HR Monster Mash: Halloween Blog Series

HR Monster Mash: Halloween Blog Series

It’s spooky season! The Brilliant HR team is excited to begin our 5 part blog series where we will be covering some common Halloween monsters – with a twist – how each monster can show itself in HR!

To kick us off, this week we are covering the Skeleton and the Vampire.

The Skeleton – HR teams operating with a bare bones staff.

Functioning with a bare bones staff can lead to everyone being so overworked, they are no longer effective. This can be a result of incorrect staffing ratios, layoffs driven by budget cuts or even expansion where hiring has yet to catch up with company growth.  When this happens, it is important to evaluate your current processes to ensure they will be effective in the new structure of the team. It may be that some employees are now wearing multiple hats and the previous processes are no longer efficient. Carefully analyze all that needs to be done, how many weekly hours it will take, and if it can be reasonably accomplished with your current team. You may want to consider hiring a consultant to help get you through a busy season. If the workload is the new normal, you may want to review what tools are available to help you automate some of your processes to ensure you can meet all your business objectives without burning out your staff. A fatigued staff are more likely to create errors which brings added risk to the organization. Automated processes can save you time and money and allow you to work with a leaner team. Having the right number of people and the right tools is key to running a successful HR Department.

The Vampire – Inefficient business processes that suck the life out of you

Have you ever looked at some of your processes and thought “this is crazy, why do we do it this way?”

I’m guessing you have.

A business process is a series of steps performed to achieve a specific objective. These processes can be fundamental building blocks to the efficiency of a department or business as they can help streamline activities and ensure resources are put to optimal use.

Generally, when a business process is created it is driven by the desire to improve efficiency, streamline communication, to ensure accountability and establish an approval workflow, to standardize a set of tasks, and ultimately to prevent chaos from consuming your day-to-day operations. But what happens over time when business objectives change, technology progresses, fewer people are available to participate in the process, or budgets are smaller? What worked before may no longer be the best way forward.

The truth is the old process may no longer make sense to your current business needs. There are important steps necessary in the development of a new business process. The obvious ones, are to define the objective, map out the process, assign actions to stakeholders, test and implement the process. The less obvious and most important are to monitor the results and repeat. What does that mean? It means we should always be testing and monitoring the effectiveness of our processes and asking ourselves if the process needs to change to better optimize time, money, and resources.

Let us know in the comments – have you dealt with any of these monsters in your workplace?

We hope you enjoyed this first installment of our blog series, and be sure to check back next week to see what monsters are popping up! 

Empower Your Employees to Own Their Career with Core HR

Empower Your Employees to Own Their Career with Core HR

It takes more than administration and paperwork to attract, build and retain the people you need to consistently deliver successful projects. Empower your managers and employees to own their own careers by investing in their development and help your human resources (HR) team focus improving the employee experience. A variety of self-service features helps you engage your employees and allow them to proactively keep up with certifications, training and other employee development opportunities, while maintaining their own information without intervention from HR. Self-service models are not new, but are more important than ever given current events.

Self-service is the norm for many people now – being able to check their account balances online, sending money through online services, reviewing options for jury duty, or buying movie theater tickets are just some of the many things people can do on their own now. And employees carry this expectation over into their work environment. With this current self-service culture, it is important that you can offer your employees tools internally to empower them and provide a good employee experience. Employees may not want to have to call or email HR to update their address, they’d rather just go and do it themselves.

Not only do employees expect this, but with the current trend to work from home, giving employees this ability is important. And when considered in the face of our current environment where many more employees are working from their home than normal, this is even more crucial. Having the tools at hand to get help on something they are doing when their colleague isn’t in the desk next to them or to make sure they are keeping track of meetings with their manager can help make the transition period easier for everyone.

Another added benefit for you is that enabling employees to access and maintain their own information and development can free up HR from those types of requests and exercises to focus on other things.

Having access to their information is one piece, but making this easy is another. According to Datis, 44% of organizations rely on three or more internal systems to handle their workforce management process. This complicates matters for employees, because it isn’t clear what should be done and where. With Deltek Talent Management, there are many options to keep things together.

Personal Data

By putting the management of personal data in the hands on the employee, you enable them to make updates on their own (while reducing your workload at the same time).

Within Employee Self-Service, or ESS, employees are able to initiate changes to information on their profile based on the permissions you establish. For example, they can submit a change to their address, but not necessarily all pieces of data are visible or editable by the employee. These changes can trigger notifications and/or approvals before the changes go into effect.

