Candidate Experience - Reducing Pre-Joining Attrition

Candidate Experience & Pre-Joining Attrition

(This blog continues the theme of treating Employees & Candidates as Customers that I had written about in one of my earlier blogs.)

First, let’s focus on why Employees & Candidates are customers? Every Organization provides product or service. And these employees & candidates are two parts:

     1)      They might consumers of these products & services, either directly or indirectly;

   2)  They are also brand ambassadors of the organization. Every minute of their career with the organization, they represent the organization.

Talent Acquisition

There 4 distinct areas in Talent Acquisition:

      1)      Talent Demand;

      2)      Talent Search;

      3)      Talent Selection;

      4)      Talent Acquisition.

The 4^th pillar, Talent Acquisition is where mostly focus is diluted and adds to the Pre-Joining Attrition or Drop-Out rate.

Organizations focus on Cost per Hire, Source Mix and Effective Source, Recruiter SLAs etc. However, one of the most important metric (in my opinion) is either missed totally or not focussed on as much as it should be:

Pre-Joining Attrition. Or in other words, Drop-Out rate. This refers to the number of candidates who accept / receive the offer after going through the entire process of Recruitment and then do not join or decline the offer. Some of the statistics show that the drop-out rates range from 19% to 40% in different industry sectors.

Why is Pre-Joining Attrition important? This has a cascading impact on various other metrics like Cost per Hire, Offer-2-Hire ratio etc. And this to a large extent defines an organization’s ability to ramp up faster.

While there are organizations which also track Offer-2-Hire ratio, to a large extent, the remedial actions for this are missed out.

Hence, the questions that should be asked by every organization should be:

      a)      How do we sustain the interest of a Candidate in our Organization?

      b)      How do we provide exemplary experience for Candidates to assimilate with us?

      c)      How do we make New Hires get up to speed faster?

      d)      How do we enhance the ease of joining us?

These questions focus on 4 distinct categories:

 1)       Communication & Marketing – Continuing to project an Organization’s image to sustain the                 interest of the Candidate in that organization which has selected him/her.
     

 2)     Candidate Experience – making sure Candidates’ identify & bond with the organization in the            most seamless manner, even when they have not joined.
     

 3)     Faster Time to Productive Use – reducing the time taken to get New Hires upto speed in such a          way that they hit the deck running.
     

 4)     Easier On-Boarding – making it easier for the Candidates to blend in smoothly right from day one. 

This is where Candidate experience initiatives should be focusing on. While Applicant Tracking systems and Talent Communities etc may provide the “feel good” factor, to a large extent, they are focused on easing the pains of a Recruiter and enhancing productivity of a Recruiter from an organizations’ point of view.

While it is right to do so, what makes a winning proposition for an organization would be to focus on the above questions, since they try to provide answers to the problem from the perspective of the Candidates.

When organizations change the focus of the systems & processes from “Inside-Out” to an “Outside-In” (looking at things from the Candidates / Customers / Employees) perspectives, organizations start being disruptors & see quantum jump in the business benefits.

Major role for HR in Continuous Innovation & Churns that Digital Age brings?

This is an age of rapid innovation. As with any cycle, innovation cycle also brings with it enormous churn. In the race to win in Digital, organizations who want to flaunt their Digital prowess as well as those who are Beginners will be trying to grab the next holy grail or to draw advantages.

Organizations will be experimenting with various ideas in terms of process innovation, product innovation, strategy innovation. In any of these areas, there will be a significant change in the organization in terms of processes, hierarchies, flow of work, pace of work, collaboration, operational frameworks etc.

And these have cascading impact on the people working on these areas internally within an organization. Not restricted to the teams / focus groups working towards their Digital goals. The impact will be felt beyond. New paradigms come in, new ways-of-working, and whole organization is geared up and aligned to work in that fashion. 

There could be probably multiple fronts / themes simultaneously happening and few of them will succeed and few of them will fail. Some of the ideas will have to be cast aside and some more will have to be pursued with more support. 

