Although commonly associated with the rise of computers after WWII, staffing technology enjoys a long and rich history. Scheduling systems date back to the Chou dynasty when Chinese harem administrators developed algorithms to manage menstrual cycles and schedule conjugal visits with the emperor that would coincide with fertility. You can trace payroll back at least to ancient Rome, when paymasters devised a salary system based on salt (the word "salary" derives from the Latin "sal dare", meaning to "give salt"). My Dad invented a search and retrieval system for aircraft engineers in the early 1950s using a sophisticated filing system in which skewers would wind their way through holes punched in talent cards to pull up candidates with specific skills.

In the late 1960s, when Dad was running Manpower's technical division in Milwaukee, he brought me to the office and I got to see first-hand an early payroll mainframe - the forerunner of Manpower's legendary Midas pay/bill system. The programmer showed me what keypunch cards were and how he programmed them. To run payroll, you had to take a huge stack of these cards (which represented both the payroll program and the payroll records) and submit them as a deck to a card reader. It was more like an industrial machine than any technology device we're familiar with today. Back then, computers were strictly for the accounting office. We had no notion that they could be used on a network, as desktop workstations, or as productivity devices like phones.

The micro-computer revolution did little at first to move staffing technology out of the back office; it just made it cheaper and more available for everyone. After Dad got his own Manpower franchise in 1974, he and I developed a pay/bill system on an early micro-computer. We had to punch in the instructions to this system in machine code or assembler (a very low level computer language). For example, instead of writing "Move $5.00 to Bill Rate", as you would in COBOL, we had to write something like this: "L,U A0,5; S A0,03726". It was a very crude system in many ways, but it did the job and helped handle the load as sales went from $1500/week to $1 million/year - big bucks for us back then.

Staffing technology gradually moved from the accounting department to the front office throughout the 1980s. In 1993, I found myself writing a new system for the family staffing company, this time using Lotus Notes as a way to do email and power internal recruiters. A friend got me turned on to the internet in a big way, but besides email, I didn't see at the time how the internet would affect staffing. Nevertheless, this Lotus system could search thousands of candidate records, pull up a resume and email it, all in just a few seconds. Meanwhile, visionaries like the developers of Monster.com realized that the internet would become the platform, and not just for email.

By 1999, it seemed everyone had picked up on the internet and browser applications became all the rage in staffing. One big problem with browser applications, however, has been that they are hard and slow to use. If you are paying someone to work on an application all day, it gets really expensive to put up with all the repainting and roundtrips to the web server. Add to that the incompatibilities between web browsers and constantly changing (notice I didn't say evolving) standards and vendor interpretation of those standards, and you have yourself a real mess.

Fortunately, Microsoft came out with its Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) in 2006, and we pounced on it at TempWorks. If you've seen an iPhone, you have an idea of what a WPF application looks like. To put it simply, WPF gives you all of the access and flexibility advantages of a browser, but in a user-interface that is easy to learn and really fast to use. We now have seven staffing companies up on our WPF system and we are adding new users every day, thanks to the easy deployment Microsoft built into it. You'll start seeing a lot of WPF applications in the coming years, including the Silverlight extension that Microsoft is marketing aggressively as a replacement for Flash.

By 2010, browser applications and old Windows programs will begin to seem like DOS programs - inflexible and slow. WPF interfaces will be common place in staffing environments, especially with touch-screen and surface computing. Although industries like porn, gambling, and social media are often claimed to be the quickest to adapt to new technology, staffing is never far behind. It's going to be a fun ride during the next five years.

By Gregg Dourgarian