Technology for HR Professionals
I'm in Atlanta attending the IQPC Recruiting & Staffing Summit. Yesterday evening, I attended a workshop yesterday evening on the best practices for maximizing the technology initiatives in the staffing process. The presenter, Shally Steckerl, is a lead researcher at Microsoft.
Very interesting discussion. Along with some human resource professionals, we discussed the technology available to HR, how it is being used, how it should be used, and what is missing. It was that last component that I found to be the most interesting. Incredible as it may be, there is no technology that would allow HR to determine the source of hire for its stars. Human resource information systems (HRIS) exist and allow HR to determine which of its employees are its stars. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) exist and allow HR to determine the source for its hires. But HRIS and ATS systems can't speak with each other.
Think of the powerful impact such a system would have. A hiring manager could instruct HR to hire a new marketing assistant. With such a tool, HR would be able to use technology to determine which of the existing marketing assistants are the real stars and then determine the source for those employees. Did they apply through employee referrals? Corporate web site? Job board? Once HR has those two pieces of information, they can efficiently and effectively source the new candidate. Hopefully that future will come sooner rather than later.
Steven Rothberg, President and Founder
CollegeRecruiter.com
There are many ATS who talk with HRIS but most don't do it well and have to do "batch imports" or some other conversion that is custom written. Data considered of lesser importance to Finance and to "non-recruiting HR" gets left behind in the ATS. For example, "secondary and tertiary" sources that tell us where people REALLY came from, and often even references, bios, resumes and education information. Many applications are looking to fill this gap but like with the integration of many other systems there are native incompatibilities between systems that force the "custom" process.