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Resumes & Job Openings

Employees also have the ability to maintain their resume within the system, making sure you always have up-to-date details for them available if you need resumes as a part of your proposal process. They can also use their resume to apply to internal job opportunities, if something that comes up that is of interest to them.

Gartner research indicates that companies need to shift from external hiring strategies towards training their current workforces and applying risk mitigation strategies for critical talent shortages, and our tools can help support this shift.

Employees can view their resume at any time, and if changes are needed, they can make updates to their resume. They also have access to an internal career portal, where they can apply to job posting if they find something of interest to them. Or, if they know someone else who would be a good fit for a job posting, they can refer a friend to that job. Once they’ve referred somewhere, they can check on the status of their referrals at any time.

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Training, Certifications and History

According to Better Buys, 7/10 people say that professional development opportunities affect their decision to stay at a company, and LinkedIn indicates that 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career. With this in mind, offering opportunities for employees to access, take, and track learning activities can greatly benefit your company.

The solution supports instructor-led, elearning, and read and sign courses, and makes these available to employees in the course catalog. Employees can easily see course details, including prerequisites, competencies/skills gained, and classes offered. From the class listing, they can easily enroll in courses available to them.

As employees take training within the system, it automatically builds their history as a part of their profile. They can download certificates and see the education units gained, aiding in reporting for maintaining certifications.

Certifications can also be tracked in the system. Certificates can be downloaded, and reminders can be sent for expiration dates. Employees have the ability to see these and update at any point in time.

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Continuous Feedback

The Deltek Talent Performance solution aids in the scheduling and tracking of continuous feedback. Employees can easily access feedback sessions, including both currently active sessions, as well as past completed sessions.

Employees can setup continuous feedback sessions with a proposed date, purpose, and notes, which their manager can then accept. Comments from both parties can be tracked, including signatures with notes once the session has been held. All recorded sessions are tracked.

Employees are notified of updates to their continuous feedback sessions and can make notes, create new sessions, or review past completed sessions.

Continuous feedback is visible within appraisals as well, giving employees the ability to easily see any sessions that occurred during that appraisal cycle and take comments and feedback into consideration as a part of the performance review as is needed.

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Goals

Employees have the tools available to set goals for themselves. This is done with a simple one-step process. They can choose goals from the library, past appraisals, or other employees as a starting point, or create their own goals. This include SMART goal instructions to help make the goal Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. Goals can be based on a scale, numerical target, percentage complete, complete/incomplete, or with no score for informational purposes.

Employees can access their goals, both those set within the appraisal and those from continuous goal management, from the My Goals link under Performance. Here, they see current goal statuses and provide updates when needed.

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Employee Recognition

Employees can recognize others within the organization that exemplify company values. This lets them enter in details about the recognition, and sends notifications to the recognized employee and their manager. Recognition received by employees also shows up in their performance review.

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5 Ways Talent Management Unlocks the Power of Resume Searches

5 Ways Talent Management Unlocks the Power of Resume Searches

You might read dozens of resumes and find only a few possible gems. What are you doing with the resumes for the other handful of great candidates that you don’t hire for a particular role? Hopefully you’re saving them to build a great source of candidates for your next search! There are so many tools that can help you search through those resumes for the skillset and experience you need. Applicant tracking systems are no longer a “nice-to-have.” They are absolutely essential for the modern recruiter. Your job has changed and you cannot be as effective without the right tools. Here’s five ways Deltek Talent Management helps you be a more effective recruiter so you can better organize, find and interact with your applicants.

1. Resume Search

The resume search within Deltek Talent Acquisition enables you to search your entire database of resumes using different parameters. These parameters can vary widely from a basic keyword search, to a location search radius, to specific skill certifications, licenses or security clearances. To determine the correct filters for your search, start with the following questions:

  • If you have a lot of old resumes in your database, are you able to search based on recently modified resumes?
  • Is your search saved for OFCCP reporting if this is a requirement for your company?
  • If you have modified your application form to add custom fields for your company, can those be added to the search form?
  • Once you find resumes that match your criteria, can you take action on those resumes by sending emails, inviting applicants to apply to new postings, or forwarding them to another user for review?

Did you know that all of these options are available to you in Deltek Talent Acquisition?

5 Ways Talent Management Unlocks the Power of Resume Searches

2. Search Resumes Dashboard

At times, getting access to resumes quickly is a priority.  When an applicant calls in wanting to know the status of their application, or a hiring manager wants to update you after an interview, being able to quickly find an applicant’s resume is important. Our Main Dashboard for the application is configurable to include a Search Resumes widget, so you can come in and quickly find their resume.

