Winning the Hiring Race: 5 ways HR teams are using Box Relay

It’s been about six months since we released Box Relay, and teams are already using it to master their handoffs and finish projects faster. In case you’re not familiar, here’s the TL;DR on Box Relay: co-developed with IBM, Relay is a workflow tool that helps organizations automate repetitive tasks and reduce time spent in emails and spreadsheets. Relay is unique in many ways: first and foremost is that it’s designed for business users without any IT involvement.

There’s been a lot of excitement about how companies are using Relay and we wanted to share with you some of our favorite use cases! First, let’s explore how HR and recruiting teams are using Relay to increase onboarding effectiveness, accelerate hiring cycles and more.

Onboarding is critical for new hire productivity and retention. It’s also a burden to manage for most hiring managers and HR departments. In fact, 91% of HR teams think their existing onboarding process needs improvement, and 43% think that time and money are wasted due to an ineffective onboarding process. Today, managers may spend an inordinate amount of time tracking down each stakeholder to make sure everything is in place for a start date, while ensuring the new hire’s first few weeks go smoothly. IT has to set up a computer and provision accounts, the hiring manager needs to figure out all of the trainings required, HR needs to collect documentation and go through employee policies… again and again and again. All of this has to happen smoothly to give employees the best chance of success and prevent early turnover. In fact, organizations that have a standardized onboarding process realize 54% greater productivity and a 50% increase in new hire retention.

Since all employees have to go through highly similar sets of tasks when they are getting onboarded, it’s a perfect opportunity to leverage a tool like Relay to automate the process.

Recruiting is similar. Even with HR management systems, hiring mangers frantically ping their colleagues in recruiting about filling open positions and often lose track of each candidate’s status. Unclear action items and unnecessarily hard coordination can significantly slow down hiring cycles, an expensive process. The average cost to hire a new employee is over $4,000, and much higher for many industries.

Here are 5 ways HR teams are using Relay to solve these challenges:

1. Improving onboarding effectiveness: Hiring managers and HR departments are using Box to move onboarding processes from spreadsheets, notes and emails to simple Relay workflows with clear actions and due dates, ensuring each step is done correctly and on time. Each individual is notified when it’s their turn to handle a specific part of the onboarding, with directions and next steps. As soon as one step is done, the next stakeholder is notified that it’s their turn to take action (no moving a card along a board or updating a spreadsheet required!).
2. Accelerating hiring cycles: Relay eliminates the need for unnecessary update meetings and “checking in” emails by providing clear visibility into the status of each open req. Recruiting and department leads can see a visual dashboard of all processes in one place. Further, with due dates and automatic facilitatation of different steps, teams are able to move candidates through the funnel faster.
3. Collaborating with external parties: Relay enables easy and secure external collaboration, so HR teams can use it to collect and share documentation with new hires before they are formal employees, with third parties to coordinate background checks and more.
4. Keeping sensitive information protected: With Relay, employees never have to send sensitive information over email again. All information is protected in Box. Further, admins can automatically retain documents (with Box Governance) to comply with regulations.
5. Ensuring policy consistency: To be both efficient and compliant, organizations need to follow the right processes around hiring, performance reviews, workplace violations and more. With Relay, HR teams can make sure that all of their employees are following standardized processes.

We are building on this fantastic momentum we are already seeing by investing in new product features designed specifically to make HR teams even more effective. Stay tuned!

Are you interested in how Relay can improve your HR processes? Learn more about Box Relay and reach out — let’s talk about it!