Recently, I heard a commercial from Indeed.com. The ad was aimed at candidates, not employers, and focused on the ways Indeed can help candidates find the best employer. Candidates now have more choices than ever before. A growing abundance of remote and freelance work in many professions means that geography is no longer a restriction and workers have more flexibility when choosing work.
The way we search for jobs has changed. Websites like Indeed.com, Salary.com, and Glassdoor.com all help candidates research the culture, salaries, benefits, and reputation of companies they are considering before filling out an application. Candidates (and often, your existing employees) are armed with more information and are using it to be selective.
In this new employment landscape, what can firms do to adapt to this changing employer-employee relationship? Start by assessing your existing Human Capital Management Strategy and begin thinking about how to integrate technology.
Here are three key places you can integrate technology to have a big impact on your firm’s talent:
Acquisition & Onboarding
When treated as a strategic function, talent acquisition can have a profound effect on your ability to influence company culture, establish an employer brand, and ultimately make your firm more attractive to prospective candidates.
Organizations typically just don’t have the bandwidth to achieve this without the support of an applicant tracking system (ATS). An ATS can free your organization from the repetitive, administrative tasks associated with recruiting, which can make it difficult to provide a top-notch applicant experience.
An applicant’s experience during the interview process can be the difference between a great candidate accepting your offer or going to the competition. But even after an offer letter is signed, much more needs to happen to reaffirm that choosing your company was a wise decision.
Onboarding is a critical first step in the employee lifecycle, but few organizations have a thorough strategy in place to integrate new hires into the company in a way that supports retention and engagement. When you create an onboarding strategy that includes your new hires’ needs and integrates collaborative planning for development, you’ll set your employees on a path toward long-term engagement and success within the company.
Post-Hire Professional Development
Talent acquisition is one of the most expensive business processes in any organization. It’s time to start talking about how to reduce acquisition costs by investing in post-hire human capital management initiatives that develop and retain existing employees.
Your employees want opportunities to develop and tend to stay with an organization longer when this investment is made. Unlike throwing additional funds at the acquisition process, spending on learning initiatives for your workforce is mutually beneficial for employers and employees. Increasing employee engagement is shown to have very positive effects on business performance. For example, according to recent Gallup research, the behaviors of highly engaged business units result in 21% greater profitability. It’s worth noting that not every resource problem in your organization is an acquisition problem. Sometimes the problem may be repetitively hiring for the same role or a failure to identify the next great leader. Most of the time, due to manual processes, businesses can struggle to predict future needs and end up scrambling.
According to multiple bodies of research, including Deltek’s own Clarity surveys, many organizations have a partial succession plan in place, but the majority are not prepared for expected or unexpected turnover. Whether the role is a leadership position or an important individual contributor, thorough succession plans are a must to help businesses weather the churn created by employee turnover.
It’s not enough for succession plans to live inside the brain of a single individual. By using the latest succession planning tools available through your talent management software, you can develop, maintain, and test succession plans to ensure that future leaders are ready to advance when you need them most.
Tracking Key Performance Indicators
Even less data-driven companies are beginning to track key performance indicators (KPIs) related to talent management–but the problem is that many are not tracking the right metrics.
Some metrics, like voluntary and involuntary turnover rates, are really just numbers. They fail to provide companies with the information needed to craft, implement and measure a more effective human capital management strategy.
Using a talent management solution to track metrics like Time to Start, Lead Time to Billable, and Talent Acquisition Sourcing Channel, your company will generate more sophisticated and actionable insights. Here is a closer look:
Time to Start: the amount of time it takes to bring a new hire on board from the moment the position is first publicized. This KPI determines the overall success of your acquisition strategy.
Lead Time to Billable: use this metric to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the onboarding process. The more quickly a new hire is assigned to billable project work, the sooner that employee is contributing to revenue.
Talent Acquisition Sourcing Channel: how effective are the job boards and social media sites on which you advertised open positions? By monitoring this metric, you will be able to determine which sources are the most effective for specific job categories and for your organization more generally.
Using technology to help you track, benchmark, and eventually predict metrics will help HR professionals to position human capital management as a strategic cornerstone for their organization.
Key Takeaways
For most organizations, a lack of integrated technology bogs down HR with administrative work and limits time for value-added activities such as strategic talent acquisition, retention and development. It prevents HR from being seen as a key contributor to strategic planning by limiting the analytics and insights they can provide at the executive level.