5 Ways Talent Management Unlocks the Power of Resume Searches

3. Resume Search Agents

Sometimes you don’t find the right candidate right away in your existing database, and being able to be notified when someone applies who meets your criteria would be very helpful. That’s where Resume Search Agents come into play – you can save your searches as a Resume Search Agent, and then choose how frequently you want emails to come in when applicants matching your criteria apply. This is very helpful when you post a hard to fill position and want to be notified when resumes come in that meet your needs.

5 Ways Talent Management Unlocks the Power of Resume Searches

4. Resume Pools

When you find highly qualified applicants in your database, being able to quickly find them when openings are available is helpful. Resume Pools make it easy to tag these resumes and view a listing of resumes with that tag. For example, if you had two great candidates for a job and hired one of them, tagging that “second choice” resume by adding them to a Resume Pool for easy access in the future if a new opening comes up is beneficial. You can also have your Resume Search Agents automatically populate Resume Pools for you, maintaining a list of candidates who have some of those skills you are on the lookout for. And keeping in touch with these candidates you’ve tagged is simple with Talent Relationship Management available within Deltek Talent Acquisition.

5 Ways Talent Management Unlocks the Power of Resume Searches

5. Monster and CareerBuilder Resume Search Integration

What happens if you don’t find the talent you need within your resume database? There are other tools and databases you can use to search for resumes – we work with both Monster and CareerBuilder to provide these services from directly within Deltek Talent Acquisition. For example, if you enable the Monster search integration, you have the option to search the Monster resume database directly and then import the resumes you find into your resume database. These resumes can then be reviewed, included in Talent Relationship Management campaigns, or invited to apply to job openings.

5 Ways Talent Management Unlocks the Power of Resume Searches
Under-Utilized Features: Employee Recognition , 360 Reviews, and Project Appraisals

Under-Utilized Features: Employee Recognition , 360 Reviews, and Project Appraisals

As a part of our underused Talent Management features series, we wanted to highlight some of the different ways you can recognize the accomplishments of your employees. In this post, we will walk through three underused Talent Management features: Employee Recognition, 360 Reviews, and Project Appraisals. Each of these features makes it easy for you to recognize your employees and for your employees to recognize each other.

We often talk about the modern workforce in our posts, but I think the desire for recognition is pretty universal. Your employees want to feel like they are contributing to your business and they want to know that they are having a positive impact on their colleagues. It can be difficult to find the time to create these types of programs and that’s why we’ve built features into Talent Management to help you create a positive culture of recognition and collaboration. If you’d like to learn more or see these features in action, check out our recent demo called “Give Employees What They Crave: Recognition.”

#1) Employee Recognition

Within Deltek Talent Performance, employees can submit recognition for other employees in the organization.  The employee giving recognition can provide information by selecting “create new employee recognition” and inputting information for one or more employees. They can include specifics about the situation and the skills and competencies that the employee or team demonstrated.

Once employee recognition has been given, the employee who gave this recognition can see the feedback they’ve given and received, and can drill down to view the details of each entry.  This screen lists recognition created by the logged in user, as well as recognition submitted by other employees to recognize the currently logged in user.

employee recognition tool screenshot

Employees can view the feedback they have given and received

When the entry is submitted, an email notification is sent to the employee being recognized, his or her manager, and the user who submitted the entry. Additionally, both the manager and employee can access recognition as a part of the employee’s performance review.

preview company appraisal screenshot

Include Employee Recognition entries in performance discussions

#2) 360 Reviews

Another way to collect information is through the use of 360 appraisals. These reviews expand the performance process from managers/team leads and employees to others who have information about the employee’s performance (both inside and outside of the organization). Managers can easily launch a 360 using a workflow template and choose who the feedback will be requested from.

new 360 assessment screenshot

360 Reviews are easy and intuitive to launch and use

If you enable the option, employees can also recommended others they would like to participate. It is also possible to keep the participants anonymous in the employee’s view. Once all participants are confirmed, the manager can review and advance the 360 to the next phase. At this point, participants in the 360 receive an email notification with a link to the solution to complete their task.  They are able to review the items included in the form, as well as provide comments where applicable.

As participants complete the review, managers can view who has/hasn’t completed their tasks.  They can drill-down into each completed review to see individual responses.  They also have a summary view available to them to see results side-by-side.

step 2 of 360 assessment wizard screenshot

All completed 360s are stored within the employee’s past appraisals section

Additionally, a project team lead can launch project 360s for members of the project team. External participants (such as the client they worked with) can also be included to obtain feedback on project delivery. Reports on 360s are also available, making it easy to see what feedback is being captured.

