HR Managers: The HR Professional

The HR Professional - Valerie Sorohan from IrishJobs.ie

Efficient HR management starts with an efficient system. With years of experience in dealing with some of the top recruiters in Ireland we’ve distilled the top three attributes that all top HR professionals should develop.

HR Management Skill 1

Organisation is the key to effective HR and recruitment. On any given day a busy HR professional can be dealing with applicants, employee personal issues, and payroll. The ability to multitask and stay on top of everything is the key to professionalism in HR. Recruitment software goes a long way towards organization and efficiency.

HR Management Skill 2

Seeing both sides of the picture is a key attribute for HR professionals to develop. In essence you represent both management and the employees and keeping abreast of new developments and HR strategy is the way to manage your dual focus.

HR Management Skill 3

Recruit the best. Recruitment is the key to the development and growth in your business. Having an automated recruitment software solution allows you to find the very best applicants for available positions in your business. 

The most important aspect of HR and recruitment today is to maximize your output by using technology to streamline your business practices. Economic indicators show that recruitment is busier that even before and HR professionals must make sure that they stay ahead of the game and drive business forward.

For more information on recruitment and how to recruit the best people for your business, please visit IrishJobs.ie

Applicant Tracking Software: Recruit the Best

Effective Tips For Recruiting Employees

One of the biggest job functions for Human Resource departments is the process of recruiting employees. Finding the right employee for your company is one of the hardest things to do. It is not as simple as sifting through CV’s to see who has the most experience or education. 

With the global economy showing only sluggish signs of recovery, it has become more important than ever to make sure you have a perfect fit.

The first aspect of recruiting employees is to determine and develop a list of core requirements for the position. In conjunction with key people in your company, you need to decide on the attributes of a candidate with reference to the requirements of the position. It may even be useful to gauge the requirements of your customers, if the position includes interaction on that front. 

• Decide on the qualifications that a candidate must have in order to do the job effectively.
• Define the type of personality that you are looking for with reference to the other members of the team and the company values as a whole.
• Make a list of the characteristics that the company is looking for as well as experience levels, salary bands and management potential.

Employment opportunities can be posted in various ways. Many companies advertise the position internally at first before looking further afield. You can utilise the power of social media, online job portals and traditional media to cast the net as wide as possible.

The Role of HR software in recruiting employees

Technology has made the job of recruiting employees much easier. This is mostly due to the introduction of a systematic approach to the entire process. Having a system that handles applicant tracking throughout the recruitment process is a core benefit of investing in HR software. You can use HR software as a vital tool in recruiting employees, because you will already have a list of prerequisites, programmed into your software. This not only saves time in terms of reading many of the CV’s you receive that are not suitable, but can streamline the interview process using applicant tracking.

HR Software

People Are The Most Important Human Resource!

Human Resources is not just about payroll, change management and budgets. The most important aspect of HR is still people. The main function of any HR department is to find, attract and retain the best people for the available positions in your business. If you lose sight of the fact that you are dealing with people, you will simply be running data through a system, and that can raise serious issues about candidate management and attracting talent to your organisation.

Using HR software that actively manages people is the only way to effectively run an HR department. Applicant tracking software does not just focus on numbers. It is tailored to ascertain the needs of your organization and match it up to the people who are applying for available positions. You can use applicant tracking to manage a potential candidate through the entire recruitment process.

People Management Skills In HR

Managing people is one of the most difficult aspects of the HR function. One of the biggest aspects of HR at the moment is the concept of change management within businesses. The recession and sluggish recovery of the economy has meant massive changes in structure, functioning and the development of businesses. HR cannot simply play catch up and try to ‘handle’ employees and new candidates. Every business must be focused on leading change through effective CRM software, practices and active employee management. All change management should keep the aspect of people at the very front of the line. The human aspect of HR is all about effectively managing your people as people. Not as expendable resources.

You Can Only Crunch Numbers, Not People

Look at your talent pool when you are hiring new people to your organization. Ask yourself if they will be able to adapt to change as it occurs and use the feedback provided by applicant tracking software to make informed decisions about new candidates or when you are promoting from within. Every position in your organization is important, and so are the people that you appoint. It is the people who work for you who will drive your business forward.

Recruitment Software

Human Resources: Formal vs. Informal Recruitment

The recruitment market is becoming highly specialised as people look for different ways of recruiting the best people for available positions in their organisations. There are a number of practices, as well as decisions involved in the recruitment process and HR practitioners need to have all of the information available to them in order to make the best decisions. This is why recruitment software and programs such as applicant tracking are so important to the overall process.

