The staffing industry is different in 2021. Millions of people are looking to regain employment, and the job market isn’t short of open roles, but the shape of these opportunities, and the process to fill them, has changed markedly.
Having been given a taste of work flexibility, candidates are now looking beyond their local borders. If a job can be done remotely, it doesn’t much matter if a job is available on the east coast, the west coast, or even in Europe. While many staffing and recruiting firms have struggled to adapt to this new paradigm, those that have been quick to recognize and react have fared incredibly well.
The hiring process itself has changed too. During COVID a large number of candidates experienced a process that was fully remote and largely automated, and they liked it. It turns out that applying, interviewing, and onboarding from your own couch and at your own convenience is quite the upgrade from traveling to far-flung offices to fill out paper forms.
Given these recent and significant changes, there’s perhaps no better time than now to take stock of the staffing industry’s ongoing technological needs. And at Able, our focus is on onboarding software that supports flexible workflows, from the perfectly simple to the high-end and complex.
What are the keys to establishing an efficient and effective onboarding workflow in 2021? Read on to find out.
From the perspective of an outsider looking in, the hiring process can seem riddled with necessary evils – an endless succession of boxes that must be ticked, no matter how painful that process might be. But does it have to be painful? Should it be painful? According to the numbers, an increasing number of candidates are saying no.
60% of candidates drop out of the recruiting process due to lengthy and complicated applications. On the flip side, 38% of candidates are more likely to accept a job offer with a positive candidate experience, and great onboarding can improve employee retention by 82%.
How do you create such an attractive candidate experience? At Able we take a three-phase approach:
Automation: a bad word for factory workers, a great word for recruiters.
An automated tool like Able is designed to take care of the busywork by consolidating and automating workflows. In the process it gives your team up to 40% of their day back, time which they can spend on the high touch, high value, and human aspects of the job – the things that they were employed to do, that are far more fun, and that put more money in the bank.
Automation doesn’t just improve the lives of recruiters. Candidates can be onboarded up to 90% faster, and at half the cost. And by delivering a fantastic candidate experience, you’ll be able to attract and place the best going forward.
Able allows you to create custom workflows based on your needs and wants. You can build an onboarding workflow all within the same view, complete with forms, checklists, and assigned tasks, and with automated reminders to ensure human intervention when and where needed.
E-Verify and Form I-9s are the bane of many a recruiter’s existence. But they shouldn’t be.
Able works to convert the regulatory complexity and confusion into something more human. Clunky paper forms are replaced by an intuitive online questionnaire. Indecipherable scans of IDs and certifications are replaced with the ability for candidates to take and upload photos of the necessary cards and documents. The often awkward and confusing back-and-forth between the recruiter and E-Verify is replaced with complete integration.
A fully compliant onboarding solution will feature:
When you spend all day screening, interviewing, and onboarding candidates, you can become somewhat blind to the processes you use and the experience you deliver. But what do they look like to candidates who are asked to navigate them for the very first time? The following questions can be quite revealing:
Oftentimes a candidate will be required to apply to a job through one portal, onboard through another, and use a wealth of other systems to complete their background check, submit their I-9, complete timesheets, and access pay stubs, along with a wealth of other tasks. If this sounds like your hiring process, you’re consigning candidates to a slow administrative death by web portal.
But by switching to an automated, single sign-on system, or even by simply creating a landing page that collates all necessary systems and links in one place, you’ll offer a far smoother and more intuitive candidate experience.
Finally, onboarding in 2021 is not just about making all systems easy to access, it’s about getting those systems talking to each other.
An example: Able’s new integration with AvionteBOLD, which is set to be one of the first native, UI-integrated solutions in onboarding. Once installed and configured, Able functionality is activated on the Talent record (tab), ready to be utilized in the UI dropdown menu found within BOLD. With no window switching and in a single click, Able’s packages, forms, credentials, and I-9/E-Verify are all right there and ready to go!
When an onboarding request is initiated, a candidate is taken through our dynamic, mobile-first onboarding experience within BOLD. It’s all the intuitiveness, simplicity, and efficiency that recruiters and candidates have come to expect from Able, but wrapped up in BOLD packaging.
Recruiters have the power to monitor Able processes within the Bold UI, like tracking candidate progress and status updates. Once the onboarding process is complete, the results, signed documentation, PDFs, and forms are returned to the BOLD platform. All data is mapped to the appropriate fields and tabs, guarding against duplicate entry and human error.
With the world of staffing changing fast, firms have two choices: evolve, or be left behind. Through advancements like our AvionteBOLD integration, Able is committed to helping staffing firms stay at the very leading edge of innovation.