The Applicant Life Cycle

How your employees are hired and onboarded into the organization can determine how well you are able to attract—and more importantly—retain top talent.   Listen to Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Cloud Delivery Lead Nigel Wiltshire, as they deep dive into the first life cycle, the Applicant Life Cycle, within Oracle HCM business processes. They discuss how you can leverage the life cycle to optimize your recruitment and onboarding initiatives.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs. Lois: Hi there! In our last episode, we were introduced to Human Capital Management business processes by our HCM guru and Cloud Delivery Lead Nigel Wiltshire. That was a great overall introduction and you should give it a listen if you’re new to HCM. Nigel’s back with us today to talk about the first of the HCM business process life cycles – the Applicant Life Cycle. 01:01 Nikita: Hi Nigel, thanks for joining us today. So first of all, what is the Applicant Life Cycle? Nigel: Hi Niki, Hi Lois. It’s great to be back. Thank you for having me. The Applicant Life Cycle is the initial part of the HCM business processes. In a nutshell, it’s all about identifying vacancies within an organization and taking appropriate steps to fill those vacancies.  Lois: That sounds simple enough! So, how many processes make up this life cycle? 01:27 Nigel: Unlike the three other life cycles that we will be discussing in upcoming episodes, there is just one business process in the Applicant Life Cycle. But within this process, there are many activities. Lois: So one process, but lots going on. OK. Nigel: Right. The business process is called “Recruit to Onboard” and covers the whole process from when the vacancy is identified to the onboarding of the successful candidate to the business. Nikita: And what are the activities within this process, Nigel? 01:52 Nigel: Within Recruit to Onboard, there are six main activities. The first is called “Determine Workforce Need.” Lois: So identifying the need to recruit new employees… Nigel: That’s right, and this can be as a result of existing employee terminations, or it could stem from a workforce planning exercise, which resulted in the need for additional staff based on company growth and change of operations. Next we have “Drive Candidate Engagement.” This activity is where the whole recruitment campaign really starts. It includes the creation of the Job Requisition, where we add all the necessary details to attract the candidate and encourage them to apply to the position. Of course, you want to also attract the best candidates, and so creating an engaging Career Page on your company’s website is paramount,  making it easy to search for and apply for the relevant job. 02:38 Nigel: The third activity is called “Manage Sourcing” and this is all about making the job requisitions visible to candidates, through various medium. I already alluded to one of them as the organization’s own career web pages, something we call the Career Site. Again, configuring that to be vibrant and easy to navigate is key to the success of that medium. Then we have Job Boards, where you can post your vacancy on external job boards for potential candidates to see. This takes all the work of creating a user interface away from the organization, but on the flip side, you have no influence on how the posting looks.  03:12 Lois: That would be places like LinkedIn and Indeed, right? Nigel: That’s exactly right, Lois. There are also Recruitment Agencies, whose job is to take your requisition and search for suitable candidates on your behalf. This is often quicker, as they will have potential employees on their books already that they would refer. Finally, there is the concept called “Social Sourcing.” For this, you would create a campaign that can include a specific audience, which would help you source candidates for the job. 03:38 Nikita: I’m not really sure I get you, Nigel. Could you give us an example of this, please? Nigel: Sure, Niki. Let’s say that you have an opening in Sales. If you create a campaign and include all of the sales team as the audience, they will use their own networks to seek out and refer candidates. This option works extremely well if you have a recruitment bonus scheme, where the referrer gets cold hard cash for recommending an applicant, who subsequently gets taken onboard. Nikita: OK, yeah, I get it now. 04:04 Nigel: The next activity in the Recruit to Onboard process is “Intelligent Screening.” Recruiters are usually very experienced and very often able to skim read a resume to ascertain whether an applicant is suitable for the position they applied for. However, this is not infallible and is, therefore, only one method of screening candidates. Before the recruiter takes a look at the resume, it’s possible in most applicant tracking systems to set pre-screening questions. 04:29 Lois: And these questions are all regarding that particular job role? Nigel: Some of the questions would be tied to suitability for the job and would be assessing categories such as their abilities, certifications, and experiences. Other questions would be knock-out or disqualification questions, which concentrate more on the applicant’s suitability to work, and would include questions around such topics as age, criminal records, and visas. Those candidates that pass the pre-screening questions and subsequent recruiter review would typically go on to be reviewed by the Hiring Manager with a combination of resume review and telephone/face-to-face interview. 05:06 Nigel: Next, we have “Select Candidate and Generate Offer.” So, between the Hiring Manager and Recruiter, each candidate would be pushed through the hiring process, where they would be screened, interviewed, checked for background, and so on. There will, of course, be many candidates that do not pass certain phases of the process and are rejected, in the same way that there will be some candidates who have second thoughts and withdraw their application. However, what the recruiting team is aiming for is to get to the point where they can make an offer to the most suitable candidate and once accepted, the final part of the process kicks in. This final process being “Onboard New Hires.” What we are aiming to achieve here is a smooth transition from applicant to employee. As a rule, there are tasks that need to be performed by many stakeholders to get the new employee up and running. These fall into three main time frames: pre-boarding tasks, day of hire tasks, and post-boarding tasks. 