mullett
And if you're doing it right? It's going to take time because you want to make sure that you're doing a tight 3 60 and covering all the different nuances as much as possible but at the same token you don't want to have the paralysis by analysis type of issue where you can't correct an action unless you take action right? So there's going to be some Misqueues but. Even with that as long as you're constantly keeping your finger on the pulse of the business and analyzing things and improving them and then deploying those different improvements I think overall you're going to be okay, but the industry as a whole if there was a system off the shelf. That came with a you know one-time configuration. You could spend two weeks configuring it. But if it had all the customizations built in and I know that that's an insane ask but something like that would take years to build most likely to have all the different customizations for all the different industries. Even just to start with one industry say healthcare that would be a huge game changer something that was going to connect text messages and having sequenced you know trip campaigns where. Somebody gets submitted to a job and you have a recap livetime via text with a link to an email that they also receive and just keeping them abreast of all the updates that go on because in healthcare and in it staffing in general. You never know exactly how many candidates are submitted to a job unless you're told and.
07:41.36
Frank Mullett
There's days where you might be submitted to you know 3 jobs and you're wondering well is there an update even if there isn't an update let the candidate know I mean you have to have the open dialogues that they're fully comfortable knowing that you are actually doing work even though there's not an update because we're just more or less having our hands tied to the desk waiting on a hiring manager. That might be out or you just don't know what the circumstances are but it's important to have that communication and those consistent pings. Especially if you're working on establishing trust and letting the other person on the other line know that hey I have your back and all these things like. We didn't spend you know half an hour to an hour getting all of your preferences and exactly what you're looking for for me to cement you to a job and then you never hear from me again like that's that's not the right, you want to go.
08:28.29
Brad Owens
That's so funny to hear you say that because I used to preach the importance of the no update update all the time like it's okay if you have nothing to go to them with they need to hear from you and I actually did a speaking engagement on that at 1 point and everyone's like yeah, but it's so hard to do this do that. It's like how do you want to be treated though.
08:31.39
Frank Mullett
Yes.
08:44.82
Frank Mullett
Exactly but that is again something that can be semi automattomated right? Like if you have a candidate that is submitted to a job and there's a timetable there like every 24 hours and then also too if you really want to go the extra mile which I would I'm all.
08:45.16
Brad Owens
You'd want to know it's worth it.
09:03.48
Frank Mullett
Always about going the extra one out I would give the candidate themselves the opportunity to determine what frequency they want the updates on. So if they want to get you know a text automated to themselves every 12 hours we can do that. It's a no update update in some cases other times. It's a very fast turnaround. So. I think all of that is important but letting everybody know who's being considered for a job what is happening with that job I think is incredibly important. Yeah.
09:27.36
Brad Owens
Yeah, should be table stakes. Absolutely so you mentioned something really interesting as you were talking about evaluating different kind of tech and tech stacks and things like that you mentioned there's this mentality for folks to buy and then have the hardest time. Customizing that thing to be what they need and then you have this other side of the build of yet with endless time and money you can probably make something pretty crazy I know large firms that are doing this for like Tens and tens of ten dozens of millions of dollars per year to keep up with that kind of thing. So. It's only possible but man it's expensive. Sounds like you've kind of hit your sweet spot in the middle talk to me about that sweet spot and what people should kind of be looking for out of their the text act they're putting together to at least enable what you've been describing.
10:18.41
Frank Mullett
Ah, yeah, at the end of the day it depends on what the particular company wants to do with whatever they find if you can buy a crm or Ats system that has a lot of the core functionality and many of them do. But. None of them are going to probably come out of the box with some of the bells and whistles where we're talking about the semi-automation of having text messages of having email drip campaigns. It's a matter of configuration. So yeah, we're somewhere in the middle where we bought. And are utilizing a software that luckily has the ability to connect to a ton of third -party apps and I think that's what a lot of these you know off-the-shelf companies decided to do. Um, not realizing or maybe they have done it intentionally realizing that there's actually a lot of money to be made if they were to take the time and invest in building a system that could be fully configured with all these customizations out of the the get go. Um, but all these third -party apps that are available that is again something that you could buy and add on and configure so that you do have the text messaging so that you do have email drip campaigns. We're more or less in that spot where we haven't an ats or crm.
