Organisations have an impressive new recruit in their ongoing search for the best talent

Citation

Boyle, S. (2015), "Organisations have an impressive new recruit in their ongoing search for the best talent", Strategic HR Review, Vol. 14 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-08-2015-0065

Organisations have an impressive new recruit in their ongoing search for the best talent

Article Type: Strategic Commentary From: Strategic HR Review, Volume 14, Issue 6

Steven Boyle

Steven Boyle is CEO at Integrated Cloud Solutions, Glasgow, UK.

In business, it’s often said that people are an organisation’s best asset. However, with the hunt for top talent always ongoing, those people also have to be the right candidates to ensure a company’s future is in safe hands.

Amid budgets being significantly reduced in recent times, internal recruitment has proved to be an increasingly popular practice. It has also been a sensible one for many reasons.

Indeed, a study reported by Oxford Economics in the past year found that replacing members of staff through external means incurred significant average costs of £30,614 per employee. This included the cost of lost output while a new member of staff got up to speed and the logistical cost of recruiting in the first place.

Aside from the money saved on the likes of recruiting fees, advertising and training, there are the added benefits of marked time savings, of motivating existing staff to strive for more, of retaining your best talent amid a well-defined career structure and of promoting those who are already familiar with the business, allowing you to immediately tap into their proven strengths.

It is an opportunity to formally recognise the efforts of those who have been working hard for promotion or are already doing all or part of a new role, which in turn can boost a sense of company ownership.

Organisations often say that they have ambitious goals to fill vacancies internally, and yet they remain frustrated and ultimately hindered by their existing systems.

Cost and time savings

However, help is at hand. The internal recruitment process can be significantly streamlined for cost and time savings, improving it from end-to-end – and it is an improvement that need not be difficult to attain.

With a firm onus on customisation and ease-of-use, your top new recruit is the right cloud software, markedly refining your internal recruitment drive, enabling you to find the best fit candidates for your positions and making the very most of your resources.

Cloud computing has become a significant differentiator for businesses looking to gain a key competitive advantage, especially small- to mid-sized organisations. In the past, the technology that larger companies were able to use was not always available to smaller organisations, mostly due to prohibitively high costs and an accompanying drain on managerial resources.

Today, however, simple-to-use cloud-based software has served to level the playing field, and internal recruitment is an area that has particularly benefitted, generating higher productivity due to its accessibility anywhere at any time, while simultaneously reducing administrative costs. Day-to-day, recruiters can respond more quickly to submissions with cloud-based software, and higher visibility of the process for management means further time savings thanks to less overlapping of tasks.

Unlimited scalability also allows organisations to implement a bespoke structure that perfectly serves their unique needs, while paying only for what they need, when they need it. Recruitment software further minimises risk to the organisation by ensuring compliance and that impartiality is maintained.

Yet one of the key benefits is for the employees themselves. The software encourages staff to independently record their significant skill sets and career successes, separating them from the pack for particular roles and thus allowing organisations to quickly pinpoint them as ideal candidates.

Each user can manage their attributes through their own self-service portal, with the facility to upload supporting documentation, such as certificates or letters of commendation. HR can also add the skills/experience against which employees can be measured.

Empowering the employee

By empowering the employee – effectively handing them the tools for their own career progression – and encouraging staff to be responsible for keeping their own key attributes up-to-date, succession planning and internal recruitment are immediately rendered more straightforward and transparent.

Employees can log those important attributes in the system, including anything from relevant qualifications, accreditations and linguistic skills, to having a clean driver’s licence and being willing to travel.

Smart software analyses this data and identifies a bespoke “skills gap” for any employee, allowing it to outline the attributes that they need in order to apply for a more senior role. Further automating the process, those desirable attributes can be gained through the undertaking of courses identified by other strands of the software, before the employee is guided through the process of applying for an open position. It is a true end-to-end internal recruitment solution.

Indeed, comprehensive analytics allow organisations to build the best possible shortlist of candidates through a simple traffic light-scoring system – red for little or no matching attributes, amber for some matches and green for most or all matching attributes. Once decisions on suitability have been made, the software then automatically sends out rejection letters or invitations to interview.

While moving a candidate through the process, organisations can automatically create alerts, follow-ups, actions and notes – information that can then be seamlessly shared with colleagues at the click of a mouse, ensuring better co-ordination and use of human resources.

Full integration with the rest of your set-up is now also realised as the software automatically updates the HR system.

It is clear that unified systems are now allowing for a level of recruitment data insight that was not previously attainable – and success is defined by those leveraging this data to the full.

Talented staff will undoubtedly always remain an organisation’s greatest asset, but effective internal recruitment software is now a key business advantage in pinpointing and honing the best person for the job.