What has long proven itself under the name of customer relationship management is now making inroads in personnel recruiting: long-term maintenance of relationships. Talent relationship management – in conjunction with other aspects of e-recruiting – helps identify qualified applicants and minimize the effort involved in filling positions.
Bangalore, India — Employees are often considered a company’s most important capital. However, many companies lose opportunities to recruit qualified personnel because they still use conventional hiring methods. Instead of using classified ads in print media or isolated, ad-hoc approaches, for example, they should take advantage of the Internet to expedite their search.
Going Online
With the end of the “new economy” hype, it is now easier for companies to find expert, qualified IT personnel. However, worldwide competition for the best personnel still exists. Employees increasingly change jobs if their expectations of the job-related tasks and company culture are not met, and if opportunities for advancement become unavailable. This steadily shortens the cycles in which companies must refill a position. As a result, the effort expended by personnel recruiters increases while the recruiting budget stagnates or suffers cuts due to poor economic forecasts. Given this development, traditional approaches to recruiting no longer suffice.
So how can you balance costs with the increased demands placed on recruiters? New strategies, such as talent relationship management and comprehensive, Web-based recruiting processes, such as those supported by mySAP Human Resources (mySAP HR) E-Recruiting, can help. The e-recruiting solution of SAP enables companies to streamline and enhance the entire recruiting process, making it more cost-efficient – and effective. It allows firms to extend the reach of job listings and provide greater transparency when updating the status of an application. mySAP HR E-Recruiting offers a warehouse for active talent relationship management, workflow-supported steps for more efficient processing of applications, functions for collaborative commerce, and tools for analysis.
Talent Relationship Management
During the traditional recruiting process, once the ideal candidates are found, the resumes of unsuccessful candidates usually end up in the trash. This can mean that companies lose valuable information. When the next position opens up, HR must start the process all over again, without a pool of potential candidates. The situation is similar to that of retaining existing customers compared to winning new customers: the time and costs involved in finding new candidates is significantly higher than that of maintaining a relationship with applicants or former employees.
Talent relationship management can minimize the efforts involved. A talent database, or talent warehouse in mySAP HR E-Recruiting, stores all the information on candidates. Information regarding candidates’ skills and interests allows a company to create and maintain long-term relationships with applicants. For example, it can send candidates personalized newsletters and invitations to events. And applicants can use a self-assessment instrument to provide information on their personalities, abilities, and market value. When a position opens up, comprehensive search functions can help locate and analyze well-suited candidates so the firm can fill the position quickly and cost-efficiently.
This approach is particularly advantageous when an employee, such as the chief controller of a subsidiary, leaves a company on short notice. In such a case, the position must be filled as quickly as possible. Instead of starting the recruiting process at the very beginning, the manager can simply define and send an applicant profile to the HR department. The solution then provides the recruiter with a hit-list of all candidates in the Talent Warehouse that most closely match the profile and a preliminary selection can be made. For example, a part-time controller who now wishes to work full time might be selected. The company can then make a formal offer, and in the best case, the contract can be signed immediately.
Relationship management, however, does not only benefit the company. Quite the contrary: self-services enable candidates to take a more active role. For example, they can register in the talent warehouse, create their own profiles, and keep track of their favorite job opportunities. The company can then communicate with a candidate using e-mail, SMS, WAP, or MAP to invite them to (recruiting) events, discuss career options, distribute notifications of open positions, or make a concrete offer.
Reduced Administrative Effort
Workflow-based tools help users avoid delays in the recruitment process. The tools reduce the administrative effort required of HR employees by enabling them to process applications fully online. Workflow-based processes provide an almost completely automated flow of information and tasks. Take requisition management as an example. Based on the organizational unit that has an open position, the system will generate a requisition form; the line manager and HR department complete this form, and send it to the appropriate manager for approval. If the manager approves the request, the system will generate an advertisement that can be published automatically in internal and external media. This occurs via an HR-XML interface that links directly to your own career site and external job boards and printed media.
The system also handles incoming job applications. It can automatically inform managers who are looking for certain candidates. The applications are then processed and evaluated, and the applicant is rated as suitable or unsuitable. The system proposes and administers all candidate correspondence such as invitation and rejection letters. The solution can also help the recruiter manage and coordinate all activities involving internal employees and external partners. And, users can electronically archive all documents that have been generated by the hiring company or received from outside sources. Accordingly, once documents have been given a uniform format, they can be easily located according to specific criteria.
An Open Solution
Personnel recruiting usually demands seamless collaboration between a host of internal and external partners, including employment agencies or job boards. For just this reason, the mySAP HR E-Recruiting solution can be linked to non-SAP software and a series of services, such as search and match engines. Users can also integrate all e-recruiting activities with back-end systems, including HR, finance, and controlling.
Integration with the SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW), a component of mySAP Business Intelligence (mySAP BI), also enables companies to generate analyses to determine key figures regarding the length of the recruiting process or the costs involved. This allows them to check the effectiveness of their recruiting efforts. Planning functions also let companies analyze and simulate various sourcing strategies and alternate recruiting processes.
