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If you've been a regular reader of these columns, you know that I've often wondered whether technology costs more
time than it saves. I stopped wondering after spending 35 hours upgrading my computer database. I'm only halfway through
this mind-numbing and eye-opening task, but it has been worth every keystroke.
What brought me to this reconciliation with machinery? I'm updating my editorial-staffing agency's database of
candidates -- all 4,014 of them -- one by one. No, it's not just because I'm a masochist. We recently installed an
upgrade of our software with a staffing-industry template. Goldmine is a contact-manager program that alternately amazes
me and drives me to near collapse. It can do wondrous things with names and addresses. At the same time, it's very
complicated and finicky. This update, my Goldmine consultant (Lenny Thaw of Easy Systems Inc. in Deer Park, N.Y.)
assures me, will allow us to find candidates for our clients much more quickly.
I'll spare you the geeky details, which involved transferring data from the old program to the new one. Everything
exported smoothly into the upgraded version with the exception of the skill profiles of our job seekers. That needed to
be done individually, since they were in custom fields that I had created myself when I first started using Goldmine.
EULOGY SPECIALIST. Still with me? To make this template do what we want it to do, I have to program into it
abbreviations for the skills of my writers and editors, for instance "Copy Wr" for copywriting and so on. I'm up to 267
skills and counting -- and learning a lot about my resources in the process. That's why I'm so philosophical about this
experience.
I've found dozens of others including specialties like Voice-Overs, Dictionary Indexes, Translation (from Arabic to
Zulu), Telemarketing Scripts, Jingles, CEO Roasts, and my favorite, Eulogies. We even have people who specialize in
proposals for prison systems. That bit of information came in handy the other day, when a criminal-justice consultant
called to say they needed an editor to look over copy for their new Web site. The guy nearly fell off his chair when I
said, "Yeah, we do that."
This discovery process revealed some bad news as well. There's an entire section of candidates for whom we list no
skills whatsoever. For others, we lack phone numbers and addresses. Wasted assets. The point is, I never would have
known this if I hadn't tackled the job personally.
As of this writing, I've been through 1,980 of my candidates. I stopped briefly because all the skills started looking the same
after a while. That's dangerous because I may skip over one that has tremendous value.
Jennifer, one of our recruiters, asked: "Hey, why are you going crazy? Can't you get a temp to do this stuff?"
An interesting suggestion. After all, we're in the temp business. But I think I'll do it myself. In a strange way,
it's kind of relaxing. And I'm learning so much about my company.
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George Giokas is the president and CEO of StaffWriters Plus, a specialty agency that places writers in
temporary and permanent positions with corporate and other employers. It also provides editorial consulting work.
His database includes 2,500 writers and editors specializing in more than 60 categories. His Web site is located at www.staffwriters.com, and you can E-mail him at
george@staffwriters.com.
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