11:34.31
Frank Mullett
And we're building out these processes and a lot of it is us drinking from a firehose because we're not necessarily the background of it in dev but in today's world where you have large language models like chat gbt and co-pilot and ah. All these other things github all of the resources that you would need as long as you have the nac and you know dedication to learning and and putting it in place. It's extremely rewarding whenever you have an entire team of recruiters that are asking for tools that you can provide. And you don't know anything about how to provide it to them initially but going through that and luckily we have we have the time to dedicate some of those allocated resources to it. So I think that's pretty huge if you're a smaller team and you don't have the time for dedicated resources then that's whenever you would have to end up. Going on to a third party and maybe getting you know, hired help for the the dev side of it. But if you have the ability to dive in I'm always really big on the company knowing how to operate all pieces. And in case, anything goes wrong or something breaks then you already have the the people that can fix it right away.
12:45.16
Brad Owens
Yeah, that'd be crazy ideal. The the interesting thing that I've been seeing in this space and I'll be curious to get your take on it. There are a lot of people that have a they have the felt problem. They have the. Okay, my data is all over the place. None of this is good. It's not doing me any good I can't take advantage any of this stuff and I also know that on top of this I need to add in automation and need to have this amazing feature that I know I have available to me but I can't use it. They're just right in that middle of the right I've got no time. Don't want to go to the whole external. Do so buy something that someone can customize for me kind of thing they're looking for that kind of first step like how do I even start down this journey and you've been through this selection journey here recently. So I'll be curious what sort of insight you can give to people for. Hey if you're truly at this point where you know there's probably better here's that kind of first step I would take in the first places I would start looking.
13:50.87
Frank Mullett
Yeah, So I think what you're touching upon is certainly something that we're going Through. We've gone through and are going through again actively and you're sitting on all of this data you're sitting on a ton of unused equity. Essentially it's a lot of data that is sitting there. And you're not confident that the data is up-to-date and so what do you do? at that point there's more or less these cleanup campaigns where you need to bubble up the individuals and your database that are job seekers. Um. And the ones that aren't and start classifying and so there's ways of doing that you can do it with email drip campaigns. Um, and you don't necessarily if you don't have the email software. You can get pretty good email software elsewhere for a reasonable price.
14:42.81
Frank Mullett
There's a bunch of them I'm not going to go ahead and name them but setting up an email drip campaign saying hey we came across your information you had at some point expressed interest in working with us and wanted to find out if that's still the case and then right away as you're getting responses. You're having the ability to then you could automatically trigger an update to their. Status whatever status field is sitting in the ats to say verified no longer interested or verified interested and then the ones that are interested. You can further filter them over to a recruiter to say hey call this person and find out what's going on and what they want and see what we can work out. Um. That's probably 1 of the easiest broadstrokes on cleaning up data. It also depends on like just how how messy the data has become but there are complex. You know. Issues around that where you have to be methodical and think through things email is usually the best bet if you have the ability to do text messaging because they have opted in then I would absolutely go that route because your open rate and response rate is going to be that much better over email. But if nothing else email cleanup with a. You know mass email just and filtering filtering them through but then also having that update your system even if it has to be manual where you're sending out the mass email and then people are giving responses to a dedicated inbox and you have people just.
16:06.16
Frank Mullett
More or less looking at the responses there and updating the statuses that's better than nothing it just depends again on the scenario and how bad it is or you know we could get lost in this rabbit hole for a while but those are probably the 2 easiest ways of going through just a quick data cleansing and updating.
16:15.31
Brad Owens
H.
16:25.85
Frank Mullett
Um, you know statuses for people so that you have adequate allocated resources from your recruiters. The last thing you want to do is provide database of say 500000 people and all of them are marked the same status because recruiters aren't going to know. You know whether today is going to be a good day or a bad day. All they're going to know is that they have a lot of calls and you know touch points to to commit to.
16:46.36
Brad Owens
Yeah, oh that'd be a fun one like trying to clean up. Someone's multiple thousands of people database with a couple email campaigns. But I mean that it works I appreciate the the logic that you put into that it makes complete sense to me one of the. Interesting points of knowledge that you may be able to share with others is I know from how we've interacted together that you hit this one point as an organization when you were like okay, our tech is definitely not helping us out at this point, there's got to be something better. Walk me through kind of that point where you all realize there was a pain and what was surfacing because what I'm seeing in the market and what I'm talking to a lot of people about is they don't realize how much pain they're having to live with because they don't ask questions internally of like is this really something we have to put up with. So what was at least in your case, some of the pain that you were putting up with so that others can maybe be like oh yeah, me too because I know the journey that you're on and it's going to be way better than you were.