Human Resources is a constantly changing environment. During the 1980’s the emphasis was on hiring exceptional individuals, whereas the 90’s called for more team oriented people to fill key roles within organisations. Today many companies are not only looking for a specific set of skills in a potential employee, but a wider range of general competencies and talents. There are also new ways of discovering talent and attracting them to your organisation that have led recruiters to use both informal and formal avenues of recruitment.

Informal Recruitment

This could be described as word-of-mouth recruitment, or at management level it is commonly known as headhunting. Some recruiters choose not to use this approach as the feel that it excludes many people who may not hear about the job. Using social media networking and other forms of ‘soft marketing’ may be a way of spreading your net a little bit wider in the search for excellent candidates for your business. This is where the use of applicant tracking software and recruitment software plays such an important role in capturing key data about potential employees for your talent pool. Good recruiters do not let any information about candidates go past them without capturing them in the net. You never know who is going to be a perfect catch for the future.

Formal Recruitment

The key to effective formal recruitment is to have the right job specifications and the right advertising strategy to attract the right employees. The strength of formal recruitment lies not only in the ability to attract the right people for the job but to have the software and the technology to handle them throughout the system. Human Resource departments are moving closer to the technological advances of recruitment software and applicant tracking to revolutionise their initial attraction and selection of possible candidates.

Choosing one candidate from a talent pool does not mean you need to ignore the rest of the people in the pool. Effective HR software allows you to keep all of the data you have on prospective candidates and use it for future employment opportunities with the business.

Online Applicant Tracking

How Does Online Applicant Tracking Really Work?

You can read a hundred articles on the benefits of using online applicant tracking software in your busy HR department, but the aspect that most HR managers want to know is how does the software work and what benefits will it bring to the rest of the company as well as the HR department? 

Most people understand the importantce of automation and a paperless system, but savvy HR managers want something more; something phenomenal to drive the technology and ensure management buy-in for a recruitment software and applicant tracking system.

Recruitment Software Explained

The most important factor about recruitment software is that it is a merge of systems in the company. HR provides a number of different functions and works within a business to manage these functions. The first thing that good recruitment software has to be able to do is combine the functions of HR with benefits to the rest of the company.

If a department has a need to hire a new employee, with a recruitment solution, the manager will be able to prepare a report in the system that is sent to the HR department. This report forms the first step of the recruitment software system. With no more than a click of a mouse, the HR department is able to tap into an existing talent pool, where the technology behind the system will match up the needs and requirements of the report to the available candidates and skills on offer. Using recruitment software the HR department can advertise the available position internally and externally across a variety of E-recruitment platforms.

With E-recruitment forms, a potential candidate will be able apply and submit their CV online which is then forwarded to the HR department and pre-screened for skills matching. Any CV’s that are matched using the recruitment software are flagged for the interview process. During the interview process, an applicant is tracked through the system using a series of reports from the interviewers to make the process faster and easier. 
Recruitment software and applicant tracking frees up HR to perform different business practices while managing all employees using an effective and efficient technological system.

Online Applicant Tracking

Decision Making In The Context of Human Resources And Recruitment

Human Resource management is all about making decisions. Choosing the right candidate for the position available is not something that should be left to chance or guesswork. The role of decision making in HR is a complicated one and using the online applicant tracking and recruitment software available, you will be able to make decisions that are based on true evaluation of all the factors.

How to Choose the Right Candidate?

In any recruitment process the ability of the candidate is weighed up against the suitability of the candidate.  While the interview process is a vital part of decision making in HR, it has been established that the ‘human’ factor can be the one to cause a problem. In an interview there are two or more personalities involved; this can skew the decision making process in many ways, and using recruitment software may be the way to overcome it.

“I believe in the adage: Hire people smarter that you and get out of their way” Howard Schultze: CEO of Starbucks

Firstly, recruitment software is used to match up the ability and potential of any candidate to a specific position using a finite set of parameters. Custom based recruitment software could be exactly what your HR division is looking for to increase the effective decision making of the department. It is not always about streamlining functions and saving money. Learning how to choose the right candidate for a position is a highly skilled process. Recruitment software removes the risk of personal attitudes impairing the decision making process.

Human resources has become a highly specialised niche market. It is no longer just about finding labour or sifting through CV’s to see which one appeals to you. Using technology is way of bridging the personal decision making process and the science of recruitment in a seamless solution. HR departments should develop policy that filters through the entire organization. This will allow for better decision making when it comes to attracting and developing talent.