If you step away for a moment from the rush of multiple releases per year and look over the last decades on what has happened in enterprise applications overall, a major trend becomes pretty clear:
Enterprise automation is all about giving control in the hands of the business (end) users.
Starting from the reporting punch cards ceremoniously handed by (then) IT gods half a century ago (remember they wore white lab coats then) to obtain their weekly report – it’s been all about getting the business user into a position where they can get the information needed and execute the processes required to do their jobs. The area where this is most evident in the HCM arena is the functionality around HR Core processes – almost all driven by the end user. Rarely a member of the HR department will anymore do data entry around a single employee – something that was a staple of HR department activity maybe even 20 years ago.
And while many end users complain about the additional work loaded on them by self-service functions, at the end of the day they empower end users to enter and process information when they want and please to. Instead of walking over to the HR department, getting and filling out a form and then hoping for the real world to accurately reflect the status change – users can now fire up their devices and - apart from the occasional system downtime - execute their core HR transaction when it works for them. And it’s not a one way street – users can go back and see that this address change has really gone through in the system.
Equally managers have seen self-service trends, too. First of all they are employees, too – and do all related activities under employee self-service. And then they have managerial duties, mostly approvals, but also budgeting and planning functions.
When it comes to recruiting – for now – it pretty stays in this realm, too. Only that for current common practice - recruiting is probably the area where a manager does the most data entry for an HR related process. Creating and filling out requisition forms – no matter how much they get defaulted – is probably the most tedious data entry job for managers… and with that not popular.
On the recruiter side there is an arms race raging, with new vendors coming in the market and using new technologies like social media, analytics, BigData and video to give recruiters the leg up over their competition. And let’s not forget that recruiting is the most measured job in HR, many recruiters understand themselves more as sales professionals than HR practitioners. .Recruiting is the one HR job where a practitioner can be fired for nonperformance as a matter of a few months… and as such recruiters always look for the best tool to give them an advantage to recruit talent better than their peers in house and in the competition.
So what will happen when self-service transforms recruiting practices?
Here are some of the functional building blocks next generation recruiting need to have – powered by self-service:- Continuous talent monitoring - Imagine if a manager could continuously monitor the talent of their teams. No longer the “that’s it moment” looking for outside talent - often delayed by the work to get a requisition into the relevant systems. No longer opening a requisition because the headcount was approved, but because talent should be monitored continuously.
- One big talent pool - Systems will consider inside and outside talent to the enterprise. Including advanced and accelerated training of employees, considering campus recruiting, skill shifts and cost change in external talent pools, acknowledging succession management considerations etc.
- Requisitions no longer exist - Managers should always see – for each position in their team – which talent is available inside and outside their enterprise for each team position. Include internal global talent in the search.
- (Real) analytics tell when to hire (or not) - Have software help with picking the best candidates, start the whole candidate relationship management (the other ‘CRM’) process, checking which candidates said no last time, but may be say yes this time around etc.
- Continuous talent management - Given the cost of hiring an employee the manager should see what training and learning opportunities are available to bring an employee and the overall team in better shape.
- Automated onboarding - If the hire is made – trigger all onboarding processes including background checks etc. – and allow the new hire to self-onboard, including benefits enrollment etc.
- Complete Automation - A resignation will start a talent search. A termination will have had a precursor of a talent search. A transfer-in will trigger a transfer-out or termination. And so on.
- A talent depth chart - Similar like professional sports teams and some military units have a depth chart, managers will have a talent depth chart, telling them what to do when the number one talent is no longer available or when it is time to re-prioritize the depth chart etc.
- Full consideration of the P - New hires or transfers into teams need to fit – and for that personality and psychological factors need to become part of the recruiting decision. But not just individual candidate characteristics, but also team dynamics on how a candidate fits into the new team, is compatible to work with peers, customers and superiors.
- Full cost considerations - Managers will be able to see the full cost aspect of recruiting scenarios – including cost to onboard, train and come up to speed. Knowing these costs should enable managers to make smarter hiring (or internal transfer and training) decisions.
Where does it all leave the recruiter?
When above happens, it will be the end of the recruiters as we know them today. Does it mean the end of recruiting – certainly not – but recruiters will have to move away from the transactional aspect of recruiting – as the software will handle all of that and the managers will trigger these transactions – and become talent coaches, recruitment advisors, system specialists, algorithmic specialists – and maybe even software vendor employees.MyPOV
As I mentioned in the onset – this post was more about being thought provoking than stating where the industry is today and / or will be soon in 2015. But self-service is a force to be reckoned with, and humans generally like to be empowers. If a manager can run talent for his team better and faster than dealing with the traditional recruiting setup of recruiters, sourcing, job sites etc. – we will see it – sooner than later. And ‘real’ predictive analytics become more powerful, science can be used to find the best candidates and they can be served to the decision maker, the hiring manager right away. Chime in on the comments.--------------
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