One of the most critical tasks any business performs is getting personnel recruited, hired and trained. It involves a great deal of work and expense, with constant attention paid to very small details.
Because there’s so much information changing hands during personnel functions, the growth of digital functions for HR has been nothing short of revolutionary. Tasks that once consumed mountains of paper and countless hours have been reduced to a few strokes of a keyboard or mouse.
Instead of spending weeks of time on the process of recruiting, hiring and training personnel, companies can now identify software platforms that help them use common hiring tools and understand what a learning content management system does.
This new world of human resources involves every part of the process of dealing with personnel needs.
Recruiting
The most difficult challenge in hiring people is making sure that qualified applicants know about your position. Before the advent of Internet-based recruitment, companies had to advertise in multiple newspapers and trade publications while still attending career fairs and other events, all just in hopes of garnering a few qualified applicants.
Today, there are countless job-listing sites and apps that make it easier for people on both ends of the hiring process to find out about each other. Any applicant worth interviewing can find a posting, as any job worth applying for will be easy to find. It’s all just a matter of managing the applications to bring the best to the top.
Hiring
Now that you have those top candidates, it’s easier than ever to narrow the field. References can be reviewed more quickly, and it’s very simple to verify an applicant’s reported education and experience. Many hiring managers also find it beneficial to review an applicants’ social media as a tool to determine their goals and personality type. With these strategies, the interview is halfway finished before it’s even scheduled.
Speaking of scheduling, the logistics of hiring are much simpler today. Applicants can use any of a number of online calendar options to choose interview dates and locations. And hiring officials can easily manage the voluminous information that’s generated by and for each candidate.
Training
This is perhaps one of the most overwhelming tasks in business. Hiring doesn’t end with an offer. It’s really just beginning as the successful applicant learns the specifics of performing the job. With the constant changes in products, services, equipment, and procedures, it’s a major undertaking just to keep everyone current.
Now that there are software platforms for these tasks, it’s become much easier. Once you perform an effective search and find the right electronic partner, the job becomes much easier for HR.
Retention
There’s nothing more frustrating than finding, hiring and training a great employee only to see him or her leave the position later on. Ironically, this is a growing problem due in part to the tools that made it easier to hire those workers to begin with!
But technology has also done a lot to help stem the tide of workers leaving their jobs. One of the best ways to do so is with employee feedback. When workers feel like their concerns are being addressed, their ideas are being considered and their future is being protected, they’re more likely to stay in their current position rather than look for other opportunities.
Personnel functions are some of the most difficult in any organization. The more we can do to simplify them, the more time and effort we can spend on our other core functions. Technology has proven to be a powerful way to find, hire, train and retain workers so that the company can keep moving forward.
