You’ve invested a ton of time and money in your shiny, new Talent Acquisition System. Countless hours of planning, testing, and executing have been spent to deliver the perfect solution for your talent organization. You have crossed the bridge into a Post Go Live status – now what? The work doesn’t stop here – your journey with the new system is just beginning!
Here are a few tips to ensure your journey beyond Go Live is successful:
- Create a support process and plan
Don’t under-estimate the value of having a support process and plan in place. Let’s be honest – the first few weeks will be crazy. Users and candidates will have a ton of questions. Things that you’ve tested over and over again will appear to be not working as expected. Be patient and have enough resources on hand to be able to assist with questions and resolution. Provide frequent updates that also offer tips and tricks and best practices. Finally, make sure you have an escalation process that can be executed in a timely manner.
- Be prepared to provide ongoing training
No matter how much training you do before Go Live, your users are going to need more. Develop a training program to not only address new hires coming into the organization, but also to provide ongoing training for existing users. Short video clips that can be imported to your website or a shared location are a great way to provide additional training to your users and candidates. Link to these resources right from your talent acquisition or learning management system.
- Put together a Road Map for future state
Even if you went all out with your implementation, there will always be features and options you didn’t include, that you will want to add later. Whether this means expanding to additional countries or regions, adding languages, or including add on components and additional features not deployed with the initial implementation, you will want to build a road map of what you want to do and when. Get executive buy-in and make sure these things are included in yearly budget discussions. Also remember to factor in release packs and upgrades. Most systems offer 2-3 upgrades a year, and you’ll want to make sure you don’t get too far behind on these, where support is no longer provided. With each new upgrade, there will be new features you will want to implement, so ensuring you have time and resources to execute these is key.
- Communicate often and effectively
In the first few weeks, plan to over-communicate. Meet daily to review how things are going and send out a daily status report that can be rolled up into a weekly executive report. Nothing is more frustrating to users, when learning a new system, than to not get any sort of communication about what’s being done to stabilize the system, and make things easier. Work with your internal marketing and communications departments to help construct positive messages and updates that are easily visible and accessible. After the first few weeks, develop a communication plan that keeps users engaged, by using a blog, or a system that allows users to post questions and search for answers on previous posts.
- Measure, improve and evolve
Take advantage of the analytics options that come with your system to measure the success of your implementation. What are your candidate drop off rates? Is your retention rate lower? Also create surveys to send out to users and candidates to get feedback on what’s working and what’s not. This will help guide you on ways to improve on what you’ve already done. The system you go live with should evolve over time and not be the same a year(s) later.
- Celebrate Your Success!
Take a few minutes to breathe, relax, and celebrate! You deserve it! You’ve worked hard to get to this point. It’s no easy task to implement a new talent acquisition system – so don’t let all that hard work go unnoticed! Take a minute to pat yourself and the implementation team on the back. Share your success with key members of the project, executive sponsors, and any vendors involved in the project.
The journeys you take with your talent acquisition system before and after the important Go Live Date are both important. After Go Live, continue to push forward to ensure the organization has an ever evolving, state of the art system, that will meet the business needs and streamline processes. Going that extra mile is worth it, so put on your running shoes and get ready to take off!
HRchitect has the technical expertise to assist you with implementing a new talent acquisition system or a post Go Live Strategy. We have worked with many different sized clients, industries, and systems, which gives us an expansive knowledge of the best practice for your organization. Further, if you are in the market for a new or replacement system, HRchitect’s Secure Selection process will help to ensure you get the right system for your organization’s needs.