The concept of feedback loop - where an organization Acts, Checks, takes corrective measures, Acts again, corrects again, Acts again... - this is a continuous process. And stability may take some time to come. Particularly in unchartered waters. 

It could be in the area of setting up customer care operations or it could be cannibalising one's own function / revenue towards a better democratized revenue stream. 

When such failures happen or mid-course corrections happen, it will impact the larger organization. New ways-of-working, having been set few months back will be revisited and changed yet again. Same with the way departments & functions collaborate. There could be additional flows or reduced flows. There could be additional roles / merged roles. 

This will look like too many chops & churns. However, it is not so. This is how it is. And probably has to be. This is experimentation. Nothing is certain until it is certain. And in my opinion, this is how organizations are going to be for quite some time to come. 

This is where HR can and should play a major role. 

How HR provides maturity to the organization, its leaders, its managers, its employees will define the agility of HR as well as the organization, not only in innovating but also in casting aside ideas that are not working and moving forward.

Five basic things that will help HR to handle turbulent times:

1. Communication - with Leaders, Managers & Employees;
2. Counselling - Leaders to communicate;
3. Collaborating - with Leaders, Managers & Employees;
4. Coaching - Leaders to discuss and explain the constant changes;
5. Cascading - spreading lessons learnt across the organization

It is those organizations, that have strong HR leadership and presence, that will successfully manage to ride the choppy waters. 

IoT as a Socital compliance tool

We have all been reading about and updating ourselves in the exciting field of IoT. Transportation / Automobiles is one of the areas where good amount of IoT use cases are being explored in a big way. 

However, I would love to see some kind of societal compliance related use cases. This may be a surprise to certain geographies, but however, may be much needed in certain geos. 

Take example of replacing of factory / manufacturer fitted equipment  / parts and using spurious parts or parts which are not in line with the Road rules of a country. Can there be a central control centre in the car which tracks and gives indication to the car owner, manufacturer, service rep, govt. authorities? 

Can a car refuse to switch on high beam when it detects it is inside city limits? Similar to speed governor?

When societal compliance is no longer automatic or is in danger of flouting due to whatever reasons, can Technology help?

Or should technology only focus on profit?

IT Services Industry – System Integrators – Way forward

This follows my post in LinkedIn few months back. I was writing about the state of affairs in Indian IT Services Industry. You can access it here.

A year has passed and we still see the same old story. Anyone who follows Vinnie Mirchandani’s blogs (access here) will understand it.

Recently, Narayana Moorthy (founder of Infosys) lamented the absence of any real innovation coming from India. And Vishal Sikka spoke about identifying / analysing problems rather than solving them after someone identifies them. 

The Analysts and Strategists alike call “blurring of Products and Services”. It might be worthwhile to take a step back and think this through. Is there a real blurring or merging? If you look back, in every space, products were replacing services or redefining the way services were performed.

You bought a vacuum cleaner. The service of cleaning / dusting the house that was done previously by your maid was replaced by the vacuum cleaner.

You bought a dishwasher. It replaced the washing of vessels by a maid or by you.

When you bought a car, which replaced the service provided by a horse. And a driverless car replaces the service provided by a driver. But you still travel from place to place in that.

You have heard these things as part of the narrative of the current “age of disruption”. However, it is not a disruption. The service performed by someone or by something was done better by something else. 

If in the case of vacuum cleaner, it was a human being who was replaced, in the case of a car, it was an animal which was replaced.

However, you still got the service. The “service” in itself was not disrupted. 

You visited another location by airplane for a conference. This was replaced by a product of “Video Conferencing”. Or, in future, by BEAM, as per Peter Diamondis.

But what was disrupted was only the travel part. Not the part where you communicated with others or attended someone else’s communication. You still did it sitting in your favourite couch.

Coming back to the present. In my opinion, the whole concept of “blurring lines between Products & Services” is misleading and in my opinion, this is where Indian IT Industry is making a mistake. They look at their business and think they are providing a Service. And as a result, the moment one talks of “Products”, they go defensive and start talking about being in Services industry and not in Products business.

And totally miss the reality that the so-called “Products” actually give the “Service”.

