Overview

The Advanced Job Offers is a new XTRF solution - an integration with an external Job Offers app that will help you automate the vendor selection process. Within this app, you can create your own strategies for selecting the best vendor and implement them, so they require no or minimum of your attention.

The Job Offers app is integrated with the XTRF Platform. It sources data from XTRF and triggers new job prospects on the Home Portal. It also uses the XTRF Chat engine for smooth communication with vendors and managers. The Job Offers app can be configured by the Admin user through the Chat Admin workspace panel or by the workspace Managers through a direct link.

Glossary

Within the Advanced Job Offers concept, several new terms are introduced:

Job Prospecting –  the process of finding a vendor for a job that involves sending offers to vendors, collecting their responses, and recommending the best vendor offer.

Cascade – a single step of the job prospecting process, defined by several criteria such as vendor filtering and sorting criteria, the maximum number of vendors, negotiation strategy, time delay, etc. 

Job Prospecting Strategy – a definition (template) of how the job prospecting should be prepared and executed for one or multiple cascades. It determines the filtering and sorting criteria and, therefore, the vendors that should receive job offers first. 

Contract Proposal – the result of successful contract negotiation (with agreed scope, deadline, and fee to be paid to the vendor).

Contract Proposal Ranking Strategy – a set of criteria defining how the contract proposals collected in a specific cascade should be compared and ranked.

How does the Advanced Job Offers solution work? 

The Advanced Job Offers is an instrument that needs to be set up once and then works without much effort or attention from your side. To get the most out of it, you need to set up several job prospecting strategies for the jobs you have on the Home Portal. Those strategies will define to which vendors and in what order the app will send the job offers.

There is no limit on the number of cascades and their order. The only limitation is the overall Prospecting Expiry Time pre-defined in the General Settings card of the job prospecting strategy.

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I. Set up a Job Prospecting Strategy

1. Open or log into your https://chat.xtrf.io/.

2. Go to the Admin workspace panel > Apps card and click the Settings button.
   
   

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3. You will be directed to the Job Prospecting Strategies page. Click the Add Strategy button in the top right corner.
   
   

   
   You will be directed to the strategy creator page.

4. Provide a name for the new strategy.
   
   

    

5. In the General Settings card: 

   1. Decide whether the strategy should be Active and thus selectable.

   2. Provide the detailed Description that will help you to select the proper strategy later.

   3. In the Vendor Assignment section, decide whether you want to select vendors automatically or manually when job prospecting ends.

   4. Enter the Prospecting Expiry Time to define when the selection process should end if no vendor is selected for the job.

II. Set up the Cascades

Before starting the cascades, XTRF automatically preselects vendors that suit the basic requirements for the job. Those requirements include the following:

• Vendor active status and availability for the job dates

• Corresponding job type, specialization, and language pairs

• Vendor’s acceptance by the client (proposed vendors shouldn’t be excluded by the client).

Only those preselected vendors will be processed in the subsequent prospecting. Therefore, the job type,  specialization, language combinations, or status filters are unavailable in the cascades.

In the Cascade card, you have to decide which vendors should be offered the job first. You should successively set all the cascades you plan to use in this strategy.

For each cascade, perform the following steps:

1. Click on the Cascade bar to expand the cascade settings card.

2. (Optional) Provide a name for the cascade.

3. (Optional) In the Vendor Filtering section, decide how the vendors should be filtered:

   1. From the drop-down list, select the filtering criteria.

   2. In the filter fields, select the required settings.
      Note: The Evaluation filter uses a percentage scale, so all the XTRF evaluation scales are recalculated during the prospecting. To ensure you get the expected results from filtering by evaluation, provide the correct percentage. For example, if you want to select vendors evaluated with four stars or higher on a 5-stars scale, enter 80 in the second column. 
      Note: The system uses the following vendor evaluation levels from the Home Portal:
      1. Specific evaluation for the selected job type, language combination, and specialization.
      If there is no such evaluation, then:
      2. The evaluation for the selected job type and language combination.
      If there is no such evaluation, then:
      3. The evaluation for the selected job type.
      If there is  no such evaluation, then:
      4. The vendor’s overall evaluation.  If there is no such evaluation, the vendor is excluded from the cascade.