HR needs to partner with other functions within the organization, such as IT and Finance, to develop and then implement an HR technology roadmap. Human capital management solutions are the most powerful when they are integrated with the existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions used by your organization. All of the above challenges can be addressed and improved by the effective use of digital human capital management solutions.
As financial professionals, our HR counterparts are the most important allies we could possibly have. They should be our strategic planning partners and our confidants. So why don’t we team up more often? In the majority of cases, I think it’s because of how we work. Fractured systems isolate us professionally, making it difficult to understand the points of synergy between our two worlds. During my years in finance, I didn’t understand the value of human capital because it wasn’t something I could capture on a balance sheet. There is no generally accepted accounting principal to assign monetary value to talent, but the intrinsic value is there, just the same.
A growing demand to track Human Capital Management (HCM) metrics is putting pressure on already burdened HR professionals. Digital HCM is the future of HR and promises to become the strategic keystone we need. So why are we so slow to embrace it? Many companies are still struggling to manually piece together information from payroll, finance, and even sales in order to extract sophisticated insights from data. Unlike most HR professionals, those of us in Finance are already accustomed to this type of analytical work. We’ve been forced to leverage technology to track and benchmark metrics far longer than our friends in HR. We’re familiar with the challenges of disparate systems and what it takes to build bridges between human capital management (HCM) and financial ERP solutions. Think of the possibilities.
Establish HCM as an integral part of the business
As the finance leader in your organization, you are typically included in strategic planning activities. If you haven’t already invited your HR counterparts to the table, I encourage you to do so now. They could be one of your most strategic partners as they understand the value of your firm’s workforce and how to increase that value through thoughtful investment.
Below are 5 ways finance can (and should) partner with HR:
1. Establish a Human Capital Management Strategy
Encourage your firm’s leaders to establish human capital management as a strategic function and recognize that they are a valuable, untapped resource. Focus on how to grow the business organically by tapping into the productivity that results from a highly engaged workforce. Attracting, developing, and optimizing great people will help your firm lead the industry with high performing teams. 2. Create an HR Technology Roadmap
For most firms, the road to a fully integrated HR technology solution is just the beginning. Prepare your firm for the total investment in terms of budget and time. Create a roadmap to help all stakeholders in your firm understand what it will take to successfully craft and implement a digital human capital management strategy. 3. Integrate HR and ERP technology
The integration of these two technologies is a must for any strategic HR roadmap. Integrating critical business functions is the only way to get the analytics required to optimize your workforce. Integration will allow employee information to be pushed into the ERP system to facilitate the project lifecycle. Critical data around time and attendance, employee expense reports, and employees will be able to move between systems and streamline the allocation of costs to projects, improve resource planning, and automate payroll. 4. Enable Collaboration
Be sure to include collaboration tools in your HR technology roadmap. Project work is often spread across locations and teams, making it necessary to have tools in place that enable dispersed teams to communicate and work together. Collaboration tools can also help to identify disengaged employees faster and ramp new employees more quickly. 5. Choose a Partner
Software was once something that we bought and used. Today, when you choose a tool, you are also choosing a partner. Spending time evaluating features and functionality is not enough. Chose a partner that understands project-based firms and your unique challenges. Make sure they have made the right investments in solutions for your industry and aligned with your needs.
Although on the surface the goals of Finance and HR may appear different; they are much more aligned than most of us realize. We both want to be able to analyze, manage, and optimize the workforce in order to predict future needs, improve utilization and grow profitability. It’s time to recognize this and come together with a mutual understanding of how so much untapped value is lying dormant in our organizations. It’s hard to quantify, you can’t report it in your financial statements, but people are our greatest asset and the true source of our organization’s value.
We understand the numerous challenges you face in Human Resources. Your department is often understaffed, and you’re constantly tasked with finding quality hires in a tight timeline. Every day with a vacant opening means another day of lost revenue, creating pressure from the top down. We created our Talent Management solution with these pain points in mind, and it’s built to efficiently manage the entire employee lifecycle.
Available as one comprehensive package or à la carte to suit the current needs of your business, Talent Management handles every step along the way from recruiting, performance, development, and training to compensation. Each solution works in sync with the others on an easy-to-use interface.
