Finding and retaining top-level talent is a priority across many companies in all industries. The quality of one’s workforce plays a highly crucial role in overall company growth and success. However, as talent markets become more competitive and screening for candidates gets a little bit more difficult, human resource professionals and organizations are turning towards technology to improve their processes. 

The average cost per hire is $4,425 and usually takes about 36 to 42 days. There are two strategies that companies should deploy— to streamline recruitment costs and lower turnover rates, so companies don’t have to hire as often. This requires a talent management strategy that has both the processes and the technology to support their recruiting team. Talent management software is one of the tools these teams will need. 

Top Features of Talent Management Software

The best talent management systems in the world provide HR departments and recruiting agencies with features that help improve the hiring, onboarding, and managing of employees. Here are some of the features that add a lot of value to a company.

Recruitment tracking

On average, about 15% of human resource spending goes to hiring new staff. A lot of these funds go into screening applicants. With talent management software, teams are able to streamline the recruitment process. A recruitment tracking dashboard gives a recruiting officer a more organized view of applicants and their application information. These systems also carry automations that could minimize the time and resources spent looking for new talent. 

Employee management

Adding team members to the team is just the start. Human resource managers then need to onboard and manage them for the duration of their stay in the company. This process involves evaluating performance, helping foster cultural fit, facilitating compensation, managing expectations and conflicts as needed, and so much more. 

With employee management features, HR departments are able to access functions that improve employee management. Some of those functions for better employee management include: 

• Compensation and benefits management
• Payroll management (when paired with an accounts payable software like AvidXchange, companies can then pay their staff remotely)
• HR related compliance
• Learning management, and so on.

Career development tracks

Not all companies believe in investing in their employees, but those that do reap significant rewards. If you’re looking to develop your staff, you’ll need some way to track their performance. Career development features in talent management software will include functions like: 

• Employee evaluation dashboards
• Employee engagement, satisfaction and wellbeing tracking
• Time tracking
• Paid leave and time off tracking, and many more.

How Talent Management Software Simplifies Onboarding

One area that companies often overlook is onboarding of new employees. A surprising 22% of companies still don’t have an onboarding program in place, despite the great benefits that an onboarding process can provide a company. Some of those benefits include: 

• More role clarity
• Lesser employee turnover
• Employee confidence and happiness
• Better culture
• Higher performance and productivity, and many other adjacent benefits

One of the main reasons managers aren’t able to onboard new staff is a lack of a talent management suite that will manage the whole process. Accessing and using a cloud-based talent management system helps because it provides recruiters and managers with a platform to manage and monitor an employee’s journey during his or her first few days in an organization. 

But just how does talent management software help simplify and streamline onboarding processes? Here are a number of ways.

Better employer branding

There has been a main focus on employer branding in recent times. Companies like Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google have put a lot of effort into developing a brand image that attracts talent. That way, their recruitment officers spend less time and energy bringing in applicants. But nowadays, it’s not just about attracting applicants. Managers and recruiters need to focus on attracting the right ones. 

This process involves clarifying the company’s mission, vision, and values and adequately describing their open roles and what qualifications and traits they’re looking for. When companies are able to do this, onboarding processes become easier because most, if not all, applicants will already be aware of the company culture and work environment they will be entering. 

Better applicant tracking

It’s impossible to track the number of highly qualified applicants that simply fell through the cracks during the screening process. A lot of human error goes into the applicant tracking process, from losing resumes to missing out on key details during an interview process. Having applicant tracking software will help in this process and put less strain on the succeeding processes, including onboarding. 

When you don’t have an applicant tracker in place, your company will feel the brunt of consequences tied up to poor applicant-tracking administration. One alternative you can try is to use CRM software to manage communications, files, and conversations with employees. If you’d like to take that route, check out this list of the best free CRM software. While CRM is mostly used for client-facing communications, it can also double as an employee recruitment workflow, especially if you’re a small business. 

Clearer job descriptions and offers

Great talent acquisition depends highly on managers’ ability to set the right expectations for new hires at the onset. When companies aren’t clear from the beginning about what a new hire must do to succeed in an organization and what reward they will receive for that success, it becomes hard for them to thrive in a new work environment. Achieving this outcome involves clearly determining their roles in the organization and how much they will be compensated for it. 

Talent management software carries compensation and benefits tracking systems that ensure new hires are aware of their compensation and roles from the beginning. They can also track back to their benefits and promised compensation later.

Onboarding training

A strong onboarding training process will reduce turnover rates by 60%. And talent management software provides some form of learning management system that a company can use for onboarding training. Using that onboarding system will give your new applicants access to training materials that will help clarify things like: 

• Human resource policies
• Standard operating procedures
• Payroll schedules
• Company culture
• Benefits and career planning
• Company events and highlights, and so on.

Improve employee listening

With a talent management system in place, human resource managers will be able to improve employee listening. This process involves getting feedback from employees on their state of wellbeing and engagement in the workplace and determining areas of improvement. This will play a big role in onboarding as it’s crucial to get feedback from new hires, especially in their first one to three months in an organization. 

Most companies’ onboarding processes don’t extend beyond the first month. Adding employee listening programs to an onboarding journey will make new hires feel that their voice matters, improving employee engagement in the process. You can also use recruitment and onboarding metrics to find out how to improve your applicant hiring and onboarding processes. 

Happy Employees, Healthy Companies

Happy and engaged employees do a lot of good for a company. As Simon Sinek once said, “Happy employees ensure happy customers. And happy customers ensure happy shareholders – in that order.” The whole organization benefits when companies start investing in programs to improve employee engagement and happiness. 

So put effort into hiring, onboarding and managing your employees by placing the right structure. Doing so will bring a lot of great good to the company over the long term.