It should come as no surprise that recruiting is more complex than ever these days. From talent gaps, skills shortages, and ever-changing market conditions to cumbersome processes and siloed technology, HR and talent acquisition teams have their work cut out for them.
However, one challenge reigns supreme: disconnected processes and technology. In fact, according to the Lighthouse Research & Advisory 2024 Talent Acquisition Trends Study, 75 percent of teams struggle to forecast their needs accurately, and 58 percent of teams missed their hiring plan last year, putting their overall business plan at risk.
These surprising numbers, caused by a disconnection between workforce planning software and the applicant tracking system, lead to four main hiring traps that can harm your business:
- Reactive hiring
- Over-hiring
- Hiring wrong-fit candidates
- Long hiring cycles
What is the ultimate dream for more aligned and efficient processes? Connecting your workforce planning solution and hiring solution in one single platform.
Today, we’re making that dream a reality in Bob. Our brand new module, Bob Hiring, is our built-in ATS that connects directly with our workforce planning module for more strategic and streamlined hiring from one platform. Let’s look at how it works.
Say hi to Bob Hiring
Before we dive into the beauty that is the connection between Bob Hiring and Workforce Planning, let’s look at an overview of Bob Hiring on its own. Bob Hiring allows HR and talent acquisition teams to fast-track the hiring process using an all-in-one centralized solution.
Unified journey
As mentioned earlier, siloed processes make an already complicated recruiting process that much more difficult. With Bob Hiring, you’re implementing and maintaining a single, unified platform for all your processes. Not only does this centralize actions and provide a familiar and easy experience for hiring managers (no need to learn yet another platform!), but it also connects to Bob’s Core HR analytics—providing the data and insights to drive strategic decision-making.
Process efficiency
Time is of the essence, especially in the world of recruiting. Within Bob Hiring, you can seamlessly build and manage your talent pool efficiently by:
- Configuring your application form to collect only the data you need
- Collaborating with your hiring team
- Scheduling interviews and sending emails directly from Bob
- Evaluating candidates with custom scorecards that are visible to the rest of the hiring team per position
- Sending and managing offers with eSign
- Seamlessly transitioning candidates into your new hire flow to begin pre-boarding and onboarding in a couple of clicks
Pipeline growth
But wait, there’s more! From within Bob Hiring, you can also ensure you’re finding and attracting the right talent internally and externally. Post your open positions to more than 2,300 job boards with global reach, share open job opportunities on your company’s career page, and connect your existing job board contracts for easy posting. If you run internal referral campaigns, use Bob Hiring to generate custom links for your people to post job opportunities on their social networks and watch your candidate pipeline grow.
Candidate experience
First-year turnover is often caused by a bad or incorrect hire (or poor onboarding), costing you in employee churn. According to research by SHRM, replacement costs per employee can be as high as 50-60 percent, with overall costs ranging anywhere from 90-200 percent. Bob Hiring helps you make a great first impression with your company’s brand and culture on full display. It keeps your candidates engaged with a portal that holds information, including the role(s) they have applied for, and the data they submitted for those positions. Don’t worry; you can handle compliance requests (like GDPR) and allow candidates to easily manage and delete their data. Plus, this exceptional experience continues for candidates who become new hires with a similar experience during pre-boarding and onboarding.
Strategic hiring: Bob Hiring + Workforce Planning
Okay, Bob Hiring on its own is a fantastic opportunity to streamline your recruitment process. But the real magic happens when you connect Bob Hiring to our Workforce Planning module, consolidating your tech stack.
According to Josh Bersin, the average large company has more than 80 HR tools, and many global companies have twice that. When you consolidate and break down tech siloes, you’re not only saving money and streamlining operations but also strengthening security, simplifying collaboration, creating less manual tasks, and ensuring a great user experience. So, how does Bob Hiring and Workforce Planning help you do just that?
Streamlined processes
Collaboration is key to efficient and effective hiring—especially when it comes to planning with finance teams. However, when you’re working in emails and spreadsheets for planning, it can make transparent and aligned communications messy. That’s not the case when it’s all done in Bob.
Let’s say your R&D team needs to hire a new DevOps Team Lead. This position request is entered into the Workforce Planning module by the manager of this new role. From there, communication, budgeting, and approvals from all your stakeholders for this position occur in Bob. Once approved, this position is moved into Bob Hiring with a few clicks. You can then set up your job description, configure your application, post to job boards, and complete your recruitment process while keeping everyone in the loop. Once you’ve found your perfect candidate, you can send them an offer from within Bob and add them to your pre-boarding and onboarding workflows also in Bob.
Plus, with all these processes in one platform, you benefit from more robust analytics and insights to optimize your work.
Recommended For Further Reading
Actionable data
Speaking of insights…unifying hiring and workforce planning within a single HR system makes it easy to translate business goals into hiring and bring hiring metrics back to the business. You’ll have the ability not only to plan and implement but also to monitor and track them on an ongoing basis in order to identify areas of concern and adjust proactively. For example, you’ll be able to leverage metrics like source of hire, sourcing channel spend, target versus actual hires, and more. All of this will help keep you aligned with your plans and provide easy, data-based insights you can share with other leaders across the organization.
Wrap your head around strategic hiring
With all the ups, downs, and in-betweens of the recruitment market, streamlined processes and removing siloes is critical. Consolidating key processes like workforce planning and recruiting into one platform can greatly impact the experience of candidates, your internal teams, and your business. With the addition of Bob Hiring, our customers can now do just that—saving time on manual processes and gaining time to focus on building relationships with your most important resource, your people.
From Shelby Blitz
Shelby is the Director of Content at HiBob. She's passionate about the written word and storytelling. In a past life, she was a music journalist. When she's not writing and editing you can find her baking sweet treats in the kitchen.