[Blog] A Practical Use Case for ESM in HR: Enhancing User On-Boarding
As described in our previous blog, ESM's primary aim is to help organizations improve efficiency, responsiveness to colleagues, workflow, and user satisfaction across departments.
As businesses started witnessing and reaping the benefits of ESM, I'm going to talk on how ESM enhances and amplifies the user onboarding process in an organization and how a centralized tool can boost overall efficiencies of an HR department.
There are two main reasons an HR team uses ServiceDesk Plus. The first is adding OnBoarders into the system, when someone is hired, sometimes there’s a quick turnaround between when the offer is made and when they start reporting, it can be quite tight. It is really important that they get this information into the system quickly. From then on, there is a lot of collaboration that happens between the HR team and various other departments of an organization to ensure the new hire is able to start straight away. The HR team needs to collaborate with the Facilities team to enable entry and to set up their desk, and IT team to configure their devices and give them access to email. ServiceDesk Plus ensures these conversations and actions are seamless, which can be a huge time saver for an HR team and a good user experience.
This can also be a very similar process for OffBoarders. It’s important that the HR team removes them from all internal systems and access and raise a ticket to notify the other departments that this employee has left the organization, start the process to start to shut down systems access and remove them from payroll.
Imagine the traditional manual method of the OnBoarding and OffBoarding process of employees, for instance, filling in a sort of paper-based form in Word or Excel, and then emailing round a group of collaborators that could lead to numerous human errors.
The fact that the workflows and notifications are built into ServiceDesk ensures you are not going to miss any part of the process. The tool makes sure the right information reaches the right people, which in turn makes it easier to fulfill the request at the desired time.
ServiceDesk Plus can also be used for recruitment. Though not as a full applicant tracking system (ATS), but on the back-end when the HR team receives candidate application or resume, they can attach them against the user profile in ServiceDesk Plus. Every potential candidate has their own record which contains all of their details, which would be their resume, their application, and if they are invited to start interviewing, they would have their interview assessment forms and then each interviewer’s feedback and details of conversations.
The big advantage is that the candidate files are accessible by the full HR team and the hiring manager. If the hiring manager wanted to check something, they can log in to ServiceDesk Plus, type in the candidate’s name and find all of the paperwork associated with the candidate.
In today’s competitive job markets, your top talent may be already be looking to leave — one-third of new hires who have been in their roles for six months or less are searching for a new job.
As a response to current trends, there is a growing view that structured onboarding processes should last much longer than they currently do. According to a recent survey by CareerBuilder of over 2,300 hiring managers and HR professionals, nearly three-quarters say their onboarding process lasts one month or less. About half said that onboarding lasts a week or less.
Studies show that onboarding programs that last less than a month are harmful to retention rates. That means that only 28 percent of companies are investing enough time in the onboarding process to make a significant impact on the business.
One month, or even less, simply isn’t enough time for a new employee to complete compliance tasks, get a good feel for the company’s culture, receive sufficient job-specific training, adjust to new technologies, and make an informed decision about whether the company and role are a good fit.