Today, I had an opportunity to step away from the usual daily grind and attend the Quarterly IHRIM meeting.  Several of Atlanta’s best Human Resources and IT professionals  gathered at the Oracle office in Atlanta.  IHRIM is an abbreviation for the International Association for Human Resources Information Management.  From the IHRIM website, you’ll learn that its mission is “to be the leading professional association for knowledge, education and solutions supporting human capital management.”  There were two brief presentations and a time for networking during lunch.  One of the topics was presented by CherryRoad Technologies Director of Enterprise Services, David Downey.  David talked about how companies are able to utitlize Business Intelligence to support better business decisions.  One of the most disturbing points he made referenced a 2009 Gartner paper that “more than 35% of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.”

The goal of all companies should be to constantly strive to improve business performance.  But, each company must know what they want to measure before implementing a new plan of action.  Since I have spent over 10 years in the Human Resource function, I immediately began to think on the topic of metrics and how each Human Resource deparment should define specific metrics and determine new ways to streamline processes; One such process is onboarding a new employee.  Most companies mail a packet of information to a new employee to complete manually.  HR Administrative staff type up the offer letter, locate all of the required Federal and State forms, policies, etc, and spend upwards of $25 on Federal Express to send a new hire packet to the employee.  Once the employee completes the packet, which, by the way, will most likely result in errors, omissions and invalid forms, the payroll staff is responsible for entering the data into the HRMS.  Even after all of those tasks have been completed, the last step is to engage your HR staff yet again to file all of the information in the appropriate folders.  In the presentation material by CherryRoad Technologies, they defined how to calculate the cost per hire.  For your employees that are tasked with this manual process, take the annual salary plus benefits and divide by the number of work hours per year (e.g., 2080 hours).  Now that you have the hourly rate for the employee, you take the number of hours it takes one of your staff members to hire an employee and multiply by the hourly rate.  You are able to calculate the average cost per hire by determining all new hire costs per month and then by dividing by the total number of new hires.  For those companies with high turnover, the costs could be astronomical, as you may infer from the information above.

The solution is to completely automate your new hire paperwork by selecting a transactional onboarding vendor.  Many onboarding solutions on the market simply post PDF files to a portal and still require the employee to manually complete and return the paperwork.  However, the AllegroHR Onboarding application completely automates the onboarding process by engaging the employee in a wizard like application that collects all of the pertinent data, free of errors and omissions, to complete the required Federal, State, and policy forms.  Furthermore, AllegroHR Onboarding is able to consume data from most Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to pre-populate the employee onboarding screens and eliminate the need for duplicate entry of basic demographics and job information.  Once the onboarding process is complete, the employee data is then transferred through an automated file interface into the HRMS.  The ROI on this automation has saved some of Emerald Software Group’s customers upwards of $1 million dollars per year.  In summary, define the metric, calculate the existing cost, and set a plan of action to cut costs and you just might find your company reaping the rewards of a more efficient process.

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