Transforming themselves to providing “Service” through “Product” is not going to be easy for an industry which was the largest job creator, linear modelled with FTE count and tasted medium-to-large contract values.

The only way the industry can re-invent itself is to innovate – not in the name of process automation to perform a service, but to take a re-look at the whole problem chain and provide solutions that nullifies the problem at the root. Not to introduce a software program with a “robotic process automation” tag and yet still provide the same service.

Taking the human out of the equation is not innovation. It is again a temporary painkiller. The only way will be to take the problem itself out of the equation with solutions. That’s really innovation.

However, this will mean:

• Cannibalising one’s own revenues;
• Trial-Error-Trial-Error-Succeed cycle for which risk taking becomes an innate requirement;
• Ability to look at “Products-that-provide-service” as a separate stream, while creating them and not to measure them through the legacy “Service” mindset;
• Leapfrogging and thinking about Long-Term compared to Q-o-Q earnings.

To me, this appears to be the only way the so-called System Integrators can survive and re-invent themselves. They need to realise that the so-called “Products” actually are providing “Service”. And nothing wrong in “Service-thru-Products” business.

Measuring Employee Engagement

In recent times, one of the most talked about and very easily misunderstood term in the HCM world is Employee Engagement. There are technology vendors who talk of importance of Employee Engagement and how their products enhance or facilitate better engagement. And there is the eco-system of analysts, observers, writers and bloggers like me who talk of Employee Engagement and how it impacts / facilitates an organization in its quest to excel in the market place.

How do you measure employee engagement?

It is important to think of what is employee engagement in terms of “outcome”. The engagement is actually the result of experience of employee(s), and this engagement drives certain outcomes in the organization’s collective performance. As a result, the engagement itself is an outcome of employee experiences in an organization. Now this does not end there. 

The Positivity or Negativity of these engagements drive outcome in other aspects of employees’ interactions with the organizations – it may be in setting and achieving goals, it may be in compliance, it may be in continuous voluntary upskilling etc.

One of the easiest and foremost measure of engagement that HR leaders can use is Employee Referrals. If you can measure the percentage of Hires that are coming through Employee Referrals, it gives you an indication on the influence your network (your employees) has on the extended network (your employees’ networks).

The higher the percentage, you reasonably assume that the employee engagement is higher. However, you need to remember that this is only one measure that is easiest and available to you without any surveys or complex modelling. An organization still needs to measure other parameters and look to improve the employee engagement holistically.

Employee Referrals as the percentage of overall Hires can be used as an immediate metric to measure an organization’s Employee Engagement parameter before and after engagement interventions. This can also be used as a signal that shows that Engagement interventions are necessary.

But then you also need to look at another dimension of this parameter. What is the duration of “stay” of these Referrals. 

Moving to Cloud HCM - Beginning not an End

With the help of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), Mobile, Analytics and other technology innovations, organizations have started leveraging the “Digital” revolution and adapting to “Digitalization” at a much faster pace.

When we talk of Digital in HCM, we need to keep in mind that the Consumerisation of enterprise IT or HR-IT in an enterprise perspective is still evolving. While companies adapt to SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics & Cloud) faster, a comprehensive Digital HCM is still in its nascent stages in many of the organizations.

To actually achieve a comprehensive Digital HCM, there are 3 fundamental prerequisites to achieve success:

1)      Digital HCM Strategy – a clear understanding and visualization of what and how of the future state of HR-IT (how the organization wants to leverage its investments in SMAC, beyond the low hanging Self Service or Anywhere/Anytime, what it wants to provide to its employees as user experience, how it wants to engage with the employees, how it would like the employees to use it, etc)

2)      Milestones - a timeline map of “What” and “When”- Digital HCM is pervasive across the entire HCM processes and hence the What and When matter if you want to achieve success. A bits and pieces adaption without coherency in its theme of digitalization is bound to let you down.

3)      Transformation & Innovation – not merely an acceptance, but a transformational outlook to the entire HR processes and a mindset to innovate. This is based on a constant feedback that comes from both user intelligence given by the systems themselves as well as the users.

