How can HR Save Time and Money?

In any business, the human resources (HR) department can ideally contribute towards saving time and money. How? Depending on the staff that is hired, time and money can be saved.

In an ideal world, every job requisition starts when a manager or a staff member enters a request, and ends with a newly recruited and highly qualified employee joining the organization and/or team.

Sounds too simple to be true?  If you’re a human resources professional, you may have just sighed because you’ve experienced that process before and it is far from that simple. From staff requests to actually hiring, the process often winds its circuitous way through your recruitment procedure and is nowhere near as short as it was just described.

The City of St.Albert would agree, of course, before they implemented an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Today, the City follows a strict process and is able to control exactly what they look for in a new hire without having to manually follow a long paper trail.

Recruitment Challenges
Of course coming to the conclusion that the City of St.Albert required an ATS, the City recruitment coordinator, Diana Rankin tells the tale of one of the windier bits in that road. The past process of hiring went like this:

1. We used to have a request to recruit, off a nondescript form that looked identical for every department in the city. You can understand the struggle of having hardcopies that all look alike and can easily get misplaced.
2. Once the form was filled out, this now-precious piece of paper traveled to various places in St. Albert for required signatures. The City of St. Albert runs its various departments from eleven different buildings in town. So, this paper ideally travels, and might rival the commute of some city employees. In the world that is now reliant on digital media, the city of St. Albert had two wonderful mail couriers that were an integral part of a paper-based recruiting system. They would pick up the mail from the HR department and take it for approval to one of the 11 buildings. Talk about snail mail.
3. When onboarding for permanent positions, the request would meander from the Director to the General Manager then to the City Manager until it reached the HR director.
4. Departments would get mail delivery between one and three times each day, depending on the department. It sometimes took a few days for a request to recruit to come back. It could also sit on somebody’s desk and effectively be lost under paperwork. The only way anyone would know if there was a delay was if the requestor asked about the status of the job request.
5. If people were in a rush, and they wanted to make sure the request got done, here’s how they did it: they would walk the document over to the director, then the general manager, then to the city manager’s office, and finally they would personally pick it up when it was signed. Now I can imagine you get the idea, the amount of time and patience this would require, not to mention how frustrating it could be.

Sounds a bit complex and unnecessary in the world of cloud and e-signatures, don’t you agree? The City of St. Albert finally decided it was time to step up and get on board with an easier and more efficient hiring process.

The Solution
The City of St. Albert left their paper-based Rube Goldberg method behind in favor of implementing an Applicant Tracking System, which is cloud-based. Using the cloud based system allows requests to travel through the approval chain within an hour. This huge jump in efficiency shortens the job requisition portion of the applicant tracking process. Having an ATS allows the City of St. Albert to send job requests and monitor them. If it stalls in the process, they can determine exactly who is responsible for the delay, and can send them a personal email to follow up.

A general best practice when using an ATS, is to waits 24 hours before nudging people via email. This is exactly what the City of St. Albert implemented into their process. Sometimes an email gets buried in an inbox avalanche, and sometimes people are in meetings. After implementing Njoyn’s Applicant Tracking System, the City of St. Albert’s HR team realized the speed and effectiveness of the process and have decided to also use the same system and the same process for approving job descriptions. They are now able to recruit based on specific qualifications and find employees that will be well worth their time. The hiring process is saving time and hiring the right dedicated staff is saving them money!

To see how your City, business or organization can implement an ATS, contact us today for a free demo!