BETTER HIRING, BETTER SERVICE. How an ATS Saves Service-Industry Employers Time and Money

Transcription

1 BETTER HIRING, BETTER SERVICE How an ATS Saves Service-Industry Employers Time and Money

2 BETTER HIRING, BETTER SERVICE How an ATS Saves Service-Industry Employers Time and Money INTRODUCTION In any service industry restaurants, convenience stores (c-stores), hospitality or retail businesses finding and hiring high-quality candidates can make or break the success of your company. It all comes down to customer service. Employees who know your products and services and who are attentive to your customers needs will keep customers happy and coming back. Hiring is the first stage of the employee lifecycle, and taking advantage of a well-designed ATS makes it easier to integrate into a larger hire-to-retire suite of HR solutions. However, industry employers face many challenges when it comes to finding and hiring employees who can deliver outstanding customer service. Keeping all of your positions filled is hard enough because of the high percentage of hourly workers and annual turnover rates that can exceed 100 percent. On top of that, finding the best employees from a mountain of applications can seem impossible. Hiring doesn t need to be so difficult. A fully featured applicant tracking system (ATS) can help managers and others responsible for hiring in the service industry hire better candidates faster. How can an ATS with all the right features aid your bottom line? Enhance process efficiency: Narrowing your field of applicants from dozens or even hundreds to the single best candidate requires lots of screening, evaluation and scheduling. Manually managing this process generates tons of paperwork and eats into valuable time. An ATS can streamline the entire candidateto-applicant process, reduce or eliminate paperwork, and save you time and money. Improve communication: An ATS can facilitate candidate screening and help schedule interviews, as well as make it easy for managers to collaborate and rank candidates, saving time. Improve access to tax credits: The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) program and additional federal and state hiring incentives can save you thousands of dollars per year per eligible hire. With appropriate record-keeping and integrated programs built into the hiring process that ensure compliance with federal regulations, it s easier for your business to take full advantage of these programs. Begin integrating all employee functions: Hiring is the first stage of the employee lifecycle, and taking advantage of a welldesigned ATS makes it easier to integrate into a larger hire-toretire suite of HR solutions. Ideally, an ATS is part of a full suite of talent management solutions, such as onboarding, learning, performance and rewards. 1 White Paper: Better Hiring, Better Service

3 Increase retention: Efficient and effective hiring improves candidate quality and leads to greater retention and higher performance. WHAT S AN ATS AND HOW DOES IT WORK? An ATS is the recruiter s version of a client management system. It provides a central location and database for a company s recruitment efforts and automates many of the tedious administrative issues that are a part of the hiring process, such as screening candidates and scheduling interviews. Basic features of an ATS allow users to manage applicant information easily from start to finish during the hiring process, including: Centralizing data: Whether you are collecting applicant data and résumés from your company Web site, job boards, hiring kiosks or even paper applications, an ATS brings everything together in one place. Automating the recruitment process: A clear, defined workflow ensures that great candidates don t slip through the cracks, reduces inefficiencies and eliminates the possibility of manual data-entry errors. Identifying, screening and ranking candidates: Especially in high-volume recruitment environments, an avalanche of applications can make it difficult to identify the best candidates, much less hire the best ones quickly. An ATS makes screening and ranking candidates a quick and efficient process that fills positions fast. Background checks and other pre-hire assessments can also be built into your workflow, so you hire only trustworthy, dependable people who are legally eligible to work. Making analysis easier: Comprehensive recruiting metrics and analytics can give you insight into what part of your hiring process is working and what s not. This data can also be valuable for improving your compliance with federal and state legal requirements, especially in the event of an EEOC or OFCCP audit. Branding your recruiting efforts: You can build an online portal for a company career site that allows you to express your employer brand and communicate what is unique about your company and your culture. You can also develop job portals for internal candidates so great people who already work for you and fit with your culture have a shortcut to other jobs in your organization. Especially in high-volume recruitment environments, an avalanche of applications can make it difficult to identify the best candidates, much less hire the best ones quickly. Most applicant tracking systems today are available on a Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) basis, meaning that they are available on-demand from any Web browser without any software or expensive servers to purchase and maintain. According to analysts at Gartner, SaaS will account for 25 percent of all new business software delivered by What s driving this trend? 2 White Paper: Better Hiring, Better Service

