Hiring practises may hinder recruitment

Haphazard business processes in some organizations hinder effective employee relationship management and the ability of a company to balance its workforce and skills demand, Jason Averbook, PeopleSoft global product marketing director for human capital management (HCM) solutions, said.

"Recruiting has always been done in a haphazard way. Organizations are using non-automated processes and it's often the individual business unit that's managing the hiring processes itself. Contractors, for example, have tended to be managed by the procurement department," Averbook said.

Most companies looking at HCM software are going through the problem of siloed processes for managing employee relations and hiring, he said.

"And when it comes to making new hires they often miss their best assets, which are within their own organization.

"Companies want one system which stores data on their people and skills base but which also integrates their HR processes into their CRM or SCM."

Across all industries, organizations are also trying to treat their knowledge base as more of a "whole", seeing how they can get value from the skills of both permanent and contract staff, Averbook said.

"There is a downshift in the number of skilled employees available for hire and that decline continues as people are having fewer children. It's a major issue for employers and some of them turn to sourcing good skills from within."

Government, healthcare and retail organizations in particular struggle to tackle this knowledge management challenge as generally they do not have centralised databases or collaborative systems to manage their recruitment processes, he said.

"Customers want the sort of IT capability to allow new [job] applicants and their existing staff to fill out this type of information online, for example. Also, they lack systems which are sophisticated enough to do things like scan the CVs of potential candidates in bulk, rather than having to sort through their different files or e-mail to do this," he said.

"[PeopleSoft] is helping customers understand what recruitment processes have worked for them in the past - be it by mail, online or recruiting through an agency."

Meanwhile, he cited the Fosters Group, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Patricks and Coles Myers as some innovative early adopters of PeopleSoft's HCM applications in recent years. "These sort of companies use [our] HCM technology to store all of their recruitment data and are also applying that information to their workforce through the reporting capabilities of the software."

Such HCM solutions appeal to high performance cultures in that they help organizations determine the ROI they're getting from their human capital. "Our applications are capable of measuring key performance indicators, organizations' turnover ratios and tracking the long-term costs of hiring individuals by looking at their overall spend on raises, bonuses or the cost of training each employee," Averbook said.

He said PeopleSoft's latest range of HCM software, Version 8, also has modules which track whether occupational health and safety policies are being met by processing information on things like on-site accidents and compensation benefits.

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