It’s common for companies, during the hiring and on-boarding process, to make mistakes. Often it’s because companies are utilizing manual processes, which are a lot of work and essentially guarantee the process can’t be replicated exactly. That human error increases the risk of failed audits from government or other entities.
“Losing important forms, data entry errors and incomplete screening are problems typical of a manual pre-employment process,” says Rob Sable, founder and CTO of EmployStream. “The cost of that mistake can mean severe fines from government agencies that could reach into the six-figure range for what is, at its core, a simple mistake.”
When these errors happen to high-volume employers, those hiring hundreds of employees at a time, mistakes can be multiplied exponentially. Fortunately, there are systems available that can help reduce errors to near zero.
Smart Business spoke with Sable about how companies can leverage new technologies to mitigate mistakes and speed up the hiring and on-boarding processes.
Why are the hiring and on-boarding processes becoming increasingly important?
It’s an employee-driven market, which has made hiring more competitive. A complicated hiring process can drive talented employees away. There are plenty of other opportunities in the market, so anything an employer can do to make it easier for a person to apply for an opening and then move that applicant’s information through their system and onto payroll creates an advantage.
If a candidate has provided his or her name and address early in the application process, why make them retype it onto several forms? With an automated system, a candidate provides that information once and they’re done. If a candidate uploads his or her resume, that information can be pulled from the document and automatically entered onto the necessary forms. Candidates can even be entered into the payroll system by having much of the necessary information taken from their LinkedIn profiles.
How can an automated system help high-volume employers?
High-volume employers, such as staffing firms, retailers, restaurants, hospitality and manufacturers that do a great deal of seasonal work may need to bring in hundreds if not thousands of employees at a time. That’s an incredible volume of information to process, and that taxes your current staff that handles the application and on-boarding process. Some companies may need to hire temporary staff or engage an outsource provider to process all that paperwork, which brings added costs. Using an automated system allows companies to easily address the increased workload with little added expense.
The manual labor that drives the on-boarding process can be reduced by 90 percent or more with an automated system. If you free up an hour per person when on-boarding thousands of people per year, you can redirect that labor spend significantly. An automated system can reduce the duration of the on-boarding process to an instant. All the finished paperwork is in the system with a detailed audit trail that you need to avoid failed audits, fines and lawsuits.
How are these systems implemented and what’s the required investment?
At many companies, these processes are often spread across manual and digital systems — paper forms must be translated into digital copies, or information is entered into multiple systems that don’t talk to each other. That can lead to errors if it’s up to people to tie things together. Having a system that does everything electronically and can be integrated into a company’s existing systems can help connect otherwise disparate processes and eliminate errors.
Some automated systems are packaged as software as a service. This means no ramp up time except to work with the provider to configure the software within your company’s existing systems. There’s nothing to install, and providers run and maintain the system that’s configured to your needs.
Every company has room to improve efficiencies in their hiring and on-boarding processes. Automated systems are designed with ease and efficiency in mind to do just that. ●
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