   3. (Optional) To add filtering by custom fields or price profile name, click the Switch to advanced editing link. In the text field that appears in the Vendor Filtering section, use the JQL syntax with suitable operators and additionalProperty() function:

      • For custom fields:

        • Multiple selection fields - operators: includes all of, includes any of, includes none of; e.g., additionalProperty("Custom field name") includes all of ("value 1","value 2","value 3").

        • Checkbox fields - operators: is or =, is not or !=; e.g., additionalProperty("Custom field name") = true.

        • Date fields - operators: is earlier than, is later than; e.g., additionalProperty("Custom field name") is later than -3m.
          -3m stands for ‘three months ago’.

        • Number fields - operators: is or =, is higher or >, is lower or <, is higher or equal or >=, is lower or equal or <=; e.g., additionalProperty("Custom field name") > 0.

        • Text fields - operators: exactly matches, contains, starts with, ends with, does not contain, does not start with, does not end with; e.g., additionalProperty("Custom field name") exactly matches "value 1".

      • For price profile names - operators: exactly matches, contains, starts with, ends with, does not contain, does not start with, does not end with; e.g., additionalProperty("Price profile name") does not start with "EUR".
        To check if the advanced filtering was entered correctly, try saving your changes. If your syntax is incorrect, you will get a message pointing to the error. 
        Note: Only the vendors who fit all set criteria will be processed later. You can select several filters to find the vendor that suits the job perfectly.

4. In the Vendor Sorting section, decide how the vendors should be sorted:

   1. From the drop-down list, select the sorting criteria.

   2. Select the required settings for each criterion.
      
      

      
      Note: You can select several sorting criteria to ensure that the most suitable vendors will be on top of the list.

5. In the Maximum Number of Vendors field, define how many vendors this cascade should send job offers to.
   
   

    

6. In the Negotiation Strategy section, decide whether you allow the negotiations with vendors selected by this cascade.

7. In the Contract Proposal Ranking Strategy section, select the ranking strategy for comparing vendor contract proposals. For now, two options are available:

   • Select the first proposal with the original or better deadline and fee.

   • Select the proposal with the lowest price and the original or early deadline.

• If you have more than one cascade in the Job Prospecting Strategy, an additional Time Delay Before Starting The Next Cascade section appears. Here you can:

  • set up the time of the cascade duration, after which the next cascade will be launched

  • allow vendors to respond to job offers even after the start of the next cascade.
    Note: If vendors are not selected within a cascade (for example, because they didn’t respond on time), they are not participating in the next ones. Checking the Allow… box is the only option for letting them be selected if they respond later
    
    

     

• If you want to include another cascade, you may create it from scratch by clicking the Add Another Cascade button at the bottom of the page. Or you can click the Duplicate button in the top right corner of an existing cascade and change only some details (for example, prolonging the response time while keeping the other criteria).

•  To rearrange the cascades, drag and drop the cascade cards to the desired position. 
  Before rearranging, collapse the cascade cards. To pick up the card, click on the icon or the Click to expand/collapse, drag to reorder cascades text.

• To finish the creation of the Job Prospecting Strategy, click the Save button in the top right corner of the page.
  
  

After you create as many strategies as you find necessary, you may use the Advanced Job Offers in day-to-day project management.

How to use the Advanced Job Offers solution?

I. Send advanced job offers to potential vendors.

Once you set a Job prospecting strategy, you can use it to find the best vendor for the job. This process can be triggered in the XTRF Home Portal either manually by the project manager or automatically through the properly adjusted process templates or workflow definitions. 

Send job offers manually

Automate sending job offers

II. Verify the Job Prospecting details (for manual offer sending)

If you have selected the manual offer sending, the Job Offers app doesn’t yet reach out to vendors after you click the Send Advanced Job Offers button. Instead, it transfers you to the Job Prospecting Wizard, where the app takes the pre-defined strategy, fills it out with the details from the job, and adds the profiles of the potential vendors that match the pre-defined criteria.

This step allows you to verify the current Job Prospecting conditions before any external parties are notified.

Job Prospecting Wizard consists of three steps:

1. Set Up Job Prospecting. Check the job details, select the Job Prospecting Strategy and Vendor Assignment rules, and click the Continue button.

2. Preview Vendors List. Here you can see how many vendors fit the criteria of each cascade. You can narrow down the requirements if the list is too big or loosen them if too few vendors fit. Also, here you can check the negotiation strategies and contract proposal ranking. If you decide to switch to another job prospecting strategy, click the Back button and select another strategy in the previous step.
   In the Expiry time card, you can check and change the prospecting expiry time, i.e., decide when the job offers sent in the next step will no longer be active.
   If everything is correct, click the Send Job Offers button.

