Are you using HR software to attract, hire, and retain superior talent? Do you manage employee paperwork with digital tools or old file cabinets?
Nearly 60% of human resources specialists are already using software to manage HR processes. Furthermore, three-quarters of HR managers are planning to integrate technology into their workflows.
The HR software market is steamrolling toward an impressive 9 billion dollar value. Don’t get left behind!
Follow this guide to discover the best HR software features for your needs.
Optimize Your Recruitment Strategy
You’re responsible for the entire employee journey, beginning with recruitment and ending with the final exit survey.
If you’re recruiting for a small mom n’ mom store, you only need an email address, website, and job ad to recruit new clerks. Yet, everything changes when you hit 50 employees. Even 20 (or 10) employees is a lot to manage.
Plus, if your company’s growing, you need to optimize your recruitment process with employer branding tools:
Strategies include:
- Attractive benefits packages
- Company culture videos
- Employee development programs
- Freebies and office perks
- Inspirational employee testimonials
It doesn’t take long for responsibilities to pile up. As you expand, you may have to outsource your recruiting work to an outside agency.
Thus, you need more HR software features to perform the following:
- Store recruiting lead data
- Recruitment email templates
- Recruitment lead segmentation
- Recruiting metrics visualization
- Candidate management
- Applicant tracking
- Automated talent sourcing
These features only scratch the surface of HR recruiting technology. On average, companies spend over $4,000 and 50 days to recruit one new employee. Multiply this number by 50, 100, or 300, and you have a serious workload on your hands.
Hence, you need employees who are committed to the long game. Integrating advanced data-driven recruiting tools help engage, develop, and keep 5-star talent.
Let’s take a deeper look at HR recruiting tools to improve retention.
The Best HR Software Features for Finding Employees
Like job-seekers, companies also market themselves to valuable job candidates. HR managers and marketing departments work together to create compelling employer branding campaigns.
If you want to boost your recruiting ROI, you must target quality leads from the start.
Ensure your HR software has the following tools for identifying candidates:
- Advanced candidate database search filters
- Social media job advertising integration
- Candidate market research tools
- Sophisticated talent sourcing algorithms
- Resume database tools
There are roughly 20 top resume databases online, including Glassdoor, Indeed, Linkedin, and Monster. Combing through each database is time-consuming. Instead, automate the process with HR software for small business hiring.
HR Software for Attracting and Engaging Talent
Once you have a scope of qualified leads, capture them with high-converting marketing materials. As you learned, marketers and HR professionals must collaborate to attract valuable talent. However, you need a digital platform that connects both parties.
Enter candidate relationship management .
Like customer relationship management, HR CRM tools identify, nurture, and manage candidate leads.
Here are some primary features to know:
- Job landing page builders
- Source conversion rate optimization tools
- Candidate email marketing tools
- Recruiting drip campaign management
- Candidate database management
- Candidate event automation (i.e., job fairs, workshops, etc.)
- Candidate feedback and survey tools
- Integrated video communication
You also need a reliable talent pool database.
Talent pools collect leads who want to work for your company.
Pool leads include applicants from:
- Resume and career sites
- Company career page
- Past rejected applications with potential
Whenever there’s a job opening, tap your talent pool first to conserve resources for new recruiting campaigns.
Integrate Candidate Feedback Tools
Candidate feedback is an overlooked software feature. Yet, it’s a goldmine of HR data.
Remember how much it costs to recruit just one new hire?
Look at your talent sourcing conversion rate. Plummeting rates could reveal a messaging problem. Candidate email bounce rates are also revealing.
Along with candidate tracking, integrate feedback surveys into the applicant journey. Discover what you’re doing wrong in real-time so you can fix your mistakes quickly.
Application tracking also reveals valuable data. If users are abandoning your applications after 15 minutes, that means your form is too long. HR software addresses this problem with application builders to improve experiences.
Streamline the Hiring Process With HR Software
You’ve tackled talent sourcing and the arduous application process. Don’t let great talent slip through the cracks from haphazard hiring experiences.
Hiring employees generates a fair amount of paperwork. Multiply this workload by a hundred, and imagine the towering stack of W-4, 1-9, 1099 forms, and more. You can’t possibly get through this pile without HR software automation.
Digital HR tools manage the following hiring processes:
- New hire tax form generation
- Employee paperwork templates
- Benefits package materials
- Employee manuals
- Digital signature tools
- Employee information databases
- Employee ID tools
Even better, HR software is entirely paperless. Employers (and employees) don’t have to worry about losing important documents. Software automates paperwork delivery via email, including tax forms, manuals, and technical guides.
Global companies are expanding remote workforces, driving demand for digital signature solutions. Traditionally, new hires have always signed hard copy documents, even remote employees! Remote hires would have to mail in documents or manually scan them.
The best HR software comes with the latest digital signature features.
New hires sign documents by simply typing their full names, making tax document management a breeze. You can also use digital signature tools to generate freelancer contracts. Plus, HR managers can password protect signed forms for added security.
Hire via Video!
HR software makes it possible to collect digital signatures without hard copies. Now, you don’t even have to hire employees in person.
These tools are vital for remote workforces. Look for platforms with video interview integration. Some platforms integrate video conferencing tools like Zoom, Skype, and Adobe. Other products may have their own custom video conferencing applications.
High-quality video resolution is critical. Video tools also need screen-sharing capabilities. Screen sharing lets HR managers easily share tax documents, benefits materials, and other company literature digitally.