17:52.17
Frank Mullett
Yeah, so the issue that we were coming up against is basically we had our end users which in this case are recruiters and salespeople even some management and they were saying like I know this data is available inside of our our system but we can't access it other than getting exports. From for myself and because of that there was a lot of communication that's happening in email going back and forth to different team members of different departments and so it was basically just an access to data issue and so we had to migrate to a new system where data. Is accessible by all parties involved. So then we just completely kind of transformed overnight this old antiquated process of having to email other people for data that they need to do their jobs effectively and to follow up on things within you know, a reasonable timeframe. So. For us. It is just a recognition that okay, we're suffering just from like too much communication all because the data isn't available to everyone and that's a huge thing I would say in any company is having data and communication. Those 2 things are kind of married together. And so whenever you can bring them together so that everybody has access and it's an even playing field and you are able to actually take actionable processes to get updates out to those who need it and so for us it was a matter of like okay we have data. Some people can access it somebody some people can and everybody needs to so.
19:26.39
Frank Mullett
What do we do and it was like we need to get into a new system where there's no constraints here on this.
19:31.27
Brad Owens
And are you finding it to be like is the juice worth the squeeze so to speak.
19:38.35
Frank Mullett
Yes, absolutely like unequivocally it is 100% worth the squeeze. Um it. It can be complex initially because you do want to set up permissions right? Not everybody should have edit access to this data but read as a fundamental. Yes, and so that was kind of the scenario that we were in we wanted to have the recruiters and the sales team have read access to data that they should have always had access to without having to rely on some type of external process where it's taking time out of their day. Do things that are again are kind of administrative like we want them to be focusing in on their clientele their customers their job seekkers etc. Especially because we're we're working on you know, being obsessed with customers and client interactions I feel like. Again, taking a page out of Amazon not that I'm like Jeff Bezos isn't paying me royalties everybody but you know looking at what they have done. It just seems like that is a process that more and more people are expecting in other industries and it's just not there yet. But I think it's coming.
20:29.50
Brad Owens
Right.
20:43.33
Brad Owens
Yeah, and I agree. It's getting there. Um, one of the interesting things that you may be able to provide to others because um, you guys are currently going through this kind of switch and you're living it all day every day. Yes, we know that people if they're feeling this kind of data pain that there might be other options for you. There might be a better solution out there. But you're currently in the midst of I don't know you're a couple months in at least at this point of this transition. What's something that's come up that you didn't really expect that maybe hindsight you might have approached differently. Anything come up that you can help people. Avoid.
21:20.94
Frank Mullett
You know I will say that we took deliberately a lot of time to think through all of the processes that we wanted to beforehand. So luckily we haven't had any significant bottlenecks where it was like. Ah, discovery of something that was unexpected and that's rare. But I would say that one of the things that I can give an example is what we did is for sms opting in right? So when you have a database that's really large and you've had who knows 50 to 100 sources where you've gotten this information for job seekers. It's hard to say for certain whether or not people have opted in to being reached out the attacks and for that reason we only went with the sources that we were 100 % certain that they were fine to receive text messaging but without that. If we were to blanket everybody then you could get into some so serious hot water and that's not something that we wanted to do so for us we were lucky some of the the pain points that we've had is just trying to set up new things with tech and different systems. Um, while we have a system that is perfectly capable of handling a lot. We don't want to bog down the the computing power of all the processes that we have already in the system so we had to basically make a mirror database system and then connect it to.
22:49.54
Frank Mullett
Our existing system so that we could use the compute power from the other system and just pull in results. So we have that type of technology and again that's not something that any 1 individual necessarily had on the front end but because we have the ability to allocate some resources and there's people who are very much so passionate about. Researching some of the new tech. They're able to dive in and figure these things out so it's it's rewarding in that sense to see individuals on the team grow and learn new things and I think that they are they would be the first ones to be like yeah this has been fantastic. There's been plenty of days where I'm like what do I do but ah. There's a lot of really solid resources out online nowadays that you can figure pretty much anything out as long as you're willing to to go through some of the more confusing nights of like what how do I figure this out and just keep trying keep trying and correcting corrective action and then it'll work out.