#3 Project-Based Appraisals

What can you do to make sure that the feedback you’re providing your employees is both timely and relevant? One answer may be at your fingertips. There are many different ways to manage employee performance, ranging from annual performance reviews to continuous feedback sessions. Deltek’s strong focus on projects means we also provide project-based appraisals for your project team members. This makes it easy to involve project managers in the review process and solicit feedback on employee performance at the end of projects they are engaged in.

Within Talent Development, project teams can be added and team members and a team lead established.

project team for business process improvements screenshot

As a part of the project team, performance reviews can be launched for team members by the team lead.

Project reviews can include goals, competencies, achievements, and other components. These components are then available for review and scoring by the team lead. This means your employees are getting relevant and timely feedback that can be immediately applied to their next project. You will create a culture of performance and recognition while helping your employees to develop and advance more quickly.

If you are looking for ways to drive employee engagement and improve performance across your project teams, then you’ve found a great place to get started with these features.

The three features discussed here are easy to use and easy to implement.  Make sure to subscribe to hear more about ways you could be leveraging your Talent Management solution more fully.

Compelling Reasons to Switch to An ATS

Compelling Reasons to Switch to An ATS

The Old and the New Reality in the War for Talent

happy smiling group of colleagues and work group together as a team

Are you feeling overwhelmed by trying to keep track of open requisitions, or the candidates you have in the interviewing process?  Not to mention the candidates with unanswered offer letters or those that have accepted or declined an offer. There are a lot of moving pieces in the acquisition process, now add to that the expectations of the candidates themselves and you could end up spending more time writing emails and making phone calls than actually recruiting anyone!

In their book “The War for Talent,” Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod tell us more about the new reality created by the war for talent. Within the old reality, people needed companies; machines, capital, and geography were the competitive advantage; better talent made some different; jobs were scarce; employees were loyal and jobs were secure; and people accepted the standard package they were offered. However, within today’s new reality, there is a shift more towards focusing on and keeping employees because companies need people; talented people are the competitive advantage and better talent makes a huge difference; talented people are scarce; people are mobile and their commitment is short term; and people are demanding much more.

While the employee/employer relationship of today impacts every type of business, it has an even more profound impact on project based organizations. You rely on your people to deliver world class projects every day. Without them, your projects suffer, your customers suffer, and ultimately, your bottom line shows the negative consequences. BUT, there are better ways to cope with the challenges of talent acquisition.

With this new reality in mind, let’s cover what you can do to stay ahead of the curve and secure the strongest candidates in the marketplace. Firstly, you need to expedite the talent acquisition process, secondly, understand how talent pools can help you keep track of those highly specialized roles, and finally, how optimizing employee branding and the candidate experience can make a huge difference for your organization.

Expediting Talent Acquisition

The days of candidates flocking to your website to apply for positions is over. Remember, if they are a great employee, you can bet you are not the only one trying to convince them that your organization is the best place for them. Mindsets have shifted. The dialogue is no longer “why should we give you a job”, instead it’s “why our organization will be a great place for you to build your career.” This means we need to rethink our hiring process completely to understand how to present a strong value proposition to prospects. People want to work where the culture is strong and the projects are interesting. How are you communicating that to prospective employees?

All this change gets a whole lot easier when you leverage technology to track and adjust your processes.

To get a clearer picture of your talent acquisition process, take a look at it and break it down into intervals of time between each of the steps between the job posting and the first day on the job – from when a candidate was sourced, to when they were screened, to when they were interviewed, etc.

Considering you have this information available – both the steps and time to fill – a part of the equation you might be missing is how long it takes you to complete each step. This piece of information lets you know right away if there are any steps that are consistently taking longer than others, and gives you a chance to evaluate your processes to make them more efficient. According to Dr. John Sullivan, the steps that tend to hold up the process the most are:

  • Approving new job postings
  • Resume screening
  • Scheduling interviews

Each of these steps can be tracked in an ATS, a great tool to aid you in the reporting of this information.  Reporting on the average amount of time in each step can help to identify blockages and where to focus to improve processes and efficiency for future hires. At the end of the day, it’s all about having the right people available at the right time to keep your projects staffed and running smoothly.

For example, through reporting you can identify if you are indeed struggling with approvals of job postings, where to make improvements to the process and if the changes you are making are improving the timing.

How Brilliant HR’s Talent Acquisition solution can help:

  • When creating a requisition, approvers for that requisition can be established.  These approvers then receive email notifications to accept or reject the requisition, with reminders if they do not take action.
  • You application process can include screening questions that score applicants as they apply to the requisition. These can be used to auto-screen candidates, or you can review these responses as a part of your initial review.
  • When it is time to interview a candidate, the Brilliant HR ATS gives you the ability to select dates and times to send to the candidate, which they can then accept or reject online.
  • You can also report on how long each of these steps takes, and evaluate if there are areas you can improve.

