Finding and hiring good people is hard, especially for small businesses. Finding the best candidates to fill your organization’s job needs will ensure that you improve employee retention! The LongJump Recruitment Agency Solution allows both internal and external recruiters to manage your pool of job applicants. Here is a summary of some of what is possible:

• Store candidate information: provides a central store for incoming application information such as resumes and CV’s
• Managing recruiters: allows you to manage external recruiters that you may be working with
• Profile creation and management: ability to create candidate and company assessment profiles
• Job and Skill matching: match candidate profiles and information to job requirements quickly and easily
• Website Integration: integrate web-based job inquires from your website with the Recruitment Agency Manager
• LongJump Platform Integration: share and use data and contacts from other LongJump applications such as email, calendar and task activities.

Here are some other tips and guidelines that can be applied with your use of the Recruitment Agency Solution and within your organization to improve your hiring process and employee retention:

• Make a Staffing Plan
  What exactly is the type of job that needs filling and how many of those jobs are there? What are the precise specifications and descriptions? Decide in advance what the salary and benefits will be. Create the necessary profile within the Recruitment Agency Solution and create time lines (Calendar) and budgets as part of the process.
• Find Good Candidates
  What type of advertising will you do to attract the candidates you – newspapers, trade journals, Internet? Consider using a Internet job board or a solution like vFlyer (that syndicates your job posting to all the leading online marketplaces). Use your website to collect information from potential candidates through the web-based integration capabilities of the Recruitment Agency Solution.
  
• Prepare Interview Questions
  A good interview has a purpose and a direction. Consider using a collaborative environment like OfficeSpace to manage the collection and assembly of interview questions. If the applicant has interviews with multiple team members, LongJump can easily hand the communication, scheduling and collaborative discussions that accompany such interviews. Here are some additional content and legal guidelines than can help in the process.
• Avoid Common Errors
  Try to avoid any and all of the following common errors. Asking leading questions. Making decisions too early in the interview. Lacking knowledge of precise job requirements. Letting the pressure of your duties shorten interview time. Doing more talking than the candidate. Failure to direct the interview.
• Check References
  If possible, check three references on each candidate. This demonstrates that you are using reasonable care in the hiring process. Careful reference checks ensure that candidates are right for the job and they are who they claim to be.

Here are a hand full of blog posts and articles that have come out since our launch at DEMOFall last week:

• CIO Weblog: More on the SMB SaaS front
• Column 2: LongJump Revisited
• Paul Gillin: Demo stuff that I’ll use
• SmallBizTechnology.com: LongJump – Business Applications for Collaboration…

I especially liked Paul Gillin’s post about useful small business services at DEMOFall which concludes with the following quote:

As a small-business owner, my financial management processes are embarrassingly rudimentary. At some point, I probably should make the switch to Intuit’s QuickBooks, but LongJump would argue that it can deliver all that functionality and more for a low monthly fee. The initial service combines 14 common business applications and an integration platform that developers can use to add others.

In the last couple of years there has been a lot of interest in why on-demand applications are better than their conventional software counterparts. ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright does a great job of identifying six important characteristics of software are service:

• Ready to run: The idea that on-demand applications require no installation and minimum setup in order use
• Pay as you go: The idea that you only pay for what you use. LongJump’s “Pay as your grow” approach provides even greater flexibility in allowing you to pay based on the number of users or the amount of storage your applications use.
• Short learning curve: The idea that on-demand application require a minimal amount of training. Additional resources like LongJump University and support help accelerate the learning curve further.
• Codeless customization: The ability to customize applications without coding or development. This one of the core value propositions of the LongJump platform.
• Loosely coupled integration: The idea that on-demand applications have adopted a loosely coupled, service-oriented approach to integrating with external system.
• Constant monitoring and feedback: The idea that a company like LongJump can and does improve the quality and applicability of their platform by listening to and learning from customers.

In general, many of these characteristics apply to on-demand application offerings. The LongJump’s platform, however, offers other unique benefits that continue to speak to the advantages it has over conventional software:

• Inter-application integration: The ability for applications to share information between each other
• Collaboration and community: LongJump tries to leverage the web as a collaborative platform for sharing information between team members and this notion is evident in many of its applications.
• Website Integration: LongJump understands that no application is an island and that customers need to be able to integrate their LongJump applications with their existing websites or other online properties. As a result, LongJump provides a growing range of “cut-and-paste integration” options to users.

One of LongJump’s strengths is its comprehensive suite of sales applications that enables sales professionals to sell and manage their pipeline’s more effectively. There is a quick overview of some of the key sales applications that come with the LongJump platform:

• Customer Manager
  This sales application allows you to store and share customer account information with your sales organization. The Customer Manager gives sales professionals a “360–degree” view of the customer relationships and keeps track of all the activity and communication history that relates to their account.
• Contract Manager
  The Contact Manager helps your business maintain and automate contract activities for prospects, customers, and vendors. Important account cycle activities like contract and account expirations, and other important events relating to product or services contracts.
• Deal Tracker
  This application allows you to build sales opportunities with integrated price books and product lists, at the same time providing an accurate outlook into your sales opportunities. Using the Deal Tracker, you can store product and price information, track deal status, maintain key live metrics on activities related to deals, and turn your sales representatives into a goal-oriented, focused sales team.
• Prospecting Manager
  Use the Prospecting Manager to really focus your sales efforts. The Prospecting Manager to “mine” for potential sales leads. These includes things like driving new prospects from your website and assign them to your sales reps, identifying which prospects need special attention, and even automating parts of you sales channel.
• Sales Force Automation
  The SFA applications serves as the flagship application for sales teams to track progress and share customer information. If you have used CRM tools before, LongJump’s Sales Force Automation (SFA) provides all of the sales management functions you’re accustomed to in enterprise-grade applications plus much more.

Remember that you can always visit the LongJump Application Catalog for a complete listing of available business applications.

Enterprise 2.0 is the term we have talked about in the past in relationship to LongJump. Generally speaking, Enterprise 2.0 is a term used to describe the “technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email”. The LongJump offering is a powerful Enterprise 2.0 enabler and we have been invite to speak on the subject in the last (most recently at at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, MA).

So Makes You an Enterprise 2.0 Organization?
A lot of companies, especially smaller organizations, have started embracing Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 concepts to take their businesses to the “next level”. This list (from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference) does a good job of highlighting some of the differences between Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0 companies.

Source: Enterprise 2.0 Conference

We often get asked how we differ from some of the other business application offerings available. We like to explain that LongJump has always positioned itself as a next-generation business application provider. So what differentiates a next-generation business application platform? Here are some of the key differentiators that LongJump provides as part of its solution:

• A balanced and comprehensive set of integrated “out-of-the-box” applications
• Light-weight “nimble” applications that are easily extensible without the “bloat-ware” associated with legacy products
• A “pick-and-choose” approach to using applications along with “pay-as-you-grow” pricing options
• A test and proven “component-based” platform that is reliable, scalable and extensible (more..)
• Opportunities for partners to add value to LongJump’s user-base through our growing partner ecosystem

These differentiators translate into a number of key benefits for small to mid-sized businesses. These benefits include:

• A “one-stop-shop” for web based applications that eliminates the need for users to use multiple websites
• An “easy–to-learn” and “easy-to-use” solution that avoids the trappings of complex legacy applications
• A cost-effective solution that allows users to get online inexpensively and purchase additional services over time
• The security and “peace of mind” users have knowing their business application platform is always up
• A growing range of value-added services from partners that allows users to solve their industry specific problems