In today’s economy, we’re seeing the emergence of many fast growing companies, and those companies are hiring – a lot. This is creating a “War for Talent” in which HR professionals are vying for the best of the best. What’s challenging is that HR teams aren’t just tasked with finding the best talent, but they also have to find new ways to keep the talent they already have, lest that talent gets recruited away by competitors. This is both an exciting and challenging time for HR professionals. New strategies are needed now more than ever to help companies simultaneously grow, find talent and hang onto the talent they currently have.
Below I’ve outlined five key strategies that HR professionals can use to keep pace in a fast growing organization.
Give your social recruiting a boost
With limited resources and personnel available in most HR departments, existing employees are a company’s most valuable asset for recruiting. Unfortunately, recruiting isn’t a main priority for most employees and many don’t know what they’re doing. Innovative HR departments overcome this issue by using technologies that make the process more automated and allow recruiters to access even the most passive candidates. HR teams can simply check a box within a recruiting module to cascade job postings to their employees’ personal social networks (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), extending their reach far beyond just the company’s social networks.
With advancements in social recruiting technologies, employees can track which of their friends, followers or contacts are applying for jobs, which social network they came from and what stage they are in during the recruiting process. This assures employees that their efforts don’t go unnoticed and that they are being seen as a valuable resource within their company. It’s also a quick and easy way for HR teams to expand their efforts with the minimal addition of resources.
Quickly onboard top talent
Once you’ve found the perfect candidate, so begins the process of getting that candidate into your system. Many HR professionals today still use routine paper work and manual data entry to complete onboarding tasks. This isn’t just time-consuming for HR teams, but it’s also tedious for new hires – especially for millennials that have become accustomed to speed and efficiency. To start the onboarding process, there are HR solutions available today that allow hiring managers to send candidates an offer letter to sign electronically, keeping the process fast and painless for both parties. Once signed, they can transfer that candidate’s information seamlessly from their application to their new employee record without any additional data entry, transferring of paperwork or transferring between interfaces.
Creating a quick and smooth onboarding process will make the lives of HR professionals easier as they work hard to juggle multiple tasks within a fast growing organization. It helps reduce the turnover of new talent and ensures that new hires have immediate access to all of the documentation, training and contacts that they need to be successful.
Find new ways to keep your employees engaged
HR teams should be just as focused on retention as they are recruiting, and employee engagement is key to retention. As it turns out, employees want to be engaged and it’s up to HR to make sure this is happening across the organization. Companies that make traditionally formal processes more social and mobile have the ability to create more opportunities for employee engagement. With social and mobile, it’s possible to give employees higher levels of visibility and accessibility with performance management and goals, which empowers employees and leads to a more motivated and productive workforce. Many HR teams have also found success incorporating gamification techniques across their organizations to increase collaboration and make work more fun. Who doesn’t love some friendly competition?
As we continue to see many new and creative ways to keep employees engaged, HR teams shouldn’t be afraid to experiment on a regular basis to ensure that they are keeping employees energized with fresh programs. As we like to say, happy employees equal happy customers.
Streamline your HR technology
Many HR departments waste valuable time and resources on multiple point solutions e.g., recruiting, performance appraisals, absence management. While these solutions are important, they only help solve issues in one specific area, and keeping all of them aligned can become very difficult to maintain. Think about the time spent training HR teams to understand every different solution and also the time it takes to report metrics from multiple systems. HR teams that are trying to navigate the pains that come with a fast growing organization must look to simplify their efforts by streamlining their HR technology. All data should exist in one content model to save time and money, and to ensure that reporting is concise and metrics are consistent across the organization.
Integrate HR with the rest of your organization
To enhance the efforts of HR teams across the entire organization, it’s important that HR professionals consider having HCM play nice with other key business applications. By having a tie-in from HCM to applications like financial management and CRM, HR teams can easily manage all candidate records in one system along with their job applications and gain visibility into staffing needs, budget and utilization across the business. It also ensures that they have access to valuable metrics associated with sources of candidates, quality of candidates (based on interview rankings), etc. allowing them to visually understand how new hires perform in the organization. Most importantly, having all of this information in one place helps management better understand where their company’s most talented performers are coming from. This level of visibility ensures that employees are recognized for their hard work, and that ultimately leads to an increase in employee engagement and performance.
HR teams that will find the most success in today’s competitive business environment are the ones that take a fresh and innovative approach to traditional HR functions. When equipped with the right tools and resources, these professionals will be able to acquire, develop and retain the talent that makes it possible to achieve continued growth.