Talent Pools

Another area an ATS can assist with is in building and maintaining talent pools. Deltek’s Clarity research shows that finding qualified talent is a top challenge for project based firms and establishing talent pools can really help to flag candidates that you want to stay in touch with for future opportunities.

As resumes are added to your ATS, you can review and then flag those that would be a good fit for future openings.

Maintaining talent pools by continuously accepting and flagging resumes from strong applicants can help you move faster when you win a new project, or when someone leaves unexpectedly and a succession plan for that individual is not in place. In his post The Smart Move for Growing Companies Is to Always Be Recruiting Talent, David Ciccarelli further expands on how having a pipeline in place can help, and some techniques for expanding the pipeline.

In the example of where someone leaves unexpectedly, this is where having a pipeline of candidates can be critical, filling that gap sooner rather than later. There is nothing worse than having to delay a project start date because you lack the appropriate resources!

How our Talent Acquisition can help:

  • When you review a resume, you can add that resume to a pool so that you can easily find them in the future.
  • Pools enable you to keep lists of candidates with specific requirements, helping you stay in touch with those job seekers with email communication.  These lists can be generated manually or through the use of search agents that automatically add to the list.  They can also be shared for easy access to information.  Inviting job seekers in these pools to apply to job openings they are a good fit for and have the appropriate skill set.  Again, potentially filling a position quicker by already having the talent defined by using Talent Pools.

Employee Branding and Candidate Experience

It is very important that you are attractive to candidates as an employer; their experience moving through your online application and hiring process can have a huge impact on this perception. An ATS can help you identify areas where applicants drop from the process and make it easier to keep in touch so that your organization avoids giving candidates the “black hole” experience.

A recent Forbes article gives some insight into some of the things that job seekers found negative in the process.

  • 60% of employers “never bothered letting me know the decision after the interview”
  • 43% of candidates found out during the interview “the job didn’t match what was written in the job ad”
  • 34% of the candidates said the company representative “didn’t present a positive work experience”

This is where a focus on your branding and candidate experience aided by an ATS help to ensure that your offer is the one that gets accepted!

How our Talent Acquisition can help:

  • You are able to create your own email templates for notifications, and then tie those to different steps in your recruiting workflow to make sure that you are keeping candidates informed.
  • You can access your listing of job descriptions when starting a requisition, and use those descriptions to fill in your job description and requirements within the requisition form.
  • Talent Acquisition can assist you with your career center – the Brilliant HR and Deltek teams work with you for a branding experience that matches your company’s needs, while providing you with the ability for applicants to find and view jobs online (including on their mobile device). This also includes an application process, where you drive the steps and information collected from your applicants.
Talent Management Maintenance Scheduled on Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 9:30 PM EDT

Talent Management Maintenance Scheduled on Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 9:30 PM EDT

Talent Management initials in circle (TM) Deltek Talent Management Maintenance Scheduled on Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 9:30 PM EDT Your instance of Deltek Talent Management will be upgraded to version 15.1.0.3 on Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 9:30 PM EDT. This update will occur during a 6hr window in which the following may be experienced:

  • Access to the Talent Management solution could be briefly interrupted during this timeframe.
  • Job seekers may be unable to apply to job postings, log into their resume profile, or update their applications during this maintenance window.
  • Integrations may not be executed during this timeframe. Depending on the specifics of your integration, it is likely that your next integration run will bring your integration status up-to-date.
  • Talent Reporting Tool refreshes (where applicable) may be delayed up to 24hrs.

Please be sure all affected employees at your firm are aware of this update! As part of our ongoing commitment to ensure customer success, we will be upgrading all customers to our 15.1.0.3 release which provides the following updates:

  • API/SOA:
    • Performance enhancement to get_new_hires API method

Customer Care Contact Procedures
The fastest and best way to receive support is to submit a case online at Deltek Support Center. See KB Article # 77086 for details on Deltek Customer Care Contact Procedures. If you need to call Customer Care after you have submitted a case online, you will need your Contact ID shown below, which will quickly route you to the appropriate person assigned to your case. Please call the appropriate Support hotline number listed below.  Your Contact ID can also be found in the upper right corner of the Deltek Support Center Home Page. Customer Care Tel: 1.877.HLP.PROJ (1.877.457.7765)
Universal International Freephone Number (UIFN): 00800 45777650
If you need to add information or update your case, you can do so by going to Manage Cases.