06:03 Working towards an Oracle Certification this year? Grab all the help you can get. Attend a cert prep live event in the Oracle University Learning Community. And once you’re certified, don’t forget to visit our exclusive forum for Oracle-certified learners. If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the community. You will need to log in first. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.  06:34 Nikita: Welcome back. Nigel, you were telling us about the three categories of tasks – pre-boarding, day of hire, and post boarding. Can you tell us a bit more about each of them? Nigel: Sure, Niki. “Pre-boarding tasks,” as the name implies, are those that can be, or need to be performed before the employee’s first day. These are performed by many different people and can range from a request for more information from the employee, such as Bank Account details, to sending the employee a link to view the company’s policies and procedures (although this could be something that the employee does on their first day). It could also be a request to IT so that they can provision user accounts and email addresses, or to Facilities to make sure that the employee has a desk and chair to sit at when they get here, or to the Security team to create an identification badge and/or an access card. 07:24 Nigel: Now, the “Day of Hire tasks” are those that are typically performed by the Employee and Line Manager. For example, the employee may have to collect their ID card from security. They may need to attend orientation training and meet the rest of the team. The manager would be overseeing all of that, and guiding and mentoring the employee through their first, usually nervous, day. “‘Post-Boarding tasks” are simply those that guide the employee through their first weeks, until they get comfortable. This may be topped off with an informal meeting between the employee and their line manager, just as a check-in to make sure they are both doing what they need to do in order to onboard the employee. 07:59 Lois: I think I have an idea, but Nigel, can you tell me why the “Recruit to Onboard” process and all its associated activities are so important? Nigel: Well, I guess it’s like anything in life. If you don’t have a solid plan of action, then all you can hope for is that everything works out smoothly. But by adopting this kind of process, you are giving yourself every possible opportunity to execute your goal, which is to fill the vacancy, with almost military precision. You already know what it is you need, so why would you not look for the most efficient way to achieve it? 08:29 Nigel: In addition, the nature of recruiting often means you have hundreds of candidates applying for a job, and they are not all going to do that at the same time. As a consequence, you may not be able to run them through the hiring process at roughly the same time and speed. Therefore, you end up with some candidates that are at the Review phase, some at Interview, some at Background Checks, and maybe a couple at the Offer phase. This, as you can imagine, makes it very difficult to track who’s who and what’s what. Therefore, if you don’t have a defined strategy, you end up losing track of what’s been done and what needs to happen, resulting in a massive headache and you looking like you don’t know what you are doing. 09:04 Lois: The two main job roles here are the Hiring Manager and Recruiter, right? So, typically, how is the workload split between the two of them? Nigel: Of course, this varies from company to company, but in general, the rule is that the Hiring Manager kicks off the whole process by registering that there is a need to fill a vacancy. The Recruiter, who actually performs most of the day-to-day management of the recruiting campaign, ensures that the opening is posted to the appropriate medium, and then manages the candidates through the hiring process. 09:34 Nigel: Now along the way, although probably 90% of the work is done by the Recruiter, the Hiring Manager does get involved when needed. This is often in the form of Approvals and Interviews, and as a general figure head in case any decision needs to be made. What you have to understand is that the Hiring Manager is usually the Line Manager for the role being advertised. 09:53 Lois: So, they’ll know the job to be filled and who they’re looking for in terms of experience and abilities. Nigel: Yes, exactly Lois. The Recruiter, who is not usually directly related to the department with the vacancy, may not know the job, but will have the skills and experience to find the right candidates and, typically, has multiple vacancies to fill from many parts of the business. So, in essence, it’s a symbiotic relationship between the Recruiter and the Hiring Manager, and together they strive to fill the vacancy as quickly as possible, with the best candidate that applies. 10:23 Lois: And then, that wraps up this process, I guess? Nigel: Yes, from here the employee is onboarded and becomes part of the Employee Life Cycle. Lois: And we’re going to talk about that next week, right? Nigel: Indeed. I’m looking forward to it. Nikita: Thank you so much, Nigel. This has been most informative. Nigel: Thanks for having me. 10:40 Lois: That brings us to the end of this episode. We hope you can take away some useful snippets of information. To learn more about HCM business processes, visit mylearn.oracle.com. And tune in again next week when we’ll be talking about the second of the HCM life cycles – The Employee Life Cycle. Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 11:03 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.