Last updated on August 4th, 2020 at 12:23 pm
Recruitment and onboarding often define how successful and productive the future relationship between employers and newcomers will be. SharePoint can help make both processes be successful by giving benefits to all the involved participants.
Pivotal for the entire employee lifecycle in an organization, recruitment and onboarding bring a lot of challenges to HR departments. When both processes are successful, employees can get inspired to work dynamically and devotedly. On the contrary, the first negative experience can ruin the company-to-employee relationship pretty quickly.
HR departments often turn to HR software to minimize the risk of failure and make recruitment and onboarding more effective. But how do you choose the right one among the many solutions on the IT market? And what features will bring advantages not only to HR managers but also to all the stakeholders?
Ready-made or custom HR solutions: which is better?
By and large, HR specialists have to choose either ready-to-go solutions or custom ones. The ready-made software can perfectly suit small or even medium-sized companies with standard HR processes. But as soon as it comes to automating sophisticated processes, integrating HR solutions with other corporate systems or implementing unique tools, a custom solution will be the right choice.
Companies looking for custom HR software can consider SharePoint among other platforms to develop their HR solutions. This option is particularly reasonable for those organizations that already run a SharePoint deployment. Although widely adopted for corporate intranets, SharePoint can serve an HR department well, and enable various recruitment and onboarding-related activities.
Recruitment: time-saving and well-structured
Recruitment is time-consuming, long-running and document-abundant. To turn recruitment challenges into HR benefits, organizations can foresee diverse SharePoint tools to foster HR activities.
Recruitment workflows
All the recruitment steps (vacancy opening and approval, candidate selection, interviewing, etc.) can be included in a dedicated workflow. The workflow-based recruitment process has a great advantage: it becomes structured, which minimizes risks of missing important steps, be it calling a candidate or discussing a test task with a line manager. Such workflows will also help coordinate stakeholders, who will plan recruitment activities according to their timetables.
Recruitment base
To accumulate, augment and manage candidates’ CVs and profiles efficiently, HR managers can organize a separate recruitment base in SharePoint. Such a base will help them to deal with the following challenges:
- Replace employees faster. When an employee leaves a company, it can be difficult to find an alternative, unless the HR department already has several relevant candidates in their recruitment base.
- Select candidates with specific skills and qualities. Some vacancies can be hard to close, as they require employees with very specific knowledge or skills. The recruitment base can contain profiles of unique candidates that can be found quickly when needed.
- Collaborate with stakeholders more efficiently. HR managers rarely work on their own: they have to collaborate with line managers, department heads, team leads or technical specialists. So it’s necessary to provide them with an opportunity to share and discuss candidates’ profiles with other departments. This can also be done with the help of SharePoint HR solutions.
Interview evaluation
Interviewing is another important recruitment activity that requires dedicated tools. If HR managers work with several vacancies simultaneously, they can hardly keep in mind all the interviewing details. To fill this gap, candidates’ profiles can contain additional interview evaluation sections split into several predefined fields (behavior during the interview, stress level, speech, confidence, etc.). Interview notes and comments will be particularly helpful for line managers to look through before meeting a candidate personally.
Recruitment reporting
A SharePoint HR site can also provide reporting capabilities to enable HR directors to evaluate HR managers’ effectiveness, monitor the HR department activities, define best practices and reveal existing gaps. Organizations can decide on the best data representation and choose the most important parameters to follow (for example, vacancies closing rate, recurring vacancies, recruitment base growth, etc.).
Onboarding: personalized and controlled
Even when a candidate turns into an employee, HR managers’ challenges aren’t over. The next 90 days will be the most difficult for an employee to dive into the corporate culture, start collaborating with colleagues and show the first results. Onboarding experience means a lot for an employee’s stay in the company. The stats shows that almost 70% of employees are more inclined to stay with the company for at least 3 years after a great onboarding experience.
To make each particular onboarding successful, it’s important to support all the onboarding participants, which includes:
- Providing newcomers with the possibility to communicate with the HR department, line managers, and their teams.
- Enabling line managers to control the progress of newcomers, provide them with learning materials, and help them if required.
- Allowing HR managers to monitor employees’ integration into the team and their progress, as well as to assess their overall satisfaction with the company and working activities.
To achieve these goals, companies can use SharePoint-based tools and solutions. Here are several options.
Editor’s note: Due to the recent situation caused by COVID-19, many companies have been forced to work remotely. This fact makes onboarding processes a challenge for both HR managers and new employees. So having a basic checklist template to guide you through the steps can be a big help.
Team sites
Team sites can play a central role in the onboarding process. They ensure dynamic collaboration between team members, thus stimulating a quicker employees’ integration into the team. Moreover, by navigating across the team site, employees will be able to learn details of different projects and particular tasks, read relevant documents and recommendations, and start participating in the team work right away.
Learning portals
Learning portals will help employees to find relevant training materials and complete all the required learning activities before taking up the first tasks. Line managers, team leads and HR managers will be able to see the training results and understand how well newcomers handle a particular topic.
Knowledge bases
A knowledge base will help employees to explore important pillars of organizational activities (code of practice, success stories, work methodologies, best practices, etc.) and find key experts in different domains. Getting knowledge from the corporate base, employees can quickly learn the established working processes and thus avoid potential mistakes while working.
Employee personal pages
Newcomers can use personal pages to store their documents, a personal development plan and an onboarding plan including all the tasks to complete during the first 90 days, as well as links to important resources. Additionally, employee personal pages will help HR managers, line managers and team leads to track the newcomers’ personal development.
Onboarding questionnaires
Questionnaires can allow HR managers to monitor employee satisfaction. HR managers can have several questionnaires that newcomers should complete after 1, 2 and 3 months of employment. This will help HR managers understand how well a particular employee is assimilated into the company and make sure that both an employee and a line manager are ready to continue the cooperation.
When every participant wins
It’s clear that organizations can use diverse solutions and tools to make the recruitment and onboarding processes easier. Companies can choose any of the features described above or consider other custom functions that fit their HR needs. All in all, it’s important to remember that an implemented solution should bring benefits not only to HR managers but also to the newcomers and other employees involved in the process.
An effective recruitment and onboarding HR solution should reduce HR managers’ efforts and minimize mistakes, help line managers and team leaders to marry recruitment and onboarding activities with their ongoing tasks, and, finally, let employees feel supported during the most complex acclimatization period.
