Over the past 12 years I have done over 600 software presentations to HR professionals in my roles of Sales Director and Founder. That’s over 600 hours of meetings. During this time it became very clear to me that there were some fundamental issues causing frustration and disillusionment for many HR professionals. Employee Life-Cycle management was a major headache.
HR Managers want to take care of their employees. But many feel as though they have too much to do and too little time and as a result their effectiveness is compromised. They would like to be able to complete the time-consuming aspects of the job quickly and efficiently, but too often there are no systems in place to support this – and therein lies the problem. Their processing of HR Data is inefficient and taking up time that could be spent much more productively.For companies with less than 500 employees, I was shocked at the number of HR Departments that were:
- Still using spread sheets to manage HR data
- Using Outlook calendars to remind them of important dates
- Not automating processes
- Reliant on payroll systems to perform HR tasks
- Communicating poorly with applicants (which in turn was adversely affecting their branding)
- Having trouble with performance review delivery and reporting
- Delivering HR reports that were cumbersome, time consuming and inaccurate
2007 and 2008 saw the start of a transition in the marketing approach by HRIS and Payroll vendors. It changed from focusing on automation of operational tasks to promoting strategic HR. The core needs of HR Managers were over-simplified and the HR software systems that were meant to service them, we not adequate or flexible.
Strategic HR makes sense and is a logical progression from the operational side of things once you have your house in order. However, for many mid-sized enterprises (particularly those with less than 500 employees), this was not the case.
Most of them were still not delivering in terms of the automation process of operational tasks because of poor technology or substandard systems.
Operational and systems issues continue to plague many HR departments. In the current market, I have generally observed:
- A lack of e-recruitment systems which would streamline the hiring of employees, reduce costs and make the business more competitive.
- Lack of automated communication with job applicants, which would reduce administration and improve branding.
- HR/payroll systems that lack the capacity to ‘on-board’ employees effectively or deal with the routing of information to ensure they start effectively. On-boarding is not triggered logically and automatically upon the hiring of a job applicant.
- ‘Off-boarding’ processes are also time consuming and manual. For example, employee surveys are not available or not integrated into an automatic system approach.
- The performance review process creates numerous headaches for HR staff. Whilst this process should take up a comparably small amount of time and effort if dealt with properly and in an integrated and automated fashion, it becomes (unnecessarily) one of the most stressful times of the year.
- Reporting on all the above is time consuming and very often inacurrate.
These were some of the problems that most other HR system providers were not solving and Subscribe-HR has been built specifically to deal with them. Over 1000 hours of research and development has been directed towards delivering a cloud based, HR and recruitment system that is flexible enough to configure HR solutions based on these requirements.
How does Subscribe-HR provide the solution?
Employee Life-Cycle management is extremely important for HR Professionals because so much of what they do is based around processing of information and data flow.
At each of the critical areas of life-cycle automation, Subscribe-HR has developed configuration points, in order to reduce the amount of customisation required to deliver an effective solution.
A Summary of these points of configuration is below:
1. Applicant Virtual Interview.
Automated screening questionnaires are utilised to improve the ability of your HR department to get the best talent into the interview process as quickly as possible. Once questionnaires have been set-up, they can be inserted into the stepping process which applicants go through when applying on-line via the Subscribe-HR Corporate Jobs Board.
2. Applicant Communication Automation.
Communicating with Applicants in a professional and timely manner is an extremely important part of the overall recruitment process. To facilitate this, Subscribe- HR allows you to send and change messages to applicants during the recruitment processes (via SMS or e-mail).
A major time saving component of our system is that it facilitates the electronic acceptance of an employment contract by a prospective employee. If a third party payroll system is being utilised, data about this new employee can then be automatically transferred to it.
3. Automatic On-Boarding and Off-Boarding.
Once an Applicant accepts a job offer, their applicant record can be transferred over to the Core-HR module. This module is where ‘on-boarding’ processes are triggered. The ‘on-boarding’ processes send messages around your business to ensure that relevant tasks are completed by the person responsible.
Subscribe-HR also allows you to prompt the new employee (when they have started and have access to the system) to open up and read company policies. Subscribe-HR will automatically record that the policy has been opened and read. This also applies to existing employees when new policies are implemented. ‘Off-boarding’ processes are also catered for by Subscribe-HR.
4. Performance Review Automation.
This process is automatically triggered based on the period in which the review is to take place. Employee assessments then begin with the employee ranking themselves using sliding scales in the areas of skills, goals and values. PDP’s also form part of the process.
Once the employee has finished their assessment, the manager is then prompted to reciprocate. When the overall review is complete, a score is produced which can be used for salary modelling / bonus distribution.
5. Intelligent and Easy Reporting.
In many companies, reporting is performed from excel spreadsheets after data has been exported from another, non-HR system (usually payroll) and can take hours to complete. Within Subscribe-HR the report module is purpose built to ensure reporting is painless and fast. In your current HR system, you will probably need to know the structure of the database to be able to extract information you require.
This complicates the reporting processes. Using the Subscribe-HR Report Writer, There is no need to know the structure of the database, as a user can simply type in the name of field they are looking for and the Subscribe-HR Report Writer intelligently finds the field and selects it for the report.
Once the report is compiled, graphical display can be selected and changed to various output types, for example bar, pie or line charts. The reports can also be added into user dashboards. For collaboration purposes, reports can be shared with other staff members and be scheduled to be sent automatically (eg. monthly headcount reports).
Employee Life-Cycle Management is made up of a number of key processes. These processes, if not managed properly can contribute to major workload burdens for HR professionals. They obstruct the professionals from providing meaningful information to the business and career enjoyment and progression.
Subscribe-HR has developed the Subscribe-HR system to manage these current bottlenecks and deliver tangible benefits to the business. The Subscribe-HR technology is cutting edge and highly configurable, putting the power back in the hands of our customers.