4 Steps to Successfully Transform Your HR Tech

June 23, 2020

 

iCIMS Staff

4 min read

The future of work is here.

It is safe to say that how companies engage, hire, and retain talent will never be the same. While many organizations are currently re-evaluating their recruitment processes, Amazon, Uber Eats, Domino’s, and 7-Eleven were able to quickly staff up throughout the first several months of the pandemic. What Amazon and the like all have in common is that they prioritized recruiting technology investments that gave them the ability to be remote-ready overnight.

Today, a business’ success is dependent on their ability to build a diverse and well-rounded workforce.  HR and IT leaders can work together to ensure they have the tools they need to virtually source, engage, hire, and onboard the people they need to continue accommodating short-term needs, while also supporting long-term business success.

Here are steps you can take to do the same:

1. Identify your biggest challenges. Evaluate your current hiring process and pinpoint any major gaps that have slowed you down in filling open roles.

• • Are you receiving a limited number of applications? This could be in response to an issue with the appearance and functionality of your career site or candidate relationship management (CRM) efforts.
  • Is your staff having difficulty maintaining contact and improving response time with candidates? There are tools to manage text recruiting, chatbots, and communication through WhatsApp that can facilitate easy, 24/7 communication with job candidates across the globe. In fact, our customers sent more than 90 million texts to candidates in 2019 and in the first quarter of 2020, more than 28 million have already been sent – we expect to see this number significantly increase over the next few months.
  • Perhaps your recruiters are spending too much time on manual tasks. The same tools that can help you better communicate with candidates can also assist with time-consuming responsibilities, such as scheduling interviews and providing status updates to applicants. Our own recruiting chatbot, answered more than 172,000 candidate questions in 2019, and within the first six months of 2020, set up more than 29,500 interviews, significantly decreasing the amount of time and effort recruiters typically spend on these tasks.
  • If you’re one of the many employers that rely on career fairs to connect with potential candidates but are currently challenged with postponed or canceled events, consider leveraging technology to host a virtual career fair that supplement human interaction with AI-powered chatbots. From April – June 2020, our customers hosted more than 400 virtual career fairs, interacting with nearly 3,800 candidates virtually, and this number will likely skyrocket.

These are all common stopgaps in the hiring process that can be addressed with the right combination of technology and people.

2. Get the right people involved. This is critical to your organization’s ability to effectively roll out a new technology. In fact, we recently conducted a study of 500 IT and HR operations executives to better understand common challenges around digital transformation, and found that a major issue is that HR and IT departments often have misaligned priorities. Talent acquisition and HR leaders should work hand-in-hand with their IT counterparts throughout this entire process to avoid any unnecessary delays.

When working with decision-makers, focus on a solution’s implementation requirements, scalability, ease-of-use and integration capabilities – all top criterion when evaluating new providers, according to our study.

3. Test and communicate – on repeat. Once the new technology is in place, test it on several occasions, accounting for any and all unique circumstances. Over the past several months, we’ve seen this work not only in our organization’s favor, but in many of our customers’ favor, as they were ready to transition to a remote work model, having previously ensured that their systems were capable of supporting this new reality.

It’s also imperative that when new technology is adopted, all employees across the organization are made aware and understand what their role is. Send out a regular stream of communication from the onset of the implementation phase so the entire staff feels involved and is up to date on progress.

Recently, our company rolled out Microsoft Teams to replace a couple of different communication platforms. To gain buy-in and feedback, our tech team set up a beta program in advance for early adopters to play in. Later, when it was transitioned to the whole company, tech services held drop-in sessions to answer questions and walk individuals through different features. The result was a quick adoption and an increase in productivity and efficiency of communication – and that translates to happier teams.

4. Ask for feedback and be quick to adjust. It’s important for a company to not only ask all affected employees and new hires for their feedback on any new technology that is implemented, but to quickly adapt their strategy or revise technology solutions based on that feedback. Whether you collect your team’s thoughts in a survey, via email, or simply during virtual meetings, there is nothing more valuable than the opinion of those using the technology in their day-to-day work.

Leverage this intel when working with your vendor to make any necessary tweaks in order to maximize your investment and better serve those using the technology.

Leaders continue to prepare for the imminent upswing that is around the corner.  And those new future of work plans will include investing in the people and technology needed to build a winning workforce. Virtual hiring doesn’t just apply to thriving today, it is what will carry your organization through the future.