23:43.10
Brad Owens
Well, what I'm hearing and what I admire about how you're approaching things is you didn't you purposefully didn't want to stay on a system and be like well this is just how things are you purposefully went into a lot of the. Tech that's out there. A lot of people are looking at buying that thing like well what features does it have like that may not be the way that you'd advocate that people go buy software instead. You'd probably look at what features can I make it have like what how extensible truly is this thing I'm about to put my entire business on top of because. If It can't do what I want to do from my standpoint not what can it do right? like do I have to recruit the way. This software is laid out. Do I have to run my business the way this one software is laid out but instead you approach things and how I advocate that other people start going and selecting technology is what do I want to make it do Think. What do I if I could choose my recruiting process from start to Finish. What would it truly look like and what are the platforms that will allow me to get to that point and that's something that I don't think a lot of people are doing So I think that's really cool about how you all are approaching things.
24:51.70
Frank Mullett
Yeah, absolutely and we appreciate that I mean at the end of the day for us. We were looking at things that we could scale right? because you're going to start a company as a startup. But years later, what do you want it to look like then and so it's really important to kind of have the foresight of. This is how we're going to start but where's the finish line for us and do we want to grow because not all companies that startup want to end up growing into a multimillion multibillion dollar business but if you have the the want to provide a lot of jobs to. Individuals as recruiters or sales reps and have them generate money for themselves and their families and loved ones etc and you want to take it a step further and provide a great service to those who are seeking jobs whether it be the healthcare field itt field any field for that matter. And you want that experience to be top notch or none then you may want to really think long and hard about scalability and what systems you can take on that you might be able to customize for the better in the long run. All those things take time and. Just a matter of um, kind of being a think tank like having individuals in your company that are your think tank for you is um, really beneficial I would say because then you can steer the company how you see fit and the long run is going to end up being so much better.
26:15.74
Brad Owens
Yeah I could not agree more hundred percent I agree with what you're saying in there. Well there was 1 quote that you gave me that led me to think oh my gosh Frank why aren't you telling this to more people and I want to read it out to everyone because I think this is all encompassing of what you've been telling us so far. Ah, the quote that you said was there's nothing more rewarding than to give people the tools that they use to do their best and that sounds like how you're approaching things and I can want to commend you on that because not a lot of people are thinking about how is this going to make my end users lives better and make our recruiters. You know more productive and make them actually have a better experience at their job. So. Commend you on that one man that's that's an amazing way to think about it.
26:55.69
Frank Mullett
Yeah, absolutely appreciate that. Um, it is true. That is the most rewarding thing and it's not even just necessarily tech tools when I ran our training program I was training them not only on how to be successful at the company. But also how to be successful at. Anything that they do and it was the three c's and I I live by the three c's like every day of my life. It's basically content context competence and so you got to learn the content of what the organization does whether it's selling products or selling services then you have to understand the context in which they're selling those products or selling the services. And then from there when you completely understand the first 2 you can actually build competence and from there like you can you can do that with anything you can learn something brand new understand the context in which it's applied and then you can really become competent and I mean you look on the back of a dollar bill and you see the pyramid with the apex of the pyramid being a. Above It's not actually connected to the base and it's basically telling you the 3 C's right there if you have the contact and the context you can develop competence and be the apex of the pyramid and then you can go on top of other bases because all of them run the same way if you understand the content you understand the context. Building competence is just a matter of time and dedication and then from there you can really be successful. So those are some of the things that you know teaching new hires and recruiters that are really looking to have a profession in the field.
28:28.26
Frank Mullett
That was probably the most rewarding and I've seen how it's helped a lot of individuals throughout their lives and so far I mean I've been at my current company for about 7 years and just watching some of them grow. Organically has been a lot of fun and and things that they'll they'll point out. It's been a lot of fun as well. So it's good overall I have no complaints.
28:49.27
Brad Owens
Hu amazing! Yeah I'm gonna leave the podcast on that amazing nugget. So. Thank you so much frank for spending some time with us and telling people a little bit about how you're approaching this whole recruiting tech thing I think it's an awesome refreshing way and I hope more people you know take on the same kind of path. I will put your Linkedin in the show notes for everyone to be able to connect with you. So everyone reach out to frank here on Linkedin. It'll be in the show notes if you like what you heard today and you want to hear a little bit more about how others are transforming the recruiting industry. You can find more at transformrecruiting.com got any questions for me I'll happily pass them along to Frank as well. You can email hello at bradowins.com hello at bratowins.com happy to pass those along and I will see everyone on the next episode. Thanks so much. Frank.
29:35.50
Frank Mullett
Thank you very much Brett.