Turning your consultancy on a dime hasn’t been easy, but some of the challenges are thankfully diminishing. In fact, the nuances of converting to a virtual workforce and a mostly or completely offsite project work are now last on the list of Top 10 Challenges Facing Professional Services Leaders, according to respondents in a recent SPI Professional Services Talent Benchmark.
However, there are plenty of challenges still remaining including around many around hiring and retaining the right talent. Here are some tips taken from the recent Technology Advice Paper: Top 10 Critical Consulting Moves for 2021.
Don’t Neglect the “Soft Skills”
When it comes to talent, consulting staff (and clients alike) must punch up their skills as online communicators and collaborators – to best engage without in-person lunch meetings or stand-up presentations. Those soft skills are now critical to your firm’s success.
In stressful working environments, clients seeking consulting support appreciate meaningful interactions with a more balanced professional staff, skilled at effective collaboration, with a bit of compassion.
Hire for the Long Term
Many businesses are trying to make short-term adjustments today so they can more easily adapt as needed tomorrow. But when it comes to hiring talent today, leadership must invest for the long term. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reported that on average it costs a company 6 to 9 months of an employee’s salary to replace him or her.
Make your firm attractive to the top talent that’s available by offering opportunities for learning, growth, wellness, personal connections, and family flexibility. Your firm will find that the opportunities you offer to your talent today will pay off in retention, employee satisfaction and even client satisfaction down the road.
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!
With more competition for qualified candidates, a proactive recruiting strategy is more critical than ever. Brilliant HR Talent Management can help your company build a stronger talent pipeline, populate talent pools, and reach the key talent you need to staff your next big project. And, did you know that we recently added a candidate relationship management feature to our Talent Acquisition solution?
Let’s take a closer look at this latest enhancement to Brilliant HR Talent Acquisition: Talent Relationship Management. This new candidate relationship management feature works well in conjunction with Talent Pools and provides the foundation project-focused companies need to deepen talent pipelines and prepare for future workforce requirements.
A solid Applicant Tracking System (ATS) can be a game-changer for your recruiters. If you are not currently building and maintaining Talent Pools, you may be missing a huge opportunity to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your recruiting engine. According to the Deltek Clarity Architecture & Engineering Industry Study, 51% of A&E firms report that finding and retaining talent is their top financial challenge. Talent Pools help by flagging candidates that you want to stay in touch with for future opportunities. When that next project is won and you need to quickly scale the workforce, you will have the opportunity to tap into potential candidates with whom you have already established credibility. As resumes are added to your ATS, you can review and flag those that are a good fit for future openings.
Where Have All The Candidates Gone?
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 strong talent acquisition pipeline in place can help.
What happens when someone leaves unexpectedly? This is where having a pipeline of candidates is critical, so your company can fill the gap sooner rather than later. There is nothing worse than having to delay a project start date because you lack the appropriate talent management resources!
When you review a resume, you can add that resume to a pool so that you can easily find them in the future:
Talent 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:
No one wants to spend months finding, attracting and hiring candidates. The real key to successful talent acquisition is speed. The ability to easily review candidates, engage in conversations and perform the necessary interviews, convert the best candidates to new hires, and get those new hires billable faster are underlying parts of the bigger picture.
Setting Up Campaigns
Talent Relationship Management (TRM) is available as a part of the Talent Acquisition module. This new feature is disabled by default, but your system configurator can enable this functionality. Once enabled, new navigation items for Talent Relationship Management (TRM) will appear in the Recruiting section of the left navigation menu.
You can create letter templates for use within TRM campaigns. These work similarly to other letter templates, and can include merge codes to personalize the messages being delivered:
You can setup the details of the campaign, including which pools, employees or candidates the campaign will go out to. You can save and edit later at any point during campaign creation:
Campaigns can be scheduled for delivery or sent immediately. You can select how frequently to send and between which dates you would like emails sent:
A preview of the campaign is available before publishing the campaign:
Once campaigns have been created (either published, saved to send later, or saved to finish later), you can view all campaigns on one page, similar to the existing Manage Requisitions page:
The Brilliant HR team is excited about this new feature of Talent Management because we heard from so many of you that finding candidates and filling open positions is a huge challenge. We are not stopping here. Talent Relationship Management offers us plenty of opportunities to build additional functionality that will continue to support your recruiting efforts.
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
Do you feel you could be getting more out of your system? Has your organization recently gone through significant turnover in HR or recruiting staff?
Consider a Talent Tune Up – an expert will work with you and analyze and assess your organizational performance among industry best practices. The goal of the health check is to identify potential improvement areas and better leverage technologies. With so many new capabilities and features in each release, it can be hard to know which will benefit you and the Talent Tune Up can help make the most of your investment.Learn More here or email me at Mlageman@brillianthr.com today!
In our growing digital world, we find more and more of a struggle with remembering what makes our jobs human. And that is the employees! Help continue the success of your employees and your business by implementing a successful performance review process. 81.6% of managers use performance reviews to help employees develop and improve professionally. But if the employees don’t understand how their performance is being measured, what’s the point?Lately, there’s been a lot of chatter in the HR sphere about continuous performance reviews. Just like in Deltek’s recent blog about the MUST in Continuous Feedback, we agree that the push for ongoing Performance Reviews helps keep the employees and managers engaged while continuing their growth as well. You’re moving the focus from “results only” to “results and behavior”, by identifying employee strengths and how these strengths can be used more effectively. By giving employees the position to give and receive feedback, employees feel more in control of their standing in the organization. Managers can draw back on instances from throughout the year and reviews are more fact-based than emotional. Employees are more satisfied in their job because they can use each feedback review as a growing point to learn from. TIPS TO HELP PERFORMANCE REVIEWS “MAKE THE GRADE” Automate the Process: Using a dedicated tool or running document for performance can help streamline your appraisal process. Feedback can be gathered from virtually any source, including clients and vendors. Have a strategic process in place to ensure everyone is poised to help the company meet high-level objectives.Make it a priority: In your calendar, link yourself to the running document or automated system that you are using (having employees have visibility and able to do the same helps both manager and employee be more efficientRename the Appraisal: If the word performance reviews, doesn’t help with your company culture and you are needing a livelier name to get people started, get creative! Include your organization name, or come up with a name like “Feedback Sessions”, or “Team Talks” that inspires well-rounded feedback.This will help you and your employees not fear performance reviews and find them to be more encouraging and lively and not dreaded and boring. By constantly taking a look at you and your employees’ performance you are self-evaluating and helping to see where the company is growing and moving towards.This is just one step, maybe even the first step, towards a successful talent management strategy. In this white paper: learn about better corporate performance, reduced turnover, and organizational mobility. Don’t forget to register for our joint webinar, Did Your Performance Management Process Make the Grade? on June 27, 2017.
*Giveaway* Receive a $15 Amazon gift card by attending the webinar and signing up fora demo on our Performance Webinar!
The Skeleton
The Vampire – Inefficient business processes that suck the life out of you
