june 28, 2018

Recognising the Symptoms – Signs your AP Workflows could be improved

Kris Elliott

Imagine you need to hire a bunch of staff all at once. You might be running a packhouse and need seasonal pickers, or maybe you run a meat works and the busy season is looming. Maybe you have winery that needs harvesting, extended Christmas hours you need to staff up for in retail, or a garden products company that needs all hands-on deck as spring approaches. Whatever the case, you need feet on the ground and you need to get them all there in a very timely fashion.

How do you communicate with and gather meaningful information from a pool of applications made up of hundreds of people…? You don’t want to reply on traditional snail mail but nor do you want 2,000 applicants showing up at your office all at once to collect forms and then returning once completed. So, before you’ve even posted the first ‘staff wanted’ advert you’ve hit you first challenge. You need to control the way the information comes to you, but you don’t have to print or send all the various forms.

The next step is going to be to figure out how to handle all that information when it come back in. The forms, CV’s, cover letters, applications, etc all need to be compiled for review and evaluation. If you’ve just thrown a PDF application form on your website and asked that people completed and email it back with a copy of their CV then some unenviable person is going to have to not only monitor that inbox, but also print and/or save the documents as well as key all the information into a centralised place so that you can make sense of it all. You can’t hire people if you don’t know who the applicants are right…?

Then comes the culling. The stripping out of all the applications that don’t meet your criteria. Perhaps they have no experience, or maybe they are under qualified. Perhaps they lack a work visa, or maybe they worked for you last year and you swore you’d never re-hire them. However, that evaluation is done, unless you want a stream of phone calls asking about their outcome hitting your main office line you are going need to let people know you are turning them down. Are you going to email them or post a letter…?

After that initial bedlam there is a brief reprieve before the interviews start. But during calm you need to figure out how to evaluate and rank the interviewees in such a way that the process is fair. After all, there will be multiple interviewers and you’ll need to able to compile and compare their feedback to get down to the ideal candidates. An interview scorecard is a fairly common practice however these often add more admin work as someone has to key that information into a system so the results are clear. The unsuccessful applicants then need to be followed up and the onboarding processes needs to commence for the new recruits.

At some point after the ‘yes’ candidates are tabulated the recruitment process needs to morph seamlessly into the onboarding process. Now that you have new staff, you’ll need to get contracts signed, paperwork completed, inductions scheduled, training completed, equipped issued, and all the while ensuring the new staff are settling into their new roles. But onboarding is a topic for a whole other blog so for now let’s focus on recruitment.

The recruitment process is usually fraught with stress, mired by manual processes and plagued with forms and paperwork. But what if it didn’t have to be…?

Imagine a public facing webform for applications that isn’t just a printable PDF. Imagine the form allows applicants to input their own data along with their supporting documents. Imagine an automatic validation that check for certain criteria (e.g.: work status, previous exit evaluations, etc) and filters out the unsuitable applicants. What if it could also automatically generate and send a standard “Thank you but no…” letter to the applicant entered email address…? What if all your interviewers could key their score card results during the interview so that as the last interviewee walks out your door you already have a ranked result for the whole process…?

And what if you could get all the way to this point in the recruitment process before you realised that you hadn’t touched a piece of paper…?

You’d have a re-energised team who are no longer as ‘time-poor’ as they were and who can proactively facilitate the recruitment process. You’d have an HR department enabled to focus on strategic outcomes rather than being mired in manual operational tasks. You’d have not only instant visibility of your processes but also auditability to ensure policy and procedure are followed. But most importantly, you’d have a new team who are positively motivated by the ease and efficiency of your recruitment process that are ready to hit the ground running with an organisation prepared for their arrival.

UpFlow Solutions specialise in Business Process Automation (BPA) and Digital Transformation. We can partner with you to deploy just this kind of solution. From filling a single vacancy to recruiting thousands of fixed term employees, we can make the process as efficient and painless as possible. Recruitment processes don’t have to be stressful, time consuming or expensive.

If you would like to understand how we can help you and your organisation please contact us to arrange an initial meeting.

Kris Elliott
Solution Sales Executive

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