The number of Americans resigning from their jobs hit a record high in January at 4.5 million, triggering seismic shocks through the world of HR. Whether employees cited the reasoning as poor work/life balance, a lack of career advancement opportunities, or feeling unfulfilled by their work, these recent trends prove that today’s workforce demands more personalized and engaging experiences from their employers or they’re walking out the door. As a result, HR leaders are attempting to juggle three growing challenges: retaining employees; hiring at a rapid pace; and ensuring employees feel valued, rewarded, and included. Despite these being mainly human-centric issues, technology plays a key role in solving and easing the burdens HR teams face. With the help of today’s advanced technology, businesses can move beyond human capital management (HCM) to human experience management (HXM), enabling them to overcome retention challenges by tailoring the HR experience to who employees are and how they work in the organization.
HXM has the power to improve each step in the recruitment, hiring, and onboarding process, allowing HR teams to easily identify qualified applicant pools, connect effectively with candidates, and reduce levels of inequality across the organization in three central ways:
- Drive targeted and qualified applicant pools, improve interviews, and identify diverse candidates.
The first connection with any candidate marks the initial step in building sustained employee retention. To make for an efficient and mutually beneficial hiring process, organizations must develop highly qualified and diverse applicant pools that will support a company culture of diversity and inclusion and offer a wide set of backgrounds and skill sets. Through HXM technology and automation, HR teams can seamlessly work together to surface the top candidates and streamline the recruiting process. For example, Olivia, an automated recruiting assistant, easily centralizes candidate communications through text, live chat, and e-mail and can also engage, screen, and schedule interviews automatically, relieving HR leaders of time-consuming, tedious steps. Additionally, solutions such as Humanly.io provide both a unified conversational artificial intelligence (AI) for recruiting platforms and AI interview assistance that captures and analyzes interview conversations. With this type of data, HR teams can make more confident hiring decisions and overcome unconscious bias from their first moments with a candidate.
2. Enable seamless employee engagement and connection throughout the onboarding process.
With HXM technology, these interactions don’t stop with improved candidate pools or interviews. HXM allows HR leaders to up-level their onboarding process to promote deeper employee engagement across the organization, making candidates feel connected early on. With onboarding platforms such as Mentor Spaces, which allows recruiters to target underrepresented talent, HR leaders can increase employee engagement and retention and connect hires with early and midcareer professionals to provide guidance and perspective. As today’s workforce increasingly seeks proven leadership development support from employers, HXM can help HR teams implement such opportunities across the organization.
3. Create a diverse, sustainable foundation that’s built to last.
Lastly, fostering a culture of belonging at an organization requires actionable steps to build a diverse and equitable workforce. Workforce diversity results in a broader range of skills, ideas, and processes among employees, increasing innovation and employee satisfaction. However, when embarking on diversity initiatives, organizations need to have access to equity and inclusion data to efficiently analyze things like pay gaps and workforce makeup inequalities to create a foundation for sustainable change. Through platforms such as Fairpay, HR teams can streamline wage gap and parity analysis to easily understand and resolve issues with equal pay and pay gaps, as well as gain transparency into workforce demographic disparities. As a result, this technology enables strengthened diversity across an organization, ultimately paving the way for improved employee representation and retention.
There’s never been a more critical time for organizations to revamp their HR practices. Both new candidates and existing employees are consistently evaluating organizations for demonstrated proof that their personal career journeys are a priority. By leveraging HXM technology, HR teams are given the opportunity to provide this assurance from day 1 and build a sustainable HR strategy that ensures a diverse, inclusive, and satisfied workforce.
Lori McNally is a 20-year veteran of SuccessFactors with over 25 years of experience in the HCM space. She has tremendous passion in helping organizations achieve their business results by closing the gap between execution and strategy through successful HR digital transformation. During this journey, she has been involved through all phases of the Human Resources information system (HRIS), from the automation and standardization of manual processes to more strategic projects. Today, McNally is responsible for the global go-to-market strategy for the SuccessFactors partner ecosystem.