HR leaders spend an average of 12 hours each week on routine tasks such as answering calls, responding to emails and updating spreadsheets. The more time HR leaders spend on manual tasks, the longer it takes to move forward with hiring steps and get back to current employees who have HR-related issues or questions. Ultimately, this leads to both a frustrating candidate and employee experience.
To cut back on administrative tasks, your team can partner with a seamless hiring, payroll and employee benefits platform, which can make HR processes more efficient, saving your team time and money. Consider the following benefits of tapping into a seamless platform to manage employees from hire to retire.
1. Streamline Hiring Steps
In today’s tight labor market, the best candidates are off the market within 10 days, meaning it’s critical for your team to have a quick and efficient hiring process. But it’s also important to ensure you’re not speeding up hiring so much that you’re sacrificing quality. An integrated hiring, payroll and employee benefits provider can offer you the tools you need to streamline hiring without overlooking key steps.
Hiring steps that can be streamlined include: prescreen surveys, interview scoring, reference checks and background checks. Automated prescreen surveys are sent to each applicant as soon as they apply and save your team time from manually reviewing every applicant – including those who might not be a fit for your open roles. Those who score well on the prescreen survey get moved to the candidate stage, where your team can determine which candidates will be brought in for interviews.
You can also streamline reference and background checks. Instead of playing phone tag with references, candidates provide their reference contact information and surveys are automatically sent to each contact. And with background checks, candidates share the necessary personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically.
With streamlined hiring steps, you can secure top talent before the competition and boost productivity by getting new hires on board sooner.
2. Support an Engaging Employee Experience
With an integrated hiring, payroll and employee benefits provider, the transition from candidate to employee is seamless. Hiring data is automatically transferred to kick off a digital onboarding process – before the employee even starts on his or her first day. Digital onboarding steps can include: signing the employee handbook, filling out direct deposit information for automated payroll, completing tax forms and filling out benefits paperwork. Sharing this information with employees before the first day can keep them engaged leading up to the start date and help avoid the frustration of sitting in the HR office for hours on the first day filling out printed paperwork.
Starting with onboarding and throughout each employee’s time at your company, your team needs to have the right technology and processes in place to make HR-related tasks as user-friendly as possible. If employees can’t find their pay stubs, or lose track of how many systems they need to log into – such as payroll, benefits, time and attendance and countless other systems – they might get frustrated with your