What do HR want?

What do HR want?
This is the golden question when selling to HR people at whatever level. Having recently attended an Online Recruitment meeting many wanted to know what issues HR were facing and what their future Recruitment Software or online needs shall be.

In terms of Recruitment Software and Online Support it really depends on where they are in their Organisational Development. HR is often reflected in the industry or Organisation it supports, depending both on the market place and changing needs of the business. For example Retail HR may consider Interactive HR systems in the future to communicate with its workforce, whilst Utilities are up-grading their Intranet Recruitment systems to manage over 300 Internal vacancies a year.

With the current HR landscape many organisations are dealing with Acquisitions and Mergers resulting in needs for new Systems, alignment with Group or Global Legacy systems, whilst trying to bring in leading edge modules linked to Performance.

The impact of IT on HR has resulted in reduction of head count and a streamlined HR Contact Centre either for Processing or second level Employment Law advice. Therefore the fallout from this has been to either increase the use of HR Business Partners in the field or to up-grade to Employee led real-time HR systems.

When looking at Recruitment Software or Online Solutions many will either need to track internal candidate applications or want to integrate external recruitment with Brand and Talent Management.

The criticism of HR Managers/Directors that they donít believe Online Recruitment works for them, is no longer the case with growth in Online Assessment, Micro sites and individual Recruitment campaigns for specific job roles.

Some of the objections HR will raise are around Employment Law and Discrimination for example a candidate recently took a Legal firm to court having been rejected for a graduate role the previous year he reapplied again and got a straight ëNoí based on his previous application notes without full consideration.

With the new Employment Agency Act organisations have to keep all employees and contractors informed about what is happening to the business and therefore are up-dating their Intranets to be inclusive of all third party relationships.

Data Protection issues are more prevalent from the Public Sector, asking advice on how long you should retain applications so not to fall foul of the previous example. .

To conclude marketing Candidate Recruitment databases or Online Solutions to HR is only achievable if you understand what their biggest organisational drivers are. There is a move to use more Online Solutions such as banners to their own site or multiple job postings, however there is still resistance to use some new tools such as Filtering Questions.

HR has changed and will have to continue to in order to keep up with the business drivers around Performance Management, Talent Management and Organisational Development. For more information or to review the CIPD recruitment surveys please click on to www.cipd.co.uk


Fiona Brady, hrhrpersonnelservices.com