Finding the Right Applicant Tracking System
Finding the Right Applicant Tracking System
With the economy beginning to finally show signs of upward mobility, employers are slowly beginning to hire again. There is a surplus of candidates on the market, and without an easy and automated process to manage candidate flow, the recruiting process can become increasingly more challenging. Do you feel like you are spending too much time with the wrong candidates and not enough time with the right ones? Have you ever lost a top candidate to a competitor because the candidate fell through the cracks or your process wasn’t timely enough?
These inefficiencies are costing your company real dollars each and every day. Although the “human touch” may never be completely eliminated in the recruiting process, technology can certainly help you become more productive and decrease your time to hire. Not only will an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) eliminate redundancies in data entry, it will also allow you to match skill set, experience, education, and geographic location quickly, thus giving you an edge in a competitive marketplace.
Once you have decided that you have the need for an ATS, look for these key features in a vendor:
Profile Creation: Allows candidate to create career preferences such as salary range, desired position, location, skill set, etc that are viewed by potential employers. This profile can be edited and activity can be tracked by the candidate. Resumes can be attached to this profile.
Scheduler: Tracks all aspects of your recruiting including calling candidates, arranging interviews and follow-ups, and taking notes from phone calls. Allows you to share tasks, manage status of activities, and link hiring managers to potential candidates. Managers are able to update HR when milestones have been met with work-flow capability.
Remote access and Smartphone Integration: Provides better time management by helping you get things done without being in the office. Grab information from any secure online connection including applications that are downloadable to smartphones. Share and collect information, schedule interviews, and monitor the process from anywhere you can reach the internet.
Keyword/Data Search: Saves the time it takes to sift through every detail of a resume or cover letter. Can search data fields and email attachments for specific keywords to best match employees.
Saved searches/hot lists: Sorts by characteristics such as open job orders, locale, position, or years of experience. Save customized searches for future reference so you don’t need to re-enter the data.
Online application with job screening questions: Requires candidates to answer qualifying questions for quicker filtering of candidate pool. This could range from compliance based questions that are answered via drop down menus to behavioral based questions that allow you to screen for personality and cultural fits.
Automated Candidate Communication: Ability to send system generated emails to candidate communicating profile receipt, acceptance and rejection of the profile, and interview process status. Create emails and send to multiple people at once including the candidate, hiring manager, department head, etc. directly from the system. Keep track of correspondence with potential candidates.
Reporting capabilities: Provides details on candidates and suggests which ones are the best for the job. Documents response rates and helps you determine if you’re getting an ROI through your ATS. Provides capability to track successful hiring sources including recruiting agencies, job boards, or internal referrals. Capability to facilitate EEO reporting and ensure compliance if applicable.
Customizable fields: Creates fields for specific departments, contact managers, job responsibilities, and other items unique to your organization. Allows you to easily search for specific information when you need it.
Promote job openings: Can publish open jobs to company Web site and fee-based job boards.
These are basic functions that are core to most applicant tracking systems on the market today. Depending on the complexity of your needs, function rich systems could include employee assessments in conjunction with the system.
To maximize integration, you may want to consider an HRIS system that includes an ATS within it, as opposed to buying a separate ATS system. At the very least, make sure to select an ATS that can create an export file for upload into your existing payroll or HRIS system. This will eliminate the timely data entry process involved with on-boarding as well help you to build a skills inventory which will help your organization to promote internal candidates as part of your total recruiting strategy and succession plan. Robust HRIS systems with Applicant Tracking will also store job descriptions, include job requisition creation with workflow for approval and job offer letter creation and approval processes.
If your organization is considering implementing a system to better manage your recruiting efforts and would like to explore the options available, contact Centripetal Consulting Group to learn how we can help.
Open Enrollment Process- The Three Approaches
The fact is that the open enrollment process is evolving, especially for small to mid-size employers. It is migrating from a stand-alone, manual process to an automated, integrated environment where the latest technologies combine to make open enrollment as efficient, effective and productive as possible. Current research shows a migration from older, more obsolete methods of processing benefits applications to web-based initiatives that greatly streamline and enhance the entire process, thus creating a compelling employer ROI and more favorable employee experience.
The current state of “open enrollment” is a spectrum of 3 main approaches:
Do We Need An HRIS?
Success in the human resources profession requires fast and easy access to information — and that requires an automated HR information management system. Too many times companies think they are too small of an organization to justify an HRIS.
To this, I must say that a company is never too small to automate processes. If a company develops sound processes early on, they are poised for growth and may potentially be able to avoid or prolong hiring additional resources in the future.
Selecting an HRIS is a major decision. Getting approval for such a system is often difficult as well.
To start, HR managers should assess and outline how activities are currently being performed within the organization, and, in particular, within the HR department.
An HRIS generally should provide the capability to more effectively plan, control, and manage HR costs; achieve improved efficiency and quality in HR decision making; and improve employee and managerial productivity and effectiveness.
When conducting an analysis, I suggest looking at looking at the business challenges that you are trying to solve FIRST as opposed to the features and functions of a particular software application.
The following questions are designed to assist HR professionals in putting together the facts, the figures, and the business case to convince senior management that the expenditure for an HRIS makes sense.
- What information are people requesting?
- How do you, line managers, the chief executive officer, and the chief financial officer obtain needed personnel information?
- How long does it take you to respond to a new request for information?
- What HR management needs are not being addressed and handled properly?
- How effective is your support to the budgeting and planning processes?
- Where do you stand in complying with COBRA, ERISA, FLSA, OSHA, and other statutes and regulations?
- What tasks are you being asked to do today? How well are you performing these tasks?
- What programs, services, and management support must you provide to help your organization meet its goals?
