Web Portal Software, developed for low cost in India

The foundation on which any technology works is through the application of people basics. An employee-relationship management package does just that.

ERM is a system and a collection of tools that:

• Strengthens corporate communication and culture
• Fosters learning - about company products, services and customers in a single personalized and easily accessible format through an enterprise portal.
• Helps customer-facing employees become more competent to handle customer interactions
• Establishes new communication channels - mail, shared folders, mail filters, web mail, calendar and mailing lists.
• Newer communication methods like open talk forum management
• Enables efficient project management
• Smooth workflow management – Forms creation, process management that links applications and processes
• Real time access to company training
• Targets information to employees based on their interests and needs – User personalization
• Reduces time spent in searching for information – unified search tools
• Streamlines performance management
• Manages resources creatively
• Encourages loyalty and commitment from employees
• Frees HR department to concentrate on more strategic tasks
• Raises productivity
• Encourages innovation levels
• Reduces turnover
• Retains talent – valued employees
• Reduces recruitment and training costs
• Affords effective and consistent rewarding

A deeper look at employee relationship management:

Content management

• Add, delete and modify content
• Dynamic page support – Ability to connect with a database
• Restricted viewability of content.
• User personalization
• Site map creation
• Content repository

Presentation template creation

• New Communication channels
• Create and edit mailing lists and discussion forums
• Team management definitions
• Mailing lists
• Discussion forums
• Web mail and administration
• Bulletin boards for discussion

Employee management

• Calendar creation and sharing
• Open talk forum for employees

Project management

• Creation and approval of estimates
• Resource and task definitions
• Milestone approvals
• Other project management aids like status and reports of projects
• Resource management
• Create and manage projects through execution

Workflow management

• Create and manage processes
• Forms management
• Track workflow

Today's employee can also use organizational improvement tools to define his promotion strategy and then create projects to undertake for his own personal growth and then execute them with ease.

A web-based ERM (Employee Relationship Management) package is an employee self-service tool that helps an employee take care of routine business tasks far more easily and focus on higher value-added tasks instead. This self-service extends externally to the organization in the form of an Enterprise Self-service model that allows major stakeholders to interact with the organization in a personalized and collaborative manner. On the whole, it is a holistic collaborative solution that includes CRM, Business Intelligence, Knowledge management and a collaborative commerce.

The corporate web portal or the enterprise information portal

Sometime ago, an Intranet was an in-house web site that offered online employee directories, newsletters and email communication. Today it has evolved into a great deal more. The enterprise information portal initiates business functions like interactive discussions, document sharing, group polling, company-wide scheduling and enables communications with customers and business partners.

The portal is an internal self-service facility that allows employees to maintain and post their personal data, select their own benefit package options and research training and development options. Facilitating better communication, increasing productivity and cost savings, it has transformed into an essential day-to-day tool for every employee.

Time management skills, project management skills, sound decision making, problem solving and communication skills, lateral and creative thinking skills are a natural consequence of such a culture.

Extending the web portal

Providing a unified platform for employees to work involves much more than easy communication through a portal and its tools.

Lets look at how collaborative efforts comprise an effective and efficient ERM (Employee Relationship Management) deployment and how an enterprise portal serves these features. Collaboration, enterprise application integration and process automation! What do these terms mean for any organization today?

Business process modeling or BPM is a solution that aims to unify process automation and the workflow model by offering a single model that creates an ideal, collaborative synergy between people and systems. The goal is to make knowledge workers more efficient with systems that improve collaboration.

Intranet Software aiding Employee Relationship Management

Intranet Software aiding Employee Relationship Management

Summary: How are customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction levels related? Customers shape the architecture and requirements of any business solution. And the employee needs to influence customer decisions. To achieve greater levels of customer satisfaction, any organization needs employees who are motivated, competent and knowledgeable. Read more... Key Points Work economy today Portal culture Collaboration Knowledge management Project management Personalization Content management Corporate training Employee relationship management

In any organization today, the Human Resources department takes care of employee needs like worker services, training programs and initiatives. But, are these enough?Isn't there a need for people-centric rules and processes that don’t just work within the office environment and facilitate better communication, but also extend to customer-centric applications?

Work economy today

The emphasis today is on information assets, knowledge assets, intangible assets and intellectual capital. Business model innovation requires a paradigm shift in rethinking existing strategies as well as the way information and knowledge flow within the organization.

Discovering new ways to communicate, transfer information, innovate, add value, perform, measure performance and also use communication technology in a manner that facilitates the spread of knowledge all through the organization is imperative today.

An evolutional development in the leading businesses of today is to seek the competitive edge through faster and better interactions. The ways in which we work with each other, communicate, transfer information, view authority, innovate, add value, perform and measure performance in the workplace is undergoing a definite transformation.

