As a side project, I volunteered for defining the use cases for prospective/employee engagement portal few years ago. While HR Management system (e.g. PeopleSoft, workday, inhouse custom tools) provided variety of features but there were certain gaps related to employee engagement which employee hub product was expected to handle. Salesforce was intended as evaluation platform for building the product proposed for specific business unit. As I see, some of the use cases are still valid and up for grab.
Problem Statement
Track and monitor prospective "candidates" from interview shortlisting to offer acceptance
Engage actively with prospective "employees" from offer acceptance to onboarding phase
Address challenges/request from employees and provide a platform to collaborate on queries as cloud-based delivery rarely had team collocated.
Lack of engagement/communication touch points was causing disconnect at each level and high churn rate (declines/separation)
Business/Working Model
Prospective candidate list received from various channels were managed centrally on organization career portal and later exported into file and shared with respective talent units tagged to horizontal. Same file was used to manage the recruitment drives.
Manual process for assignment of candidates for interview process, capturing feedback on paper or online form/excel sheets
Connects with prospective candidates (PC), prospective/current employees (PE/E) primarily driven via the talent/human resource management team.
Solution Proposed
While it didn't reach till the solutioning stage but back of mind using process automation to track different stages of engagement was certainly there. Key considerations were-
- Assignment rules to ensure there is no duplicate assignment of candidates with predefined forms/screen flows to capture feedback.
- Conversion from PC to PE on selection with further tracking in separate object to address communication challenges.
- Using activities to track list of items needed for onboarding process and to notify/email relevant units for smoother onboarding (like assets team for Laptop; security team for ID card, etc.). These regular connect and activity closure were expected to give an implicit indication on PE final conversion to E.
- Collaboration via chatter/private group to handle discussions related to projects and unit activities.
- Using email templates (for each communication type), auto assignments rules (for assignment of PC to interviewer or PE to a buddy), process builders, validation rules (to limit business rule violations), data loads (for capturing the candidate details), knowledge article for FAQs/documentation and so on.
Cost of licenses, license type (community/platform/salesforce) and interaction between entities were not considered in initial stage.
L1 Use Cases
There were two broad level processes/use cases which product intended to cover -
Employer key problem area -
- Candidates not turning up for interview (Outside the scope as handled by talent team but reverse engineering to revise the plans).
- Prospective employees declining the offers.
- Tracking accountability of interviewer for hiring only genuine candidate (principal-agent problem).
- Last but not the least - driving engagement at project/unit level to address disconnects.
Employee (PE/E) key problem area -
- Lack of feedback or input from Employer on processing status of candidature for both selection/rejection scenario.
- Disconnect and lack of communication from offer roll out till joining (this also led to deflection partially with trust as one of many other reasons).
- Lack of touchpoints and navigation guidelines (while these are covered during induction but connect goes for toss).
- Single platform for collaborating with point of contact for typical concerns faced by employees (e.g. continuous learning/certifications, policy links, project status, project documentation link, templates to be followed and so on).
Epilogue
While engagement was shelved after initial discussions and I too moved to another initiative, but got interesting insights while evaluating various use cases and capability mapping.
Irrespective of tech choice (JS, Java, PHP or Salesforce) and associated cost it could have been an exciting product/idea to work on as it intended to cover some of the problem area industry wide. Some of the companies in 'best companies to work' list which I know indeed work on giving holistic candidate/employee experience and potentially the reason why they are in the list. Value based analysis (Anderson & Narus; Gyan Courtesy - Prof DVR Sheshadri) for any offerings is the key. :)