- What are the major tasks that you intend to accomplish and the results you plan to achieve in order to have a successful HR operation?
Answering these questions will provide you a solid foundation for evaluation of various HRIS products on the market. Because there are so many HRIS providers including in-house, outsourced, hosted, non-hosted, hybrids of these etc., it may make sense to look for an additional resource outside the company to help with your evaluation.
Benefits of an Integrated Payroll/HRIS
Do you feel as if your human resource department has turned into a mess of administrative work? Is senior management questioning how HR adds value to the organization? Is it becoming harder to get additional budget assigned to your department? If “yes” is the answer to any of these questions, it may be time to look at getting out of the “paper pushing” business so that you can focus more time on “Strategic HR”, such as recruiting, training/development, quality employee retention and succession planning. These are the functions of HR that are core to making the most of human capital. Improving in these areas can be a reality if your department deploys the right technology that will minimize administrative work, easily ensure compliance, and allow access and reporting capabilities to meaningful data points across the entire organization.
Putting an HRIS in place with employee and manager self-service may prove to be the answer to your administrative challenges. Since payroll is the most accurate data in any organization, it only makes sense to build an HR database off of this data. To enjoy further benefits of automation, I suggest utilizing a fully integrated payroll/HRIS system in order to ensure utmost data integrity. With most systems on the market today, role based security is deployed. This means that certain employees including managers, employees, and non-HR executives have access rights to certain data points that are central to their role. The system becomes a universal tool that benefits the entire workforce, not just HR.
The main key benefits that an HRIS is designed to improve are:
- Improved responsiveness to employees and management with a workflow process that streamlines HR record-keeping and maintains proper audit trails
- Maintain a competitive workforce by simplifying and speeding up hiring, training and retention programs with an accessible, integrated database
- Gain greater control real time payroll processing by eliminating the need to transfer files back and forth, reduce errors and payroll corrections
- Ensure government and payroll tax compliance with automatic updates that keep you up-to-date on the latest regulations
- Plan for talent succession by identifying top talent and key positions for keeping the business fluid and healthy
- Increased employee retention by deployment of self-service tools that keep employees involved with the employment life cycle
- Enhance your reporting capabilities with workforce decision data that helps you lower benefit costs, spot organizational trends and take clear action
- Containment of costs including insurance premiums, controlled labor expenses such as overtime, Travel and Expense, IT and disparate system related costs
- Improved employee communications through centralized intranet portals and employee survey capabilities
- Create and leverage a standardized infrastructure that will enable executives to better analyze costs associated with their organizational structure for budgeting and forecasting purposes
Technology is the framework behind the success of a well-functioning HR department. The advancements that have been made with functionality delivered in a Software as a Service model are making these types of systems more affordable and more customized than ever before.
Automating Benefits Administration
With the cost of healthcare has become so controversial, it only makes sense to take a step back and look at all aspects of this expense, not just the insurance itself. Employer’s attempts to control medical rate increases have included benefits cuts or outright elimination, increased cost-sharing measures, and adoption of consumer-driven health plans. There can be inherent dangers in these approaches including decreased employee satisfaction which ultimately leads to voluntary turnover of good employees.
When the hard cost of insurance seems to be spiraling out of control it is logical to also explore the soft costs associated with the administration of the benefit plans as a strategy to mitigate this expense. Depending on the size and complexity of your organization and benefits offerings, up to 25% of your total spend could be tied up in the transactional costs of benefits administration. This warrants considering processes improvement or retooling as a means to controlling this cost.
Regardless of the size of an organization, the right technology will dramatically improve open and continuous benefits enrollment by automating manual tasks, engaging employees with self-service and optimizing benefits planning usage patterns. The resulting benefits are significant: saved time, increased productivity, improved data integrity, and consistent employee communications which
leads to increased employee retention.
Several methods for automating the benefits administration function are available to even the small market. Consider these options to determine what will work best for your organization.
1. Deployment of Employee Self-Service – The technology application that you choose must have self-service functionality that is easy to use, includes workflow capabilities, and is accessible via the internet. If you properly train employees on how to use the benefits enrollment portal thoroughly, most employees will complete it successfully the first time. Studies also suggest that more than half will do it at home with a spouse, thus making them more productive at work. Data accuracy is also improved when enrollment info is entered at the employee level as opposed to the administrator level. The more participants that have access the better. The use of kiosks should also be considered for those employees who may not have the internet readily available. Expanded reporting and survey capabilities also give added bonuses to employers who successfully deploy ESS.
2. Technology Integration – A stand alone benefits administration portal gets you halfway there, but to truly maximize efficiencies, I suggest a fully integrated Payroll/HRIS/Benefits application. Payroll data tends to be the most accurate data set in any organization, so it makes sense to build benefits technology off this data to ensure utmost accuracy for employee contact information, eligibility, premium deductions, and terminations. Many systems also include interface capability to the insurance carriers. This type of integration allows for ONE point of entry for all payroll, HR, and benefits related information. This creates a more efficient, less error prone process. Integration eliminates profit leaks with terminations and eligibility because all employee data is resident in a common place that
connects with the carrier.
3. Expense – Who should responsible for this cost? In many cases there are three different parties involved with the process: the insurance carrier, the insurance broker, and the
technology provider. You as the employer are clients of all three. I suggest putting them in touch with each other to see what makes the most financial sense for your organization.
Many times brokers will absorb this cost as a value added service. The carrier may be willing to cut you a deal to retain or attract your business. Thirdly, the technology provider may have
extensive experience with your carrier and may be willing to reduce this cost because less work has to be done on the front end. At the end of the day, it is worth the financial
investment and time up front to create the carrier feeds and maintain connectivity especially if you plan to stay with that provider for several years.