At the same time, higher levels of stress, customers demanding more, increase in diversity, more competition, new communication channels and a greater pressure to deliver more with less is forcing organizations to re-look the prevalent work culture.
Providing better customer service, discovering new customers and increasing customer revenues are the goals of any CRM initiative. Interactions between customers on web sites, mail campaigns, brick and mortar stores, call centers; with mobile sales force staff and other marketing resources are an integal part of customer service applications.

But what happens when interactions within the enterprise that provide CRM solutions don’t really follow a smooth pattern? With the extended virtual enterprise, independent workers who live in a work-world devoid of meaningful human interaction often as outsourced specialists on contract can feel marginalized and isolated. The current economy dictates downsizing, restructuring and reengineering. As a result more and more employees are following the virtual employee model today.

What we have here are faster and more frequent interactions between the company and employees. Traditionally companies used to spend more time and money on high induction, training and development costs. But, low morale and sub optimal employee performance proves that companies are not getting their employee relations right.

The need for an employee relationship management system within the enterprise is critical today. ERM is not a technology, or a product or an application but a strategy that aims to bring conversation into newer avenues within an organization.

Sharing and creating knowledge motivates employees to learn and think in terms of a learning community. Collective learning fosters coping skills and builds change-resilience skills in a fast changing new environment.

Collaboration

Lets trace out the evolution of collaborative efforts. Point-to-point interfaces that connected one application to another and shared information between departments (Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as they were called) didn't really collaborate too well as they don’t have the functionality that was required to fit all business processes. Sometimes, several interfaces were required to integrate ERP with existing legacy systems or with the newer applications. Then came middleware or enterprise application integration(EAI) software that provided the basic infrastructure to rapidly connect internal applications and an organization’s interface.

The challenge then was to create an electronic information highway for internal application integration. Integrating external applications would naturally follow suit. Integration begins at home; that’s the concept we are discussing here. Employee Relationship Management (ERM) systems that take care of (Enterprise Application Integration) EAI internally are the core to any organization’s competitive success today.

Workflow is the key enabler to an adaptive and responsive organization. Collaborative difficulties arise due to an inability to easily partner with customers and suppliers, an inability to share experience from previous projects and share critical information during business tasks. Application integration facilitates more efficient information exchange and delivery. Although most of the tools from EAI vendors today aim at making integration more elegant and manageable they fail at efficient collaboration.

Collaborative applications like web browsers improve co-operation and take care of all business process needs. To integrate workflow management within the enterprise and overcome the shortcomings of working in a distributed environment, the solution is a knowledge portal.

Knowledge management

Now, how different is a knowledge management portal from an intranet? Knowledge management in its complete definition is not only capturing the existing data within an organization and storing it for easy retrieval, but also creating, sharing and reusing knowledge.

In an economy increasingly progressing at Mach speeds and occasionally failing at the same, new revenue sources must be generated fast enough to justify the very existence of an organization. Staying competitive means beating the clock and transferring critical knowledge quickly up and down the enterprise value chain.

Exit research interviews have revealed that one of the most common reasons why employees leave an organization is for better opportunities elsewhere, as they felt that their talents were not being utilized to the full. This again leads us to the most important collaboration process called the portal. Not just an intranet but also a portal that collaborates knowledge.

Gone are the days when employees worked within four walls and were able to share information with each other easily. With the extended virtual workplace of today, knowledge sharing is history. Collaboration and workflow automation delivered on a customizable, multidimensional interface like a portal includes content management tools like search and retrieval, access to electronic news and information, document repository and group productivity tools. The unquestionable fact remains that the enterprise portal is the chosen delivery framework for all knowledge management endeavors.

Spending billions of dollars implementing in-house information collection and dissemination systems without taking care of collaboration across workflows, business lines and processes is definitely not the effective strategy.

Project management

Most of us are involved in projects everyday but we just don’t know how to manage them. A project is goal-oriented, coordinates activities within it, has marked beginnings and endings and is unique. It’s a system for taking corrective action and places an emphasis on timely responses. Project management software enables users to track projects, monitor and manage them. And if this is integrated with other applications through a common interface like the portal, its benefits are multiplied twice over.

Personalization

A knowledge management portal delivers customized information to its users by figuring out what is contextually relevant to its users. Personalization software makes educated guesses about employee preferences and capabilities, thus enabling companies to quickly enlist people with the right skills and knowledge for a particular project. Personalization extends beyond the content provided by the roles the user plays. The user can determine the page layout and the information he receives in the most usable and pertinent manner.

In conclusion, we can say that the portal is a collaborative element that stretches across both the enterprise and its partners. The portal is a unified point of access to all applications and documents. The user is at the center point and is able to interact with information from a variety of sources and collaborate with others both inside and outside the organization. Thus proving that the portal is the best working environment for recognizing and resolving business problems most quickly in the collaborative enterprise.

Content management

In the early days of the Internet, an online presence meant an online brochure that would increase organization exposure among browser-equipped end-users. What it did was to provide information about products and services and increase brand name recognition.

