Home / Newsroom / 2004 Press Releases / Press Release

01-20-2004 New legislation to reduce junk email to have little impact on normal business practices of staffing firms.

ATLANTA, GA January 20, 2004 VCG Inc., the developer of StaffSuite and WebPAS software solutions for leading staffing companies, today stated that there would probably be little impact on the normal business practices of staffing firms due to recently inacted legislation -- and that it's WebPAS and StaffSuite products will help staffing firms to comply with the new law.

Background and major points of the legislation

On December 15, 2003 President Bush signed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which took affect on January 1, 2004. As stated by the US Senate, this bill was created to regulate interstate commerce by imposing limitations and penalties on the transmission of unsolicited commercial electronic mail via the Internet.

Staffing providers across the U.S. are asking themselves what this Bill contains and what it means to their business. The following attempts to highlight the Bills contents as it applies to staffing providers and provide a plan of action for compliance with the new law.

The first major point of consideration is that this Bill applies only to unsolicited emails. If you are currently doing business with Clients that have asked you for certain information, or with Employees that have specifically requested that you find them work, then sending an email to these people is perfectly legitimate and is not covered in this Bill.

This Bill does, however, cover emails that are sent to unsolicited people. For example, if your business wants to initiate an email campaign to everyone in your database explaining the services offered, the guidelines of this Bill should be applied. There are four major areas of concern with regard to email campaigns: The From address, the Summary line, the contents of the email, and requests for removal from future emails.

The From line of the email should not misinform people as to who is sending them an email. For example, you will not want to indicate a return email address of The IRS when sending out an email campaign. This will clearly mislead the recipient as to the sender of the email (and is a good way to have the email immediately deleted). On the other hand, indicating a From address of jobs@acmestaffing.com or wewanttohireyou@abcstaffing.com is perfectly legitimate it does not mislead the recipient. It is also important that the From address be a functioning email address to which the recipient can post a reply. Except in cases where your email server is temporarily unavailable, the From address should be functioning for up to 30 days after sending your email marketing campaign.

The Summary line of your email marketing campaign cannot be misleading. For example, you will not want to title your email You may have just won $1 million when the content indicates you are a superior staffing provider. This would constitute a misleading summary.

In the contents of your email-marketing memo, you must indicate clearly that this memo is an advertisement or a solicitation. You must clearly indicate that the user can decline to receive further unsolicited emails, and how they should accomplish this. The memo must also include your business's physical postal address. Additionally, no sexually explicit material may be transmitted without indicating such in the summary line of the email.

The last area of concern is the ability for the user to indicate that they do not want to receive any further unsolicited emails from your business. As mentioned above, you must indicate in the email how the user should give you this information. The easiest approach for most businesses is simply to have the recipient indicate this information in a reply. Your business must honor this request within 10 business days. Also, once a person has made this request then your business cannot sell, lease or exchange their email address with any other business.

VCG's software can help staffing firm's comply with the new law.

It is our hope at VCG that this information assists your business in their email marketing campaign efforts. It is important to note that your VCG Applicant Tracking System can also help your business to comply with the new Bill.

WebPAS offers Outbound functionality, which is the email marketing tool of choice for most WebPAS users. It is important to review all solicitous marketing letters in your Letter Manager to ensure they contain information about how to unsubscribe to future emails. Also, be sure to add your physical postal address if it is not already contained in the memo.

You might also leverage a User Definable Field (UDF) on both Candidates and Contacts that allows your Users to indicate if this person has requested to be removed from future marketing campaigns. Remember, UDFs are searchable fields. This UDF indicator should filter each future email marketing campaign recipient list. This will ensure your business is always in compliance. Please note that VCG does not want to enforce the recipient list based on such an indicator, as not all communications to this person via email are unsolicited.

VCG will be introducing a mass emailing capability in StaffSuite 3.5 as well. Your business will want to follow the above-mentioned advice with regard to formatting your email marketing letters. StaffSuite Employees and Company Reps will also have a flag on their profile that indicates to the User if this person has unsubscribed to future email marketing efforts. This flag will be searchable, as well, and will be a crucial filter to all unsolicited emails.

We know you will find these tools useful as you roll out your marketing efforts in 2004.