Recruiters and internal hiring teams will tell you that the jobs market is more challenging for businesses right now than it has been in living memory. In the UK alone, there are almost 1.3m job vacancies with organisations across sectors, but especially in production, healthcare and hospitality, noting their issues with hiring and retaining top talent.
In such a challenging hiring environment, any advantage that can be gained could be vital and mark the difference between the best talent on the market wanting to work for you, and struggling to fill open positions at all.
Lengthy, drawn out hiring processes don’t benefit anyone. The longer it takes to recruit for an open vacancy, the more expensive job advertising becomes, the more time your internal hiring teams are focusing on one challenge, and the longer your in-situ employees have to pick up the slack for a departed peer.
HR software helps to streamline and simplify the entire recruitment process with automated candidate screening and ranking, centralised CV pooling and hosted forms helping to keep everything in one place, easily searchable and comparable, to make faster hiring decisions that benefit both internal teams, and candidates too.
Long, drawn-out hiring processes will disenfranchise top talent. And in such a challenging labour market for businesses, each passing day you don’t make a hiring decision (or at least candidate contact), could see their offers from rival employers stacking up.
Utilising the right HR software as part of your hiring process can help internal hiring teams to focus on finding and talking to the best talent, rather than spending their time on the administrative tasks.
HR software can remove the burden of carrying out tedious recruitment-related tasks, from sending and printing paperwork to easily scheduling interviews or candidate tests within one centralised platform.
These may sound like small benefits, but time saved extrapolated over a financial year, across potentially hundreds of thousands of hires, will free up hundreds of internal recruiter hours, away from remedial tasks to allow a more intense focus on hiring candidates that not only have the right skillset, but also align with organisational goals and values.
In a tough hiring market, employer branding can become a critical differentiator as a candidate with many offers chooses who to work for. In fact, seven in 10 recruiters worldwide say great employer branding has a significant impact on the success of their hiring campaigns, and can reduce the cost-to-hire per candidate by up to 43%.
HR software can help make that great first impression because the majority of today’s employees expect a seamless experience with technology embedded into the process. Being able to see the recruitment process and what stage they’re at in the cycle, uploading documents and adding personal data, and being able to download candidate-facing organisational documentation from one space are important small factors that may help sway top talent to your company over another which may still be relying on emails and phone calls for the entire hiring process.
Good HR software will help you to spot trends in your workforce with up-to-date analytics and reporting.
Data surrounding seasonal workflow patterns, as well as critical times in the year where employee churn is at its highest, can help organisations to plan resources for when enhanced hiring activity may be required, ensuring the workforce is always at a level capable of carrying out the organisation’s needs.
HR data of this type can also help focus employee engagement efforts. By understanding when employees may be most likely to be searching for new opportunities, HR teams can head off any annual exoduses and reduce overall churn rates with internal engagement schemes and reward initiatives.
One of the barriers to businesses adopting any new software is the investment required to source and adopt new software, both in terms of capital outlay and internal hours spent finding, integrating and properly learning a new system and related processes.
However, the business case for HR software is a strong one, and the best HR software, when used correctly, will more than pay for itself. In fact, it could save you thousands each year.
And there are a couple of interlinking reasons for this, some of which are already noted above.
For example, reducing the time it takes to find and recruit your perfect candidate has direct cost savings, including in vacancy advertising fees and the associated time costs for internal recruiters.
HR software also makes it easier to track and manage spend. Whilst headline recruitment costs such as agency fees or even social media post boosts are easy enough to track, hidden costs associated with offline recruitment processes, like postage, document printing and even lunch interviews, can all be tracked and accounted for. The software itself can even mitigate the need for many of these smaller expenses, with documents like employment contracts being stored, shared and electronically signed online.
And HR software, as mentioned above, can help to reduce employee churn too – as well as improving the likelihood that an accepted job offer will convert into an employee starting (and staying) in their new role. Coupled with freeing up internal recruiters to focus more on hiring a candidate that best fits an organisation and specific role, the chances of a successful hire increase – handy when the cost of a failed hire at mid-management level can climb into the hundreds of thousands.
Convinced that adopting or upgrading your organisation’s HR software could pay dividends? Then your next step is to find the right software.
Scouring the HR software market can be time consuming, especially if your organisation has complex or bespoke requirements, such as specific integrations with existing technologies.
That’s where Phase 3 can help. Our HR technology consultants have helped hundreds of businesses to plan, find and adopt the right platforms for them – at the first time of asking. We can help to analyse your existing HR processes, identify your critical requirements and manage the entire implementation of your new chosen HR software – from data migration to go-live testing and support.
Find out more about the HR services we offer!
Laura’s role as Head of Marketing sees her continually looking for new opportunities to tell the world how great Phase 3 is.