The beginnings of e-commerce saw the models of mail order catalogs and the end-90s extended internal applications in an organization to B2B and B2C applications. All these models have undergone a metamorphosis and the emphasis is now on giving the user something fresh and new and often. Data warehousing and mining technologies can divine customer preferences and pump targeted personalized content to the user. The enterprise portal is again the chosen delivery framework for content management endeavors.

Search and retrieval tools, access to electronic news and information, a repository for documents, web sites and databases and collaboration and group productivity tools of a content management system are delivered through a customizable, multidimensional interface.

Corporate Training

With corporate training gaining popularity today, the portal can be used as a training ground for employees from different branches around the globe. Training people in sound-decision making, problem solving and communication skills, lateral and creative thinking skills, the portal uses techno-enhanced and self-directed training methods by taking into account different preferences of individual employees.

Management

Misalignments can be due to a lack of clarity, misunderstandings, a silo mentality, friction and disagreement existing between departments. Free communication like open internal polls, the use of employee self-service software, and the other aspects of virtual teamwork, ongoing surveys help avoid and identify misalignments within the organization.

Moving up the ladder or across?

He can also determine and monitor personal growth through planned research and self-directed training. The employee can decide which ladder he wants to climb, the hierarchical one or the horizontal one.

The customer

Customer-facing employees when happy, deliver results. Productivity and effectiveness improve directly in proportion to their performance. ERM(Employee Relationship Management) integrates technology, strategy, process and the most critical ingredient of an organization - people. It gives customer-facing employees the freedom to develop their own strategy and implement it with ease. As for customers, they can access the enterprise through multiple channels like the call center, the web or through any other common channel.

The Great Indian Manpower Hunt: Across Challenges and Hurdles

Why is it so crucial to upgrade the skills of staff and promote mentoring in all aspects of the company.

Indian recruiters had it easy in the mid-1990s. Unemployment was at a real high and a steady pool of talent combined with low turnover made it a comfortable job.

Hardly a mere decade later situations have changed: the position of a recruiter is not an enviable one anymore. A burgeoning economy along with steep rise in job and a steeper rise in demands for quality talent makes is pushing the recruiters and HR departments to extreme limits.

The fact is brutally bare: there IS a shortage of talented talent in India!

According to McKinsey's estimates, Indian factories will need 73 million workers by 2015 - 50% more than today. The IT sector is on a hiring spree, targeting an intake of 3 lakh in 2006. The Nasscom McKinsey Report predicts India will confront a huge shortage of skilled workers in the next decade, particularly in the BPO industry.

This seems like a huge paradox in India, a country boasting of over one sixth of the world’s population (1.2 billion). Even more disheartening is that the shortage is occurring when half of the population is under 25 and there are 40 million unemployed.

Incidentally, India is churning out 3.6 million graduates every year and the numbers are on rise. All these facts and figures add to the outsider’s perception of India’s position as an inexhaustible supply of cheap, skilled labor.

But the reality is that there exists a huge demand for quality talent across the industries. So what is being done to manage the impending crisis?

Indian government is working to convince the best of the massive Indian Diaspora to return home — offering opportunities that might be hard to come by even in the United States.

Don’t Pay Peanuts

This however is not enough to beat the heat of talent hunts. One of the first steps that any company or recruiter has to take is to realize that the global war for talent is linked to paying top price for top talent. Indian companies are trying hard to get good talent all the while trying to keep the costs low. There is the danger that in trying to keep costs low, Indian companies will lose the war for talent.

Spend More on Brand Building

Recruiters, industry experts and observers all have a unanimous opinion: one of the most recruitment tools is your brand. This is often as important as salaries and benefits. People want to work for the IBMs and Microsofts as opposed to an Indian name.
Spend time on your brand building activities not only in relation with your customers but also general audience and the workforce in particular. Don’t be hesitant to shell out those dollars on PR, advertising, and other kind of promotions etc. Try to incorporate your branding tactics in your main recruitment channels – especially your recruitment website.

Upgrade the Skills of Current Staff

It always pays for a firm to invest in improving their existing employees’ skills and competencies to beat the great hunt for manpower. Good organizations generally plan talent retention even before talent acquisition. They map employee needs, conduct necessary workshops to upgrade skills, identify latent talents and provide the necessary training. Many companies are doing this as they realize this as a vital tactic in beating competition for talent.

Map Employees Personal Needs Too

Employees will stay with you only if you provide them with what they want – not only in professional terms but also in personal terms. In this booming economy jobs are easy to find and the seekers have an option. Most will look at how your present company will help them in their growth. You need to address this issue right from the beginning.

Attracting talent with flexi-timings is a good option. Many seekers would like to know before joining how the job timings will affect their daily routine. Allowing employees to choose their shift timings provides them opportunity to concentrate on their hobbies which they use as stress-busters from a regular job.