Plus, with video conferencing, you can hold large group hiring orientations. Even better, your department saves money on printing, paper, refreshments, and other hiring logistics.
Video conferencing also mitigates issues with commuting, like traffic delays. Instead, HR software automates interview and orientation alerts to keep the trains running on time. Alerts prompt attendees to add virtual meetings to their Google calendars.
Improve Retention With Video Tools
In general, video conferencing tools enhance the entire employee journey.
You also need video tools for the following HR tasks:
- Employee disciplinary action meetings
- Workforce inclusion training
- Benefits training
- New manager training
- Employee wellness meetings
- Employee exit interviews
- Interdepartmental meetings
- HR project management
Video exit interviews are a critical point. These meetings produce valuable data for HR managers. Learn which elements contributed to employee satisfaction and which areas need improvement.
Always refer to your employee acquisition costs. According to Psychology Today, 33% of new hires quit within the first three months of employment. Exit interview data is vital for understanding these trends and reducing turnover rates.
Manage Turnover With Onboarding Metrics and KPIs
Great onboarding also increases retention through employee satisfaction.
Similar to hiring practices, an uncomfortable onboarding experience can drive away valuable hires. Worse yet, no onboarding strategy leaves employees feeling lost, discouraged, and unproductive. Of course, these problems only create more budget challenges.
The best HR software optimizes the onboarding experience from the beginning. Plus, you can speed up the process with automation. If you’re building a freelance marketplace, merge automated hiring and onboarding processes to streamline the experience.
By definition, onboarding is the practice of integrating new hires into a company. Many onboarding experiences begin and end with one email, leading to high drop-off rates. If you don’t study onboarding data, you won’t uncover weaknesses in your strategy.
HR onboarding software should track the following metrics:
- Onboarding completion rates
- New employee satisfaction
- Voluntary vs. involuntary turnover rates
- Retention rates by manager (or department)
- Skill adoption rate (how fast are employees developing?)
- Onboarding ROI
Onboarding metrics help HR managers set measurable key performance metrics or KPIs.
For example, suppose you own a marketing agency and want to decrease turnover rates for entry-level associates by 50%. You review onboarding metrics for the past year and notice a startling trend. A similar percentage of new associates didn’t receive adequate software training.
Next, you review recorded exit interviews and find that most former associates felt lost and unsupported in their roles. They reported the training manuals as too cumbersome and filled with technical jargon
With this data in mind, you craft a user-friendly software training program complete with step-by-step video instructions. You review onboarding data three months later and notice a stunning improvement in new hire retention rates!
Optimize Onboarding With All-in-One Solutions
Now that you have some onboarding KPIs let’s devise an optimization strategy.
As you learned, one communication channel doesn’t cut it. This rule applies to onboarding technology as a whole. New employees need immersive digital experiences to stay engaged, especially employees who work from home.
Take WorkBright HR Software, for example. This software comes with the following built-in features:
- Application and candidate tracking
- E-verify solutions for employee paperwork
- Remote I-9 tools for global workforces
- Onboarding API integration
This software example uses automated processes to streamline onboarding from one dashboard. Plus, new employees can experience onboarding from any mobile device. This feature is crucial for field agents, remote workers, and international employees.
HR managers also enjoy the latest fingerprint signature solutions, employee error resolution, and easy payroll exporting.
All-in-one solutions cut costs while mitigating human errors due to multiple technologies. You can also use all-in-one HR software to generate candidate leads, recruiting templates, and more.
Manage Employee Happiness
As companies grow, it’s more challenging to keep up with employees. Employees often quit from preventable issues like low morale, miscommunication, and lack of resources. Of course, these problems drive HR costs.
You can’t be everywhere at once. That’s why HR departments rely on HR software that acts as their “eyes and ears.”
You understand the importance of conducting hiring and exit interviews. However, you’re missing a huge chunk of time in between.
If you’re an HR manager for over 100 employees, you can’t possibly ask every employee if they’re happy every day. Plus, you wouldn’t have the time to extract data insights from these conversations.
The best HR software has tools for creating engaging employee happiness surveys. Don’t just ask employees if they’re happy; inspire them to elaborate on their feelings.
Like onboarding journeys, optimize the entire employee experience with surveys and feedback.
Make feedback surveys easy and fun. Integrate animations, videos, and digestible quiz questions into feedback forms. Don’t model your surveys after high school chemistry tests.
Employee Happiness Metrics
Your software should visualize survey data in a way that’s easy to understand.
Leverage software to visualize the following employee happiness metrics:
- Employee net promoter score (NPS)
- Production and productivity rates
- Callouts (absenteeism)
- Overall employee wellness
- New hire failure rates
Employee net promoter scores are a valuable yet overlooked metric. This score measures how often employees refer or recommend new hires to the company. You can boost this score quickly by implementing an attractive referral program for employees.
You also have to analyze customer metrics to understand employee happiness holistically.
Positive and engaged employees drive the following:
- Customer happiness
- Average sale per customer
- Cross-selling rates
- Upsells
- Customer referrals
- Membership sales
Quality HR software ensures all department stakeholders have access to candidate management data. Look into customized solutions that connect HR, sales, marketing, and IT departments.
Improve Your HR Workflow With Software
It’s time to put your messy file cabinet in storage. Your competition is leveraging the best HR software to recruit, onboard, and manage employees.
Remember these software features as you reduce turnover and supercharge those retention rates. Continue to gather data and analyze your progress. Consider the value of all-in-one solutions that consolidate your tasks.
The blog is also full of great ideas. Get inspired with the next post!