Open source: SugarCRM at Footprints Recruiting

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is generally hard to get excited about, but Jeff Strachan a founder of Footprints Recruiting[1], an English as a second language (ESL) placement agency, verges on evangelical. And little wonder: Being burdened with a legacy system built using forms in Microsoft Outlook and being burnt by the lock-in of proprietary software would be enough to make an open source evangelist out of most people.

In Strachan's case, he has become a fan of one CRM system in particular: SugarCRM's open source Sugar software.

Footprints Recruiting recruits teachers from around the world to teach English in public and private schools. Footprints primarily targets Asia for placements, although the Middle East is an expansion market. It has offices in Canada, South Korea, Australia and the United Arab Emirates.

The nature of the business means that it is both cyclical -- ramping up towards the start of school semesters -- and competitive, with a number of placement agencies often competing to make sure their candidates are best positioned for a limited number of openings offered by schools.

In addition, recruiters like Footprints need to convince teachers that they should choose them instead of a rival firm. "Teachers have to trust us that we can get them a good job at fair market value and that we're reliable," says Strachan.

Before Sugar, the limitations of Footprints' internal systems were beginning to grate, Strachan says.

"Ten years ago when we first started the company we didn't have any money to invest in anything. It was two guys with laptops who emailed notes back and forth,"

Managing teacher files was done through forms in Microsoft Outlook. For a placement, teacher resumes must be compiled along with visa information, criminal background checks and photos in order for presentation to a school, which will then accept or reject a candidate. When, like Footprints, you're receiving some 50 to 150 applications per day, the limitations of this approach can quickly become clear.

"We have about 90,000 teachers in our database right now," Strachan says. "We have 14,000 advertising contacts. We've got another 12,000 or so school contacts that we're trying to manage. Each one of those has to be internally maintained.

"At this point in time we have 992 teachers who are now slated to go or have expressed interest in going to a program called EPIK -- English Program in Korea -- which is designed bring native English speakers into the public schools around South Korea. This year they're going to be hiring around 1000 teachers.

"Each one of these teachers when they first apply to teach abroad with Footprints Recruiting they submit their resume, submit their picture, they give us the basic overview of what their experiences are and so on. As they go through the process more information needs to entered into their profile; as an example, criminal background check. They have to get the check then they have to scan and provide us with that scan, as well as university transcripts, etc. [In total there are] 16 documents.

"There are six recruiters working on this project, and it's first come, first served. We want to get all of our 992 teachers across."

Footprints has used Sugar to create a Web portal that allows teachers to manage their own profiles. "Sugar will tell each teacher what is outstanding, which of those 16 documents is not included." Sugar will remind teachers that there are outstanding documents they need to file, at a frequency set by Footprints. "The other thing that's really critical is that [because] a teacher can now manage their own profile, if they see a mistake on their resume they can log in and make that change instead of having to email us, one by one by one," Strachan says.

Previously it would take around four emails for a single candidate to file all his or her documents, and a staff member would have to find a teacher's profile then attach the information. Not only does Sugar handle that, but if there's an issue when a staff member is reviewing a profile, a rejection statement with a note about a problem can be sent to the teacher. "So in one step everything is accomplished, as opposed to receive the email, open the email, find the teacher open the teacher's file, attach the teacher's file into it, make a note in there and then send it out."

Candidates for different placements will often have to fulfil different requirements. In the past, Footprints would only offer a general application form. But now, with Sugar, it can offer a form that's tailored to a different job, which have different criteria in terms of visas and requirements.

Thanks to efficiency gains, Footprints can now maintain its staff level without having to recruit more people for peak periods. "This system will actually allow me to maintain my workforce at 12," Strachan says.

"It allows me to achieve considerably more effective work from my current staff because they're able to guide people thorough the process easily, because they can see in their dashboards where people are at, taking a more proactive approach as opposed to a completely reactionary approach.

"The system will do the email for them; now they can pick up the phone. Believe it or not, through technology we're bringing a human element to our recruitment."

Another efficiency is that now candidates can easily book themselves into available interview slots with Footprints, instead of recruitment staff having to do it manually via email.

The key challenge with shift to Sugar has been data migration, which Strachan describes as "an absolute nightmare". "That's not necessarily because of Sugar. It's an absolute nightmare because it's 10 years of data collected in different ways for the same fields over a period of time."

Strachan says Footprints looked at "tonnes" of CRM systems. When the company started, its website was built in Microsoft Word. "It was absolutely awful," Strachan says. It was then shifted to a system built in Dreamweaver, then to a proprietary PHP-based system built by an external programmer. Frustrating experiences when trying to get the site modified turned Strachan off closed source: "There is a bunch of unique functions in our business. We don't operate like most normal businesses because a n employment agency doesn't typically get visas for teachers; it's usually a far less complex process.

"So we knew we were going to have lots of customisation and that customisation continues -- every week there's new things that we do. I knew I wanted to go with an open source code base so we could make changes."

He speaks highly of Sugar's development community, which includes a partner program run by SugarCRM. "Going with a partner that is recognised gives me the power to be able to evaluate and critique -- that then puts more power back to me," he says.

Strachan says that, thanks to being able to build extensions to the core Sugar system, he has been able to tell his staff: "If you can rationalise a way to make it better, it can be done in this system."