Do not put an embargo on employees earning money through their hobbies. Many a times there is no conflict of interest between the company and the extra earning of an employee. So you benefit from allowing them to enhance their personal skills as well as assure they’re going to stay with you for a longer time. This strategy, if promoted early in the recruiting phase, also works magic in hiring best talent.

Promote Mentoring Culture

Did you know that over 35% of employees, who are not being mentored within 12 months of being hired, are actively looking for a job! This comes from a reputed business magazine, Business Week. No one really needs to be convinced of the power of mentoring – for both employees and organizations. Provide ample opportunities for mentoring employees as well as time to managers to learn the skills, find the time, and build the relationships necessary to make it successful.

In the contract employee’s mind: Is it still “hire and fire” perception?

There was time in India when job seekers – active and passive alike – viewed contract employment as more of a hire and fire kind of employment. With little data to support their theories about the arrangement, seekers believed that contract employment robs one of certain benefits that permanent employment offered.

While the overall perception of the general populace has remained unchanged, the trends are definitely supporting the cause of contract employment. This is observed mostly among the employers but employees are also catching up with the trend.

Worldwide, the temporary staffing industry averages 140 billion dollars a year and the curve is only moving vertically upwards. India is also not far in catching up with global temp staffing majors like Adecco, Manpower, Kelly Services already actively entering the Indian market in 2003-2004.

With such a wide exposure to the concept and experience of contract employment, it is has to be a wait-and-watch game of will Indian workforce embrace contract labor whole-heartedly. As of now, the trend is moving in favor of contract employment.

A stigma more than an opportunity

Many Indians still associate a strong social stigma with contract employment. Two strong factors exist behind this: 1) fear of loss of benefits otherwise available to permanent employees and 2) job security – “will I be working here tomorrow?” are frequent symptoms during these doubtful moments.

These fears are not without strong cases to strengthen the foundations of the belief. There have been numerous past and ongoing cases and examples of either or both in the industry today. Overseas examples of layoffs and restructuring do little to help the cause.

Moreover, it is no secret that contract employment usually hinders promotion opportunities or transfer to another position; it may also result in not being able to attract a loan from a bank.

However, there is hope round the corner. A handful of recent recruitment studies point towards an increased Indian interest in contract employment. Employees are realizing that contract employment offers more freedom in terms of time. Typical contracts range between 1-2 years after which the candidate can carry on with the firm or migrate to a different employer.

Many even use temporary assignments to determine whether they enjoy working within a selected industry or with a specific company. For others it is a way to work with those biggies that they always dreamt of working for, even if it’s for a short duration.

For employers, it is another way to cut costs. And speaking in favor of the employers, they no longer consider this as a hire-and-fire kind of arrangement. Consider the stakes involved in adopting a hire and fire attitude: if an employee is fired, his experience and knowledge of the company leaves with him. To find a replacement, train him and achieve ROI is much difficult than respecting and appreciating the current contract employee.

Employers have realized that in this growing Indian economy, there is no dearth of jobs for talented workforce hence the employer might as well humor the contract employee as long as he satisfies the set norms of the workplace.

What is the future of contract employment in India?

Currently if one analyses the market, the trend is moving in favor of increased utilization of contract employment – both among the employers and the job-seekers. However, there are bottlenecks in the widespread acceptance.

According to a 2005 petition submitted to the ministry of finance by Executive Recruiters Association, a non-profit organization, “a key issue that is impeding the temp staffing industry growth is the restriction imposed on utilizing temp staff for Core and Perennial work. Since the definition of Core and Perennial work is not clearly stated, it is bound to get interpreted differently by different entities (appropriate governments). As stated in the previous point, this is hampering the employment creation significantly. The restriction (Sec 10 of CLRA) should be removed, thereby allowing utilization of temporary staffing in all functions and industries.”

But the main problem is with people’s attitude. Laws can be changed and adopted easily. Attitudes are very hard to change. It’ll take an entirely new generation of workforce to evaluate, accept and practice the concept of contract employment.

This generation will be free from the external forces that contribute to the development of stigma attached to contract employment. It is only a wait and watch game to see how quickly this new generation will evolve.

Simplicity isn’t enough; Make Candidate Testing Secure and Non-Discriminatory

On a superficial level, making a recruitment process simple, secure and non-discriminatory seems to be, well, a simple task in itself. But HR executives and recruiters will know better.

Candidate testing is a crucial step in any organization’s recruitment process. They usually form the first phase in filtering “prospects” from “applicants.” Such a critical aspect of recruiting has been giving HR executives and recruiters a sizeable amount of concern. Everyone wants a simple “silver bullet” testing process that’ll save them time, money and effort.

Question is: How to do it?

Making it Simple

Does simple always suppose to translate as “short, easy, and less work than current process?” In a recruitment scenario it can mean “more work now, but awesome ROIs in long run.”

While developing a candidate testing process first (and obviously) define the attributes needed for the job. This should include the abilities, personality, motivations and values. Consider using psychometric tests of ability and personality to measure those harder to reach attributes. But don’t limit to this.

