Like many HR leaders, your fitness goals in 2023 are probably to slim down costs and to pump up your mobility muscles. While getting your TA and TM teams into even better shape can be a challenge, try following our helpful tips to inspire other stakeholders to ask, “Have you been working out?”
1. Trim recruiting costs by upskilling/reskilling
Internal mobility is all the rage for meeting two needs at once: reducing recruiting costs and helping with labor shortages. When it comes to mobility improving profitability, one study shows that hiring internally saves 18% in costs compared to hiring externally.
Plus, enabling greater internal hiring reveals something especially compelling when we look at employee performance and retention together rather than in isolation. According to a study by professors at Cornell and the University of Minnesota:
- Internal hires tend to stay within the organization,
- Internal hires tend to be high performers in their new role, and
- The highest-performing internal hires are more likely to stay vs the highest-performing external hires.
By committing to upskilling and reskilling your existing workforce, you can reduce hiring spend and flight risk at the same time. If you ask Harver’s Chief People Officer Laura Stanley, internal mobility is a new year’s resolution worth keeping.
2. Improve your agility with soft skills assessments
Agility is a top priority for many organizations this year. And just like you can get lighter on your feet by doing plyometric exercises, your HR teams can react faster to what’s coming by assessing soft skills. Objectively measuring teamwork, communication, and other soft skills is a critical predictor of performance in any role, helping talent teams to easily reskill internal talent to adapt to any changes in talent strategy or labor force trends.
McKinsey notes that reskilling significant portions of the workforce soon is a requirement, with the development of soft skills a key element. Adopting soft skills assessments is one way to streamline HR costs and workflows, by enabling faster and reliable evaluations of internal talent to inform succession planning, talent development, and other initiatives that foster greater responsiveness. Some solutions, such as Harver’s soft skills assessments from pymetrics, even include actionable insights for improving a job seeker’s less technical skills to ready them for future roles no matter what lies ahead.
3. Streamline wasted time with automation
At the gym, repetitive tasks like running on a treadmill can help you keep moving. But when it comes to hiring, mindless tasks like scheduling (and rescheduling) interviews feels like going nowhere fast. Skip the hiring treadmill by automating scheduling, reference checking, and other tedious responsibilities.
For instance, a traditional reference check takes 90 minutes of recruiter or hiring manager time when you add up all the manual steps. Meanwhile, an automated solution like Harver’s #1-rated reference checking solution only takes 2 minutes of recruiter time (and returns more candid feedback).
Think about how many checks your team does, then multiply that by 88 minutes. That’s a lot of available time you just freed up.
4. Consolidate your equipment for efficiency
How often would you work out if you had to go to separate places for yoga, weight training, and cardio?
That’s what it’s like for organizations that organically grow their talent strategies and TA/TM solutions over time. This kind of bloat with multiple vendors across the talent lifecycle can weigh down your teams in two ways. First, research shows it takes close to 10 minutes to get back into a workflow after switching digital apps. And second, invaluable data siloed within each offering can add weeks, if not months, to analyzing and acting on insights.
Choosing an HR automation partner with comprehensive solutions is like switching to a gym that has everything you need in one convenient place. Remember to focus on evaluating the people behind the products too. Having knowledgeable and dedicated People Science and Customer Success teams on your side is like having a personal trainer available to guide you to perfect form as you adapt to new TA and TM goals and “exercises.”
5. Showcase your fit body of work using data
Considering all the pressure on HR teams to hire, retain, and develop talent, it’s understandable if you want to show off a bit. It’s not about vanity, it’s about demonstrating the results of your hard work. Especially if other stakeholders in your organization don’t yet see the value to the business you add by hiring talent who carry their own weight and more.
To help demonstrate TA’s return on investment, check out our whitepaper on how to connect TA KPIs to business growth. It walks through everything you need to strike a pose that would impress even the most sculpted weightlifter, including how to show that TA contributes to top and bottom line success.
Conclusion
Whatever your HR new year’s resolutions are for 2023, the actionable tips above will help slim down your HR costs. Plus, unlike fad diets, our suggestions actually have staying power.
To explore better, faster solutions for greater hiring and development efficiency, request a demo to learn about Harver’s unified suite of automated solutions for making better talent decisions, faster.
