Recruitment and HR Tech – The Game Changer for Staffing Companies’ Value Proposition
Humans are the driving force behind the rise and fall of every business, every industry. Recruitment and HR-Tech is a colossal market globally, growing big by the year and estimated to be worth $30 Billion by 2025, according to a report by Grand View Research Inc. With constantly changing industry trends and continually evolving technologies, workforce management is today a hurricane of a challenge to master and perfect.
Most organisations are outsourcing staffing and HR-related functions to subject matter experts in the HR space, who add value in managing them and setting benchmarks. Owing to this growing need, leading players in the HR Outsourcing industry are trying innovative means to transform key HR processes, automating them, minimizing manual intervention in routine tasks, eliminating redundancy and cutting operational costs.
HR Tech Adoption in India by Staffing Service Providers
We are seeing a strong push for Recruitment and HR Tech adoption in India, with industry leaders in the Staffing and HR space embracing many tech solutions (integrated ERPs and CRMs as well as Point Solutions that target specific functions), bringing operational efficiency to business processes. Leading staffing service providers have accelerated their HR tech adoption rate to enhance their value proposition to their clients and offer them a competitive edge in their business. From demand management, sourcing, assessments, interviews, selection and offer – to documentation, onboarding, attendance, payroll, invoicing, compliance and employee self-service – they are streamlining the end-to-end Staffing function with tech tools. A Sierra-Cedar Report revealed that 70% organisations in the APAC region will spend more on HR tech, although they are lagging compared to companies in the US and Europe. Furthermore, adoption of mobile HR technology is no longer an emerging trend, with over 50% companies already using them.
HR Tech Tools to Adopt for Your Staffing Business
- Demand Management: As an aggregator of demands from various clients across industries, it’s important to create a centralised platform where these demands can be created, stored, allocated and tracked. Add to that a mobile app for recruiters, vendors and managers to manage demands and drives on the move.
- Sourcing: As the nature of demands vary with clients, industries and expertise sought, staffing companies should build a strong sourcing engine to operate 24/7, parsing and mapping profiles to open requirements, while building a solid candidate database. Power it with AI & ML to rank these profiles and recommend them for future requirements. For general staffing, which requires a multi-pronged approach with recruiters on the ground sourcing talent, a Mobile app for field recruiters would streamline the sourcing process.
- Screening:
- IVR-Based Interest Check: Manually calling candidates to check their interest in the job can be tedious, especially when hiring in volume. An IVR-based interest screening tool can come handy. Automated IVR calls can screen out candidates who’re uninterested, cutting down the time and effort spent in shortlisting profiles.
- Assessments: An assessed candidate is more valuable than a manually evaluated resume. Having a psychometric/aptitude/skill-check assessment to filter quality profiles will prove as a differentiator among other service providers.
- Interview Management: Rather than scheduling and tracking interviews manually through emails and excel sheets, it’s a best practice to have a centralised tool to create and schedule interviews and manage the candidate line-up.
- Offer Management: Gone are the days when offers had to be manually created, where tracking the offer release and candidate’s acknowledgement time consuming and subject to misses. An integrated offer management module would generate templated offers and release them to candidates on a click of a button. Subsequently, push notifications can be sent to probe candidate’s acknowledgement.
- Digital Onboarding: Documentation during onboarding is tedious and often requires a lot of paperwork and manual intervention. A digital onboarding tool can be used to collect and store the candidates’ documents and personal info on to a central database, which can automate Aadhaar Verification, KYC and BG Verification.
- Attendance Management: Biometric-based attendance may prove efficient for cases where the employee reports to the same location. But for staff who tend to be on the move (such as salespersons, security personnel, delivery personnel, etc.) having a GPS-enabled mobile attendance app can ensure accuracy and authenticity of attendance data. The same input can then be pushed to a payroll engine. Leaves and approvals would also be an integral part of this tool.
- Payroll Management: Having a full-fledged payroll module as part of the ERP will streamline payroll management. It will act as a centralised platform for tax management (investment declaration & flexi-benefit management), to access payslips from anywhere, anytime and to automate salary and reimbursement reports.
- Invoice & Collection: Integrating an OCR component to automate data entry of vendor invoices in system-preferred format and having smart bots to dispatch invoices and send out collection reminders would greatly reduce the time and effort put into such non-value-adding process steps.
- Complete Employee Self-Service Tool: A great way to boost candidate/employee experience is to deploy an employee self-service tool that will give them all-round support throughout their stay in the company. A self-service tool can encompass a range of features, including leaves, reimbursements, access to view and download offer/appointment letters, Payslips, PF, ESIC, Insurance, and contract extensions and appraisals. A bot-based helpdesk as part of the tool will ensure grievance redressal.
- Employee Engagement: In a recent survey by PwC’s Consumer Intelligence Series, 71% of the respondents say employee engagement is critical to achieving overall organisational success. Benefit portals can be great engagement tools and will provide access to a marketplace with offers, rewards, discounts, cashbacks and benefits. Integrating one of these tools into an HRMS would be a great value add, and such services come with no associated costs for both, the service provider as well as the client.
Conclusion – Deploying the Right HR-Tech Solution!
Leveraging tech can help staffing organisations achieve operational efficiency across the spectrum of functions, including recruitment, employee engagement, workforce management, payroll, compliance and analytics. When carefully implemented, HR tech tools can help to:
- Streamline Staffing and HRO processes
- Establish a Centre of Excellence across departments
- Improve statutory and regulatory compliance standards
- Build a centralised database with controlled access
- Set up a real-time analytics and reporting engine to offer actionable insights
- Reduce costs, effort and time, adding value to customer service
These are just a few of the many benefits of implementing tech within staffing companies. But a thorough analysis is critical to ensuring positive impact to the client’s business. Deploying a bulk of tech tools won’t necessarily bring them operational efficiency; instead Staffing and HR service providers must evaluate the pain points of the client’s business and design an HR tech deployment strategy backed by data-based fact check. All the key stakeholders must collaborate to build a business case and define clear outcomes with an estimated ROI.
As a preferred staffing partner, your goal is not only to help your client achieve operational efficiency, but also to evolve the client’s HR department from being an administrative division to becoming a centre of excellence whose strategies align with the company’s business goals. And that is the value-add every staffing/HR-tech service provider must aim to deliver to their clients.