In the public space, the applications like Google or Amazon or Facebook that we use, not only provide user experience in terms of the User Interface (UI), but they are also intelligent to understand the users and accordingly keep the user experience richer.

For a successful Digital HCM in HR-IT, a continuous feedback loop needs to exist to ensure constant innovation and transformation.

This feedback loop coming out of the user intelligence is an important piece in public consumer applications. When applied to enterprise HR-IT, this translates into user analytics as a necessary component be it from an employee portal or any other Anywhere, Anytime application functionality.

A simple use case could be user analytics from a Learning application – when users are provided with a Learning portal, apart from the usual self-services like enrolling for courses, approvals and e-learning, the portal should also be used to track and present choices of learning curriculum / courses based on the job profile of the employees automatically.

Another option could be to present users with information on what courses are being actively pursued by other employees. A tag of “See what your peers are learning” could be a tool to motivate learning. Another use case is about mobile learning. The business benefit of “Mobile enabled” or “Wearable enabled HR” is not from providing an app to approve leave of absence or travel expenses.

These are already being practiced in many organizations. And this is a step in consumerisation of IT in enterprises. The consumerisation here is not about pay-per-use but about the user experience and enhancing it to consumer grade experience similar to a public consumer application to increase employees’ engagement and connect with the organization.

The user intelligence is based on usage pattern over a period of time. Hence we have to understand that the entire process of actually digitalizing HCM is a journey and not a one-off exercise. The importance as well as the success of Digital transformation lies not in migrating to Cloud or mobile enabling. These are not end by themselves. Digitalisation is a journey and involves continuous innovation as well as adapting faster to changing paradigms.

The success of a digitalisation journey for an organization is not based solely on which Cloud product they are adapting. It is more about use cases of “how to use”. This is invariably where the HR leaders need to think beyond traditional boundaries and innovate.

Disclaimer: Some of the wordings like Systems of Record / Systems of Innovation etc are reused from already existing materials on the internet. Thanks to those creators.

We will all be JEDI – Not too far into the future?

On the one side, the “Digital” juggernaut is attaining critical mass. SMAC is accelerating. On the other side, there is a recent development which has a potential to transform all of us into Jedi. Scientists have successfully experimented brain-to-brain communication, albeit at its rudimentary stages. They deserve credit for the pioneering work they all do.

Go through these articles:

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/7/6115573/telepathy-brain-communication-EEG-TMS

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/indianorigin-professors-reaserch-could-help-paralysed-communicate/article6600378.ece

When the brain-to-brain communication becomes a reality, probably it will in a decade or so, the SMAC as we know it today, is likely to change.

Exciting use cases will be coming up for brain-to-brain in all processes. And there could be instances where the SMAC stack products / services that we know of today will be inadequate and new line of products / services might emerge.

With modifications, the brain-to-brain might morph into “brain-to-machine” and change and shape the IoT as we know today, facilitating Machines@Speed-of-Thought. (Thank you Bill Gates)

Quite a few interesting use cases can come up in the HCM processes. 

We may no longer need mobile phones – smart or otherwise. We may no longer need an e-mail.

Most importantly, the major changes might be required in the statutory and regulatory framework of nations and enterprises.

On the lighter side:

Forget about the attrition analysis after I leave. Probably the moment I contemplate a job change, the analytics machines might trigger an alarm to my current employer’s HR and my manager. And send my resignation automatically? Remember the movie Minority Report.

I have nothing against it as long as it also triggers a job offer from another company, ofcourse, with a substantial hike!!!

We are likely to see new brain “waves” and probably brain “quadrants” in the next decade.

Successfactors will be bragging about “brain experience”.

WorkDay will trumpet about “multi-tenant brain”.

Oracle will come out with “Brain Fusion”.

An Analyst firm will come up with a new terminology: Brain-as-a-Service (BaaS)

N.B 1: My family name is not Wan-Kanobi

N.B 2: I am again going to view the DVDs of Iron Man 3, Minority Report, Star Wars and above all T3: Judgement Day