National Workforce pursue growth with FastTrack360

National Workforce are an Australian owned and operated business that supply staff for casual labour hire, temporary and full-time jobs. With offices in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, they fill industrial, hospitality, office, trade and government roles. Managing Director at National Workforce, Jacqui Russell, is a long-time user of FastTrack, and began using the platform because the business “just needed somewhere to manage everything from candidate management, payroll and billing.”

Growth aspirations

National Workforce have used FastTrack in its various forms for a decade.

10 years ago, only 6 months into business, National Workforce “had everything on a spreadsheet” to manage a handful of clients before a change was necessary to facilitate the growth they desired. “We had 30 to 40 guys out at the time, and we went ‘this is ridiculous, we need a better way.’ We wanted to grow, so we knew we had to get something in place to help us manage the business.”

In their continuous pursuit for growth, National Workforce sought to update their software 4 years later to manage not just recruitment, but their end-to-end processes. In turn, this helps their business continue to deliver exceptional service to their customers.

“We’re very service-focused. That’s how we’ve always grown the business, and look, it’s a growth business. We could have stayed where we were four or five years ago but part of the ethos is creating opportunities for people. If we don’t grow, people who start in a job with us today have to stay in the job unless someone leaves, and that’s just not reality.”

“We’re also very customer-focused. It’s not often we lose clients through poor service, and we are still that old-fashioned recruiter,  we try to get to every site to do a start-up and introduce a new person. If a new guy starts, we’re there to do the induction. We’re still very hands on. We have account management teams where all they do is service clients. A lot of the bigger guys have stripped that back, and gone ‘that’s a cost, do we really actually need that?’. I get it, there’s a cost there, but it works well for us.”

Possible solutions for growth

When National Workforce looked to upgrade to the cloud, Jacqui wanted to make sure they were on the right path so completed an industry review of available options.

“We learnt a lot from interviewing people regularly from the industry. They come in and we’ll ask what system they’re using and what they like or don’t like about it. We keep abreast that way. It’s probably a better source, as you get an honest answer because they’re using the system.”

To evaluate the best fit for her business, Jacqui and her team went through “countless demos” with other providers and reviewed:

• Usability/User Interface for both the consultant and for the candidate
• Familiarity
• Business process
• Cost and Value

As for their decision to move to the flagship FastTrack360 platform, the cloud-hosted solution, this was ultimately determined by efficiencies.

“We need to be sustainable, and that for us is about efficiencies.”

For National Workforce, they identified efficiencies in the form of:

• Scalability – “It’d be great to get to a point where we’re growing, and we don’t need to add headcount every time we grow.”
• Implementation and the ability to connect with third party providers such as Rostering– “It increased the efficiencies we could gain by implementing partners, opening up the APIs and bolting things on, such as some custom items. At that point also, it was about minimal impact to the business.”
• Keeping up – “Some of the driver back then was also technology was coming and changing.”
• End-to-end solution – “We liked the fully integrated pieces, and no-one was really offering that.”
• Familiarity & knowledge –

“The team knew the system, they liked the system. We know this product, we’re familiar with this product, we know how it works, we know what to expect.”

Implementation

When upgrading to the latest FastTrack360 platform, Jacqui stated “Our FastTrack consultant, Mon R was awesome”.

“Looking back, with the race to meet the ATO’s Single Touch Payroll compliance we had to get setup quickly. We could have gotten more out of the implementation but with Single Touch Payroll we had deadlines to meet. If we had 4 more weeks, we would have done things a little bit differently. I think the process is worth it, it’s necessary otherwise we make mistakes. You don’t want to duplicate the non-essential data. You want to start clean.”

The benefits

Capturing and processing candidate info

When asked about the benefits of FastTrack360, Jacqui pointed to resume parsing and BroadBean.

“The outlook add-ins, the guys enjoy that. It’s a good process. We’ve got some champions in the business making sure that people are aware of that.”

Outlook Add-Ins allows users to parse resumes straight from their inbox into FastTrack360 to automatically create candidates with all the key information, saving recruiters time, effort and advertising costs.

To compare how much easier it is now, Jacqui referred back to The Newcastle Supercars event.

“You know what, there was a real lightbulb moment for me. A few years ago, we needed to find 400 people for the Supercars, but before FastTrack360 it took us four weeks to get that many candidates setup. At the time, it was the biggest thing we’d ever done. Everyone was all on deck, we worked crazy hours to get all our candidates registered and setup. It used to take too long. We had one weekend where everyone came in, everyone was doing manual data entry. I thought it was ridiculous, why are we doing this in this day and age?”

Now with FastTrack360, better automation and better integrations between systems Jacqui is more confident on the impact on her team when taking on big events like the Supercars.

Back Office processes

With the FastTrack360 end-to-end platform in place, National Workforce are enjoying the benefits of simplified and streamlined processes.

“We like that you roll payroll, then you can easily do your invoicing.”

“Plus, we’re running more volume in payroll. That’s where we’ve had efficiencies as we’ve upgraded to FastTrack360. Our payroll team is small but very efficient”

“We feel as we grow further and use importing of timesheets more, and less touch, then we’ll continue to be small We believe our back-office team will remain lean in the future.”

In their technology ecosystem, FastTrack360 is now at the centre of their business operations.

“It’s critical, for sure. Our employees are users in FastTrack360, everyone’s using it. Everything we do has to be able to work with operations. That’s probably evident with the rostering partner we’re looking at. We looked at best in breed external rostering providers, what would work best, and plays with FastTrack360.”

Asked if she would recommend FastTrack360, Jacqui said she’d be happy to.

“I would. It’s a good product, and no one else is doing what you’re doing as far as recruit time pay bill. The system is getting more intuitive, it’s reliable. And I know who to yell at when something goes wrong!”

“The guys in support are awesome. I talked to Mel and Nick from Customer Support, back in those early days when they both started and Phil Collins started,  and then Cassie was there, and those guys really improved the service level at FastTrack for me.”

Looking at the future

As for their next steps, National Workforce have clear goals for the future.

“It was only back in June that we had a strategic meeting, which was then rolled out through the whole business. It was about setting targets for the next three years. We’ve got some sales targets, some people development targets, customer targets and candidate targets.”

It’s all around growth, and it’s looking at growing 25% year on year. We’ve been doing that for the last eight, and we want to continue that.”