3. Send Job Offers. In this step, you actually send the advanced job offers out. 

After the first cascade of job offers is sent, the Show Job Prospecting Status button appears. Click it to open the Job Prospecting page, where you can check the vendors’ responses or cancel the prospecting (see the Monitor your Job Prospects and Cancel the Job Prospecting sections below).

After you start the prospecting manually or automatically, the job status on the Home Portal switches to Offers Sent.

III. Collect vendor responses (automated)

Once you send job offers to vendors, collecting responses is handled entirely by the Job Offers app.

Vendors can receive job offers in the XTRF Chat and on the Vendor Portal.

Via XTRF Chat

The Job Offers app is an integral part of the XTRF Chat:

• The list of active job offers exists as a separate, extendable tab in the XTRF Chat main window.

• Each job offer gets a separate chat room.

• Past job offers chat rooms are removed from the Ongoing tab.

• The vendor receives a chat message every time a job offer is presented

• Job offer negotiations are handled in chat rooms as well.

When the vendor receives a job offer via XTRF Chat, they can choose one of the four options.

• Accept. If the vendor accepts the offer, the Job Offers app saves it as a Contract Proposal from the vendor.

• Reject.

• Open Job in Vendor Portal. The vendor will be directed to the Vendor Portal, where they can see further job details and accept or reject the offer. 

• Negotiate (available if negotiations are enabled). It allows the vendor to propose different deadlines and fees in further messages.

At the end of this step, the Job Offers app saves vendor responses as Contract Proposals with different terms. 

Via Vendor Portal

The advanced job offers are displayed along with regular offers in the Job Offers module.

After opening the job offer, the vendor can accept or reject the offer on the Vendor Portal or negotiate it in XTRF Chat. After clicking the Negotiate button, the vendor will be directed to the XTRF Chat, where the negotiations will be performed as pictured above.

IV. Compare contract proposals

If no contract proposal has been collected in the current cascade, the next cascade starts after the time scheduled in the Job Prospecting Strategy.

After all cascades are concluded (or if the manager cuts the process earlier), the Job Prospecting is over. Now it’s time to compare contract proposals.

The Job Offers app ensures that:

• All sent job offers are invalidated.

• Vendors who haven’t responded are informed about the invalidation of the Job Offers via chat message.

• Collected contract proposals are automatically compared and ranked for each cascade based on the Contract Proposal Ranking Strategy selected for each cascade.

• The project manager is informed about the result of the job prospecting.

For example: if the app collected no contract proposal in Cascade 1, but some contract proposals were collected in Cascade 2 and Cascade 3, then the best contract proposal from Cascade 2 is considered the best contract proposal of the whole job prospecting.

V. Pick a vendor

When the comparing and ranking process is finished, the manager is notified about the results in XTRF Chat and can click the link to the Job Prospecting status page to view the full statistics. The system recommends the best fit for the job based on the deadline, fee, and response time. 

If the job prospecting strategy had been pre-configured to assign the recommended vendor automatically, the Job Offers app would request the vendor selection from XTRF TMS. For negotiated offers, the Job Deadline and Total Cost in XTRF will be updated accordingly. Otherwise, the manager can manually select the vendor by clicking the Select Vendor now button and then the Assign Vendor button next to the most suitable offer.

• The Assign Vendor button is marked red next to the vendors with the best offer.

• After selecting the vendor, their name appears in the top right-hand corner.

• You can change the selected vendor by clicking the Reassign Vendor button next to another vendor.

VI. Monitor your Job Prospects

To keep abreast of the job prospecting processes, use the Job Prospecting Dashboard. This interface shows all of your job prospects with their statuses. Use the filters on top of the list to locate the job prospects with a given status or specific jobs.

VII. Cancel the Job Prospecting

At any stage, the project manager can cancel the whole process in the Job Prospecting Dashboard.

To do so, click on a Job Prospect on the browsing list to enter the status page, and then click on Cancel Prospecting.

As a result:

• All job offers sent from all cascades are closed (invalidated).

• The project manager and vendors are informed about the cancellation via chat message.

• In XTRF TMS, the job status is reverted to Open.