Great onboarding means efficient hiring, reaching the best applicants, and hiring at the right time and for the right reason.
With clear understanding of skill gaps, HR can plan for reshuffling of employees within teams, push for a referral-driven hiring process, or leverage means of internal hiring to fill the position.
Hiring and onboarding are among the most critical jobs of a business leader. Make no mistakes, it’s a tough task. Hiring is time-consuming, high risk, and tedious. Furthermore, it has legal consequences and significant business, reputation, and financial impacts if it goes wrong. Whereas technologies and cloud-powered tools are driving most aspects of business these days, it’s surprising how many enterprises, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and HR directors are not leveraging tools and applications that streamline and improve many hiring tasks. In this guide, we will cover all the hiring and onboarding aspects that you can automate and improve to a great degree, using one or more digital tools and better processes.
Leverage Application Tracking Systems to Manage Every Aspect of Candidate Application Life Cycle
Conventionally, HR operation managers relied on spreadsheets, e-mails, and forms to manage candidate application life cycles. It’s a major pain point for HR to keep track of applications, each at different stages, but handled by one person! Voilà, application tracking systems solve all your problems. These applications are available on the cloud, which means you can start using one within the next few minutes. Right from creating job descriptions and organizing recruitment campaigns to tracking onboarding progress for short-listed candidates—these applications help you keep track of every movement of the candidate’s hiring process.
- You can easily find free and premium application tracking tools, suitable for small, medium, and large HR departments. JobScore®, SoftGarden, and iKrut are among the popular free options you can try out.
- There are sophisticated premium options, such as BambooHR, Zoho Recruit, Jobvite®, and iCIMS®.
- Also, full-blown Human Capital Management Systems (HCMSs) such as Oracle Fusion®, Workday HCM, and SAP SuccessFactors® provide top-notch application tracking features.
A word of advice—try out a free version/trial of the software/cloud tool before committing to it.
Understand Current and Expected State of Employee Skills
We’re talking about good old gap analysis. The most positive outcome of a hiring process is when a department gets an employee who fills a skill void and strengthens the cumulative capability of the department. To enable this, executives, managers, and planners must continuously engage in an effort to document the current skill set, and in parallel, document the expected skill set necessary for the team to do well. These gap analyses documents become a vital enabler for the HR hiring team to formulate the perfect job descriptions.
With clear understanding of skill gaps, HR can plan for reshuffling of employees within teams, push for a referral-driven hiring process, or leverage means of internal hiring to fill the position. Cloud-based document management solutions such as Google Drive and DropBox® can be huge enablers for HR to create an organizationwide, fully accessible, continuously updated, and collaborative repository of such gap analyses documents.
Create Collaborative Internal Job Descriptions
After you’ve made a decision to hire, it’s time to define the position and profile so that you can ultimately get in the perfect candidate. Remember, this needs to be a holistic effort, and that’s where cloud tools come in. Utilize your shared needs and gap documents, previous job descriptions, and create miniteams to get the job description spot-on. Get rid of splashy and ambiguous vocabulary from the job description. Ask open-ended questions to get better insights to help you devise the perfect job description. Again, cloud-powered document management systems prove greatly helpful. You can even use Slack, a communications management tool, to gather feedback on the job description draft. Remember to run it though Grammarly, a free cloud-powered language check tool!
Automate Job Posting to Minimize Time Investment, and Maximize Exposure
Now’s the time to post your job description on the major job search portals, such as Indeed®, Glassdoor®, CareerBuilder®, and Monster®. Of course, you’d want to post the advertisement on LinkedIn®, too, and probably you’d want to cover your business Facebook page and Twitter profile. You get the idea; there are too many places where you’d want to put the job up. This is where automated posting tools make a strong case, saving you hours, and getting you applications from all quarters. JobTargets is among the leaders in the market for automation of job posting. You might want to check out Talemetry Job Broadcast, too, which can post job descriptions on hundreds of websites, social media profiles, and online destinations, all from a unified interface.
Manage Referrals Better than Ever
Conventionally, internal referrals have been known to be a slightly more expensive means of hiring, probably because there’s the additional component of giving out a referral reward to the referring employee and the need to organize dedicated hiring campaigns for multiple times before closing out a position. Thankfully, with dedicated and advanced referral management tools, organizations can organize the referral hiring practices instead of letting information get scattered. Check out Zao, a tool that lets you create a referral reward system, organizes inbound communication, and evaluates the LinkedIn profiles of possible candidates. There are other similar tools you can check out, such as Zalp and Jobvite Refer.
Automate Résumé Screening
We talked about automating job posting. You can well imagine the volume of résumés you’ll receive. Of course, you’d want to screen them to spend more time on the more relevant ones. Great news—even the screening can be automated. For instance, iCIMS is a tool that lets you screen résumés, via its feature called iResume. It processes all the documents and extracts vital information such as job history, skills, and contact information. Then, these data bits are cross-referenced against the values you specify, and the résumés are organized in different categories, which you can then review. What’s more, it even pulls information from the e-mail applications you receive, which ensures not even a single application is missed out. Screened résumés can even be arranged in prioritized lists, making it amazingly simpler for HR to go ahead with hiring and onboarding.
Final Thoughts
Considering how critical hiring has become for small- to large-sized organizations, there’s a tremendous business case for automation of the different aspects, leveraging technology.
Mauricio Prinzlau is the Lead Cloud Expert at Cloudwards.net, a data- and user feedback-driven comparison engine for cloud storage, online backup, and VPN apps and services. In addition, he also loves producing educational videos and reviews to help people get the best services for their needs. Get in touch with him on LinkedIn.