Go one step beyond and define your brand characteristics. Develop a test to highlight candidates who matched those traits and abilities.

Online testing is another option to make candidate testing a very easy process and save tons of recruiting time and money. Numerous organizations have taken this route, some as early as mid-90s. LG introduced online testing for new recruits in 1997 and these tests have helped it reduce recruitment time in a big way.

Online tests usually involve a logical thinking test, comprising analytical thinking, arithmetic reasoning, and written and communication skills.

Making it Secure

We spoke about the efficiency of online testing in the previous section. However, we overlooked a huge related aspect of online testing – security.

Online tests are usually taken at home or internet cafes where the chances of cheating are relatively high. Research shows that, 85% of people believe that it is easier to cheat in an online test. This is a major concern for the proponents of online candidate testing.

This has, however, not deterred the users of online candidate testing. On the contrary and quite expectedly research and studies are going on to combat cheating online testing. Many firms have come up with products or solutions that can predict the candidate behavior during tests and evaluate fairness in test taking with decent accuracy.

Many of these solutions rely on test uniqueness – each applicant receives a unique test. Content security is improved preventing test contents being shared across candidates, thus reducing the risk of cheating.

We however, would recommend these online tests a first phase of the first phase i.e. use these tests to eliminate otherwise unqualified candidates. Candidates that complete the test satisfactorily should be given another test to further filter worthy candidates.

If you’re thinking this is too much work, consider this: 1000 candidates have applied a particular post. Imagine the effort to manage the 1000 candidates dropping in to your premises to giving the test. On the contrary, using a secure online testing method allows you to evaluate 1000 candidates over the net with very less effort and the short-listed 50 or so candidates can be given a test on your premises to further filter it. Online combined with premises tests really works wonders – and it’s considerably simple and secure!

Making it Non-Discriminatory

In a country like India which has diverse cultural groups, it becomes a little tough to please all the groups. Frankly speaking, that is not the way recruitment should be. It should be based on merit, skills, passion and experience rather than cultural and regional consideration. There is no discrimination against a particular community if their representatives among the workforce are fewer in numbers than other communities. These issues have to be addressed by the government, which has to be proactive in the uplifting of marginalized groups.

However, it is in an organization’s conscience to provide equal opportunities for graduates who are physically disabled. No considering these groups of the workforce is surely a discrimination against them and in the western countries legal actions have sprung dime a dozen. If a disabled person is qualified to work for a position in an organization is it good to disqualify him purely because he is disabled?

In India, lawsuits against discriminations are few compared to western countries. But the possibility exists. Making your candidate testing simpler and easy for the disabled enhances your image an equal employment opportunity provider among the general masses and this itself will lead to an increase in the number of candidates who want to work with your brand.

Conclusion

Candidate testing is often the first step in recruitment process and should not be neglected altogether. If implemented properly, the above 3 steps will help you gain momentum in your quest for effective candidate testing and recruitment.

What Exactly does Making Recruitment Process Simpler Mean

Going on a higher level, it has to be much beyond merely translating to less work!

So what is this that we hear about – simple meaning NOT less work in the recruitment process?

In a sense, simple DOES mean less time and work for the departments involved. That is if only we could classify recruitment as a short term hiring process for a particular position. Ideally it is not the correct definition, but unfortunately, in reality this is what being practiced in most companies.

Typically, HR department teams with specific department heads to evaluate the analytical and logical skills, commitment, ability to take responsibility, and grasp of candidate’s area of specialization when going about the candidate selection process.

Now if any of the aforementioned evaluations can be cut short in terms of time then the work also will be reduced. As a result, the recruitment process WILL be termed as being made simpler. What is overlooked is whether the simpler recruitment process is really successful in the long run.

For instance, a candidate may emerge out of these evaluations with flying colors but does that mean that he/she is the perfect match of the position?

Why not? For the simple reason that the recruitment process is limited to the specified tasks and one major factor is brutally overlooked in this scenario. That factor which can determine if the recruitment process is indeed successful.

Evaluate Your Recruitment Process Success

A recruitment process is successful not when a position has been filled by a worthy candidate. This is just a part of the success. Real success arrives when the position does not ask for another repetition of the recruitment process – that is, when the candidate hired does not quit the company for compatibility reasons.

Employee compatibility can be determined by, well, the employee himself. Currently how many companies try to see the candidate point-of-view while recruiting him/her? How many of them run “will fit in the organization” tests? Worst, how many people give candidate opportunities to decide for himself whether he’ll fit in or not?

Sadly speaking, not many. A candidate knows by instinct and experience whether he/she will be happy working in a particular company. Taking a scenario as an example, a candidate is evaluated as being fit for both sales and marketing departments. Her choice is marketing but because she is good at sales also, the firm puts her into direct sales department.