4 Lower costs: SaaS solutions are far less expensive than on-site, licensed solutions that require hardware and technical support staff. Flexibility and scalability: SaaS solutions are Web-based and can be up and running quickly from any device with an Internet connection. Also, these solutions are far more scalable and can grow with you. Security: Data is housed off-site and is encrypted. Program upgrades: Updates and new versions are installed seamlessly, with no downtime or hassles for users. HOW AN ATS BENEFITS SERVICE-INDUSTRY EMPLOYERS In the service industry, hiring can seem like a never-ending process because of the high turnover. However, an ATS can benefit your organization in a number of ways, including: Streamlining the hiring process: A paperless system reduces the time it takes for information to go from one stakeholder to the next and also enables real-time joint review of applications by the hiring manager, job supervisor and others. It s easier to rank candidates and identify the best ones at a glance. It can also help you avoid mistakenly hiring former employees who are not eligible for rehire. Best of all, efficiency in the hiring process reduces your cost-per-hire and time-to-fill, and also frees up more time for your managers to focus on running a successful business and that s what it s all about, isn t it? Improving quality of hire: Finding the right candidate is often like finding a needle in a haystack. You know a great candidate exists in the stack of applications, but finding the right person can be time-consuming and frustrating. Too often with manual processes, the best person is gone by the time you find them because another business was faster at getting them an offer. Expediting the hiring process with the automation benefits that an ATS provides can improve the quality of your hires. And that isn t the only benefit research from the talent management experts at Bersin and Associates shows that turnover rates for top-performing employees are far lower than for averageperforming ones. Enhancing your sourcing: To find the best candidates, you need to cast your net as wide as possible. An ATS allows you to tap into online resources for industry-sector businesses to find people with relevant experience and even to tap into job boards and other sources for hourly candidates. Flexibility to meet different needs: In restaurants and the hospitality industry, some hiring needs are seasonal. Whether you need to fill hourly or exempt positions, an ATS allows you to ramp up your hiring quickly to meet the demands of peak seasons. If you need to hire around an event such as a store opening, don t just settle for a warm body. You can easily process large numbers of candidates and ensure high quality across the board. Finding the right candidate is often like finding a needle in a haystack. You know a great candidate exists in the stack of applications, but finding the right person can be time consuming and frustrating. Expediting the hiring process with the automation benefits that an ATS provides can improve the quality of your hires. 3 White Paper: Better Hiring, Better Service

5 Screening applicants thoroughly: Research from the University of Chicago revealed that hiring based on an interview alone generates results only slightly better than flipping a coin. In the service industry, those odds just won t cut it. You need to hire people who are trustworthy and dependable if you want to deliver outstanding customer service. Effective pre-employment talent assessments and background checks can have a dramatic impact on your ability to hire quality people. An ATS can build-in these screenings seamlessly. You can even customize questions that will allow your organization to hire people who are the right fit for your culture. Integrating tax credit screening and processing: The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) program and other hiring tax credits provide significant incentives to get certain groups such as unemployed workers, new summer youth hires and recipients of long-term assistance into the workforce. However, only 31 percent of employers are filing for and collecting Work Opportunity Tax Credits, while 42 percent don t even know what they are. Another 27 percent know about them but don t file. 1 An ATS can build the screening and processing for eligibility for these incentives into the hiring process and make it easier for you to get all of the credits that your organization qualifies for. In short, an ATS makes it easier to hire better employees and retain them in the long run. Also, new hire data becomes the basis for an employee s personnel record, so the most effective ATS systems are part of a broader suite of HR or talent management systems. Collecting and setting-up this data the right way at the beginning of employment allows a business to use this information effectively for learning and development. CONCLUSION Employers in the service industry have hiring needs that are far too complex for manual processes. Using an ATS to streamline your hiring processes to eliminate inefficiency not only reduces costs and decreases time-to-hire, it improves the quality of your people. When you hire better people, great things are possible better customer service, happier customers and stronger sales. You ve taken the first step toward building talent management processes that can engage and motivate your people in the future. The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) program and other federal and state tax credits provide significant incentives to get certain groups such as unemployed workers, new summer youth hires and recipients of long-term assistance into the workforce. However, only 31 percent of employers are filing for and collecting Work Opportunity Tax Credits. PeopleMatter HIRE TM can help you automate your hiring process and enable you to hire the best employees and it s only one part of our ecosystem of talent management solutions that help you hire, schedule and engage great people, earn their devotion and make them want to give their best. PeopleMatter HIRE can help you automate your hiring process and enable you to hire the best employees and it s only one part of our ecosystem of talent management solutions that help you hire, schedule and engage great people, earn their devotion and make them want to give their best. To find out more about how PeopleMatter can revolutionize your people processes, contact us today at or sales@peoplematter.com. 1 Kleiman, Mel. Managing Employees in Tough Economic Times. Convenience Store Decisions. January 1, White Paper: Better Hiring, Better Service

6 ABOUT THE PEOPLEMATTER INSTITUTE The PeopleMatter Institute (PMI) is the thought leadership source for PeopleMatter, the HR industry and service-focused organizations worldwide. PMI provides extensive research and education tools to help businesses and individuals understand, manage and motivate their most important asset: their people. Access the PeopleMatter Institute on the Web at To learn more about how PeopleMatter s suite of online HR tools can help your business, visit CONNECT PeopleMatter 466 King Street Charleston, SC White Paper: Better Hiring, Better Service