RECRUITING
Our tools help you create an efficient employee recruiting processes, making it easier to assess qualified candidates and fill positions faster.
Digital interviews improve hiring quality and cut the time spent interviewing by up to 50%
Referral system engages your employees in the recruiting process and rewards them for inviting their best contacts to work for you
TRAINING
Nurture and grow your staff from within by providing employees with a self-service answer for continued learning.
House a full catalog of instructor-led, online or external courses
Automatically set up required training courses for new hires or for specific job roles
Manage certifications
CAREER DEVELOPMENT
Our automated appraisal process reduces administrative burden so you can focus on reviewing performance and career goals.
9 Box Planning maps out which employees are ready for advancement or need further development
Process-driven compensation system ensures employee incentives are tightly aligned with performance
Here are four tips for attracting young talent into your organization.
Tip 1: Create a Compelling Job Posting
When looking for jobs today, candidates want to get a really good idea from the job description what they will do every day, how they will contribute to the company, and what they will gain from working with your company. Simply posting a bullet-ed list of requirements and responsibilities is no longer enough to grab their attention. You could be missing out on some great candidates by writing descriptions that don’t address their major concerns. Are you giving them enough information and are you taking advantage of all of the new media that is available to you? Share graphics, videos, and other resources on social media to draw candidates in and pay special attention to focus on information important to them.
Tip 2: Look in Non-Traditional Places
Sometimes your best candidates aren’t those found through traditional listings on your website or standard job boards. Often the key to finding the right talent is making the most of all candidate sourcing channels available to you. Build and maintain your referral networks, reach out on niche job boards and leverage professional organizations to access candidates who may not be actively searching for a new position. Encourage your employees to leverage their networks and social media presence; it’s a great way to find candidates and to build your company brand.
Tip 3: Make the Interview Evidence-Based
It is important to know that the people you bring in can do the job – that they have the right skills and experience required to step in and successfully perform in their new position. Prepare a standardized set of questions to ask each candidate interviewing for the position. This is a good way to draw more accurate comparisons between candidates. An effective way to understand how someone might fit into the team is to ask detailed questions about their experience and how they would perform routine tasks. Pose typical problems they might encounter on the job, and ask them how they would address them. This can provide more tangible evidence of their experience and how they think on their feet.
Tip 4: Define Your Measures for Success
Let prospective employees know how your company measures success. What do they need to accomplish to be a top performer, and what is your reward or recognition structure for those who do perform to your expectations? Are incentives both employee and team oriented? Is there a career path and what is it? In order to hire and retain exceptionally talented people in the new workforce, you have to work hard at it. It’s a two way street. You must keep them motivated and inspired and give them work that fills their sense of purpose and lets them know they are valued.
It might sound simple to someone who isn’t familiar with the process, but “software implementation” and “information technology team” don’t always co-mingle as well as we would like. When shopping for a new human resources solution or any new cloud-based software for your organization, it’s important to take in to consideration the folks who will be doing most of the legwork up front: your IT department. Sure, you might never intend to cause stress or excess work by purchasing separate solutions… for example, an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and a Learning Management system (LMS), but the amount of work required for those team members to make the switch(es) might make them a bit hesitant to give their stamp of approval. And you definitely WANT the IT team to be on your side! The IT Department in your organization will be thrilled to know that the Brilliant HR and Deltek Talent Management is a single sign on, Cloud-based solution that’s simple to implement. We start with a three-pronged approach to installing services beginning with the deployment of the product. We then go through a step-by-step process working closely with you to uncover unique needs for configurability, evaluate best practices and ensure the right support tools are in place for an effective product launch. During the implementation process, we provide consulting support to assist in organizational readiness in areas such as change management, process definition, workflow creation and compliance. Once the solution has “gone live” within the organization, each client is assigned a dedicated client services account manager to ensure your needs are met.
CLOUD PLATFORM
Features
Globally accessible and accommodates multiple languages as determined by the user
Flexible and configurable to fit client needs or mirror processes already in place
Fast Feature Adoption: Upgrading and staying current allows customers to take advantage of new features and enhancements faster than ever. Upgrades are seamless. Deltek will upgrade your solution so you can avoid a costly conversion or migration process every few years.
UNIFIED SOLUTION
Features
Easily integrates with service providers for assessments, background scans and content delivery
Cross-module reporting with full API
Metric driven applications, so important analytical tools are readily available