The result: employee jumps ships when confronted with a marketing department job offer in some other company. This is a classic case of recruiting process made simple but unsuccessful in the long run.

See the Employee Perspective also

Very few firms currently use the employee point-of-view assessments to make the overall recruitment process simpler. At these companies, candidates are provided an opportunity to meet her potential colleagues, workplace etc so she can make her mind in deciding to take up an offer.

The result of this is that the candidate gets an overall picture of the job profile, which ideally does not mean only the tasks that the position demands to be carried out. A full picture is where she’ll she where she’ll work, whom she’ll work with etc.

The benefit of this arrangement is that firms can indeed simplify the overall recruitment process by hiring the most compatible person.

The other benefit is that by these arrangements you also cull the fear of discrimination charges in offering jobs – something that is rising at an alarming pace across the world. By putting the ball partly but firmly in the candidate’s court you act as a responsible employer providing equal opportunity without discrimination.

In conclusion, we see that it is more important for a recruitment process to be successful in the long-run rather than becoming simple in the short-term but tiresome in the long run.

Recruiting Strategies for the “Graveyard Shift”

Don't provide short-term incentives if you are looking for a long-term commitment.

Recruiting for the graveyard shift – normally ranging anywhere between 3 pm to 6 am – is a major cause of headache for companies in general and recruiters in particular. Most commonly, this is cited as the cause of high turnover the world over.

Recruiters are always evolving strategies to attract and retain talent in these shifts but 80% of them always find it difficult it do so. Stylus Inc HR experts have been closely monitoring the trends in global arena and have collected their recommendations in this article.

What to AVOID

However, before going into what-to-dos we found it imperative to discuss what strategies should NOT be employed to attract talent for night shifts.

Many companies, after long deliberations, think of providing a sign-on bonus for hiring employees. This is a mistake as the sign-on bonus not only risks portraying your company in a desperation mode but provides only short-term motivation for the new hires. Once the sign-on bonus money is spent the new hires do not have sufficient motivation to work for you.

Another strategy is to have people rotating from day to evening shifts. This is generally not a good idea from a health or safety standpoint in that it disrupts sleep cycles constantly, leading to fatigue and the inevitable injuries, material loss, errors, etc. If you start requiring this, you will undoubtedly lose a lot of your desirable day people.

Therefore, don’t provide short-term incentives if you are looking for a long-term commitment.

Attracting and Hiring Talent

Attraction and retention of employees for the graveyard shift are two different tasks and strategy evolution should be approached in two different ways. Let’s take talent attraction first. Here are 3 strategies to ensure optimum talent attraction:

1. Assuming the second shift begins at 3pm, you have some thinking to do. People looking for second jobs generally can't get to work until after 5pm. You can consider breaking the shift into two, say 3-7, for which you can try and attract students or moms, and 7-11 shift for permanent part time. Of course, this means screening and hiring more candidates but is a sure shot way to ensure business productivity.

2. You can also include a meal or McDonald's gift certificate so that they don't have to stop and eat on the way. This is not a short term incentive as the sign-on bonus but a long-term motivating factor for employees to consider working for your company.

3. Some companies offer a shift premium plus a four day workweek at 10 hours per day. The three-day weekend is a great incentive if you can work it into your schedule. This is a good strategy as many employees often site this as a major incentive to stay on second shift even when offered first shift.

Last, but in no ways the least, be sure, to include your incentives and benefits in your ads and other recruitment endeavors to ensure high apply rate.

Employee Retention Strategies

Taking this from an employee perspective, the people who have already worked in the “graveyard shifts” know what it means to be there. Here are a set of common grouses of the employees (they reflect the concerns of employees of all parts of the world):

1. They believe that graveyard shifts are managerial "stepchild" in most places. They feel management does not show as much interest in these employees as they do in the day shift.
2. People know that they’d have to give up a lot of social life in this shift.

Best ways to tackle these concerns are to address them directly. Ensure that these employees get the same training opportunities and motivation as their counterparts in the day. Have the same physical visits from management to show interest in the employees and their growth.

In addition, make it the "fun" shift to work. Have lots of social events, potlucks, and other events to promote bonding among the employees. Have a TV/VCR to tape their favorite shows while they work. Morale is a special issue with this shift, so work hard to make it good.

Address other issues as well

These are not the only ways to retain the employees. Address issues that don’t fall into the ambit of the shift-grouse but still matter to the employee. Child care is big issue on this shift. Arrange for extended-hours child care with a local provider, or on-site and see if that improves the quality of the employees.

Consider offering special tuition reimbursement for this shift only. This will entice students to your jobs, entice employees to start school and simultaneously upgrade the quality of this workforce. A word of caution: don't make the requirement that the courses be directly work-related or you’ll only alienate the employees from the management.

Conclusion

Recruiters and companies have lots of options open to them while attracting and retaining employees for graveyard shifts. Your working environment and corporate constraints will dictate what is best.

