Four Ways to Improve HR Teams Productivity
The Human Resources department (HRD) functions as the strategic backbone that drives the overall employee productivity for any company. From being responsible to tracking it to downright rectifying things that hinder it, the HR department is mostly consumed in making sure that the organization runs like a fine-tuned machine.
In the pursuit of this grand purpose, it’s easy to forget that your HRD does ultimately comprise of very human employees who might be facing challenges with productivity similar to those that they work to resolve each day. Given its in making your organization more productive, it becomes crucial to ensure that the department is in top condition itself. How do you do this though?
Here are the four main things that you should look at to get there.
1) Differentiate ‘activities’ from ‘transactions’
Because of all the process overhead involved in the tasks carried out by HR, the department is constantly engaged in following protocol, putting out fires and dealing with things on ad-hoc. This keeps the department and its people from fitting into their larger strategic purpose of making the work environment productive. Some of these tasks are certainly important and for the sake of clarity, let’s call them ‘activities’. For instance, conducting interviews and identifying employee job and culture-fit are all very important because they determine who enters your team and helps shape the future of your organization.
However, tasks like scheduling these interviews, getting approvals and issuing offer letters are more like transactions that are repetitive and keep recruiters from getting to more important things. These menial tasks can easily be automated using a high caliber Applicant Tracking System like Lever, Talentera, Workable or Jobvite. Not only does this save time, it also streamlines processes making everything far more transparent and efficient.
2) Pinpoint everything you can automate
Once you have identified that your HR department can do without the tedious transactions, you should enlist all the time-consuming low-value aspects of hiring and look for a recruitment solution that can automate them. Since each organization is unique in its hiring processes, try to look for a solution that can be configured and customized to your specific recruitment needs. Some crucial process automations to get you started:
· Job requisition development and hiring approvals: Look for a module that makes it easy for recruiters to be informed about an opening, create that job ad and have it approved by the higher ups.
· Job posting and promoting: Get your recruiters to do more by letting them post a job once to their ATS and have it replicated to tons of jobs boards. This saves their time and boosts the number of applications received.
· Evaluations: Having standardized tests that are automatically scored can make the entire assessment process far more objective and time efficient.
· Interview scheduling: Let candidates and interviewers mutually decide on the time and place of the interview by booking calendar slots that automatically sync with their email calendars through the ATS. Not only does this reduce no-shows, it also eliminates the needless scheduling back and forth that your recruiters have to go through.
· Letter Templates: Allow communication with candidates to be personalized without letting recruiters break a sweat by using a recruitment solution that lets them create offer/rejection/thank you letter templates that can be shared with multiple applicants at once from within the platform.
3) Establish metrics to monitor (and help the team achieve them)
There’s a popular saying that goes, ‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure’. If you plan on boosting your HR team’s productivity, you need to set quantifiable standards and measure performance against them. Metrics like time-to-hire, cost-of-hire and employee turnover are commonly used to evaluate the efficiency of a recruitment process but there is so much more to it. To learn more about this, read up on the ‘8 Recruitment Metrics You Should Be Tracking’.
Calculating these metrics manually can be a huge ordeal, especially if you deal with a wide pool of applicants and maintaining spreadsheets with manual data entry is also a short-term relief at best. This is where an ATS steps in to provide rich reports on your team’s performance, the quality of talent received and the roadblocks that slowed the process down. These reports can be configured to show you exactly what you want to see which brings clarity in the data-driven decisions that you make.
When using hard figures to assess the HR team’s performance, it is essential that you provide them with all the necessary resources to pull off the hard targets in the first place. Make it a priority to bring technological relief to your recruiters wherever possible to help them reach their goals. For instance, including candidate score carding and internal referral modules within your ATS can seriously cut time-to-hire along of with cost-per-hire. By striking a balance between enabling your HR team and monitoring it, you can easily achieve team productivity.
4) Improve Communication
Coordination and cross-departmental liaison during recruitment takes the largest chunk of time for the HR department. Getting hiring budgets approvals from Finance, scheduling interviews with line managers to getting final approvals from the CEO, there is so much coordination involved. To minimize unnecessary delays in this long communication chain, use cloud-based task management software that keeps responsibilities transparent and bottlenecks easy to spot. A competent ATS will usually include this module in its feature-set which makes it exceedingly easy to create, delegate and complete tasks like sending direct messages, sharing automated reminders and changing task ownership across the organization. Ensure that the platform comes with mobile-functionality to further ease in-app communication in the high recruiting season where people can conveniently respond to notifications when on the go.
Final Thoughts
It goes without saying that it doesn’t matter what department you’re talking about, if you want it to be productive, you need to prioritize your employees’ time so that they can closely match the markers of productivity that you have set at the organizational level. The costs of an unproductive team can be both astounding and pervasive and one tested way to avoid them is to invest in competent technology that alleviates the tedium and directs your employees’ time towards more meaningful tasks. 2017 is almost coming to a close and this is perhaps the ideal time to evaluate the benefits of taking the leap and the cons of keeping the status quo.