Then again, it is also clear that there are people who are prefer second or third shifts but finding them demands great amount of effort and time spend. We suggest you do not rely only on finding these people but also have a Plan B i.e. use a mix and match of the above strategies to attract and retain quality talent to work on the proverbial graveyard shifts.

"War for Talent" is not Just a "War for Talent" Any More!

It’s a new war and every company is waging it; most however are not fighting it in the right way. Superior strategies and formidable tools matter the most in this war.

So what war are we talking about?

Most people, by now would have exclaimed “hey it’s war for talent!” In part it is correct but only smart people would have guessed it as the war for mindshare through the war for talent!

Confused? Hang on, we’ll explain.

Everyone knows that print applications are rapidly losing their impact and candidates prefer online profiles than paper-based ones. Numerous technological advancements have been made in the long run to ease the candidates as well as companies that are in the hiring mode (that is, almost all the firms that are operational).

In such a scenario, with countless numerous job boards and online resume tracking applications, any candidate will be overwhelmed by this information overload. Ask her which job board she liked the most or can assertively remember having a good experience, chances are 9 out 10 times you’ll return with a negative answer.

There is no top-of-the mind recall for a candidate when faced with such a question because there is nothing to differentiate between two “different” job boards. Same functions, similar clichéd images, all make any job board just a face in the virtual crowd.

Multiply this with the countless candidates applying at different job boards at same time and you have a major concern figure.

What do you stand to lose here? Tons!

Imagine this scenario: You call a candidate for interview and treat her with respect and make her feel important then no matter she gets the job or not, she’ll always talk in positive terms about you to others. You get word-of-mouth for almost next-to-nothing! Adds to your brand name. This is thinking at a higher level, which most companies choose to overlook.

Contrast this with a scenario of a candidate having a real bad experience at the interview (say, you made her wait for 2 hours for an interview of 20 mins) then what you have is a candidate that is 8 out of 10 times going to reject your offer AND talk in negative terms about you to others. Negative publicity affects your brand a lot.

Duplicate this scenario on the web – your job board is part of your overall branding strategy. A dull and boring recruitment website will not help you in your branding process (not to mention the less-than-enthusiastic response from your candidate).

On the other hand an exciting, interactive and easy to use online recruitment application will not only make user-experience memorable but also help in your branding purposes. Make your candidate feel important on the web and you’ll do a lot better in business.

However, only easy-to-use recruitment application will not ensure the desired branding and recruiting purposes. It goes much beyond all this. You user-interface, your response method, the way you respond etc are all part of this very crucial war for talent and mindshare.

In a higher level war use superior tools to gain that competitive edge!

That’s the specialty of Stylus Inc online recruitment solutions – a recruitment website that is built not only on ease-of-use attributes but also branding aspects. Of course, each firm is different hence naturally the branding strategies will be different. We can customize our readymade online recruitment solution to suit your recruitment as well as branding goals.

Online Recruiting and Staffing Software - Complete Feature List

Collect resumes, hire people, maintain a candidate database, handle human resource – both in-house and those of your client; identify prospective candidates and perform various evaluations.

Stylus E-Recruitment Solution is an innovative web based solution useful for organizations with multiple locations that manage resource requirements. It is an automated system helping recruitment process; aimed at providing easy solution for the job listing, job management, candidate sorting and management and recruitment process management.

In essence, it helps in keeping the recruitment process clear and transparent between the applicant and the HR managers.

Features

• Users and Roles
• Employer
• Visitor
• Candidate
• Technology for Design
• Technology for User Interfaces

Users and Roles
The website will have the following types of users:

1. Employer
2. Visitor
3. Candidate / Seeker

Employer

As an employer you have complete powers on this site – the controller of the website.

You have complete control to manage jobs and current job listings, conduct resume search and track applications received; shortlist candidates and schedule/track interviews. Keep track of the complete recruiting process with numerous stages, avail mail templates, view reports and set system parameters.

The employer or the HR department of a company has to her disposal the following modules/functions.

• Login – Completely Secure; only authorized personnel can edit/modify material on the site
• Logout
• Retrieve Lost Password
• Change Password
• Edit Registration Details – The registration info would be the same as what is now collected in the booking form.
• View/Edit Company and Contact details
• View/Edit Company logo picture.
• Manage Jobs (View/Edit/Delete) Current List of jobs
  • Displays a list of all the Jobs added by the HR.
  • Has links edit and add job pages.
  • Flag Jobs as Hot jobs
  • Activate / Deactivate Job postings
• Resume Search
  • A search page which lists from the available resumes, a list of resumes according to the search criteria. Search criteria being:
    • Skills
    • Employment type.
    • Salary
    • Willing to Relocate.
  • Filter Job search results based on columns
• Application received
  • Lists all the applications of candidates who have applied for various jobs.
  • The listing id done based on the filter criteria. Search criteria being :
    • Job code
    • Name
    • E-mail address
    • Interview Stage No
• Shortlist Candidates and Schedule / tracking interviews for candidates
• Recruiting Process - Stages (Post Recruitment Process)
  • Stage Zero - Screening and scheduling
  • Stage One - HR Interview
  • Stage Two - Process linked Interview
  • Stage Three - Final Interview (offer – acceptance / reject)
  • Stage Four - Joining
• View Interview Schedules
• My mail templates
  • Lists and Lets the user view/edit/add/ delete the mail templates.
• My Calandar
  • Lists the appointments book by the HR.
• View Reports (5 reports assumed)
• List/View/Add/Edit/Delete Admin staff
• Set System Parameters

Visitor

A Visitor is any person who visits the website. A visitor will be able to do only the following:

1. View Home Page
2. View Static Pages
3. About Us
4. Privacy Policy
5. Terms & Conditions
6. Contact Us
7. Search Job Listings (Quick Search & Advanced Search)
8. View Job Listing Details
9. View Hot Jobs
10. Register as Candidate

Candidate

A job seeker is a visitor who has registered and has logged in – in addition to doing what a Visitor can do, a candidate can perform the following functions as well:

• Login
• Logout
• Retrieve Lost Password
• Change Password
• My Home
• Search Job Listings (Quick Search & Advanced Search)
• View/Edit Registration (personal profile) Details
  • The registration info would be the same as what is now collected in the booking form
• View/Edit Resume Builder
  The Resume builder is divided into eight sub divisions.
  • Introduction.
  • Experience summary.
  • Why Hire me?
  • Experience Details.
  • Education/ Training/ Certification.
  • Skills.
  • Upload resume and picture.
  • General details.
    (Details of the above are given in section)
• Apply for jobs
  • A registered and logged in seeker may not only view list of jobs and urgent vacancies but also apply for the same.
  • There is no limit as such to apply for jobs, but if a job is offered and accepted he/she is not allowed to apply any more jobs. Similarly if rejected for any job he/she will not be allowed for any more jobs for a limited period of six months.
• Job manager.
  • Here a seeker can create his/her cover letter
  • View a the list of jobs he/she applied and the status of the same.
  • View previous and next interview details.
• My Calandar.
  • Here a seeker may add his/her free time best for the HR to contact him or schedule an interview for.
  • Seeker is also shown if any appointments have been fixed by whom and where.
  • Seeker may edit or delete any free time added if it is not booked by the HR.
• My Web page
  • This section gives the link to the seekers online profile.
  • The online profile is a all the details of the seeker collected in the various section above put together.
• Receive Email updates.
• Activate / Deactivate resume
• Create Cover Letters
• Check status of jobs applied and view interview schedule.
• Receive Interview scheduled via email.
• Receive/Accept Offer notification.

Technology for Design

The Website will be built on the Microsoft .NET Platform using ASP.NET and C#. The database server will be Microsoft SQL Server 2000. We recommend that the application be hosted on a dedicated server to ensure scalability and security of information.

Technology for User Interfaces

The user interface of the Website will be HTML 4.01 and will be viewable in browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 +

We will separate the user interface code from the business logic and database layers. All data access code will be in the form of stored procedures within the database for which there will be wrappers in the data access layer.

Outsource your staffing and recruiting software development to Stylus Inc. Contact us with your recruitment application development requirements

Recruitment Software in Making

Recruitment software plays an indispensable part in reducing a staffing agency’s administrative burden. An enterprise's HR department can be freed of it's day-to-day mundane activities and can allot more time to concentrate on their prime focus of business and goals.

Who said e-Recruitment is only for recruiting?
Today’s recruitment applications are designed to do a whole lot more than just reduce paperwork. They can make a significant contribution to a company’s marketing and sales activity.

Recruitment websites and software make possible for managers to access information that is crucial to managing their staff, which they can use for promotion decisions, payroll considerations and succession planning.

In wake of these and related trends, it is imperative for frequent upgrades to your company's software or web applications make it easier for clients and employees to address new business needs.

Online recruiting and online recruitment systems, with its emphasis on a more strategic decision making process is fast gaining ground as a popular outsourced function.

Take your time to read these interesting write-ups to help you make your outsourcing ecommerce web development decision a smooth and easy one.

Educate youself on the pros and cons of recruitment software with our eRecruitment in detail

Do you know what are the basic features of an erecruitment software?

Won't you love to know a typical recruitment software application development scenario. See how we understand the situation, propose a solution and develop the product in this development scenario.

Why Outsource Customer Relationship Management Software development to Stylus?
Legal and Financial Concerns - You may have certain legal and financial concerns about outsourcing. We understand this and have made all efforts to ensure that your concerns are taken care of.

Communication Methodology - We understand the pivotal role played by clear communication for the success of an outsourced project. With this in mind, we have incorporated tools and processes that facilitate unhindered communication.

Transparent Development Process - We will ensure that what you have in mind is what you will get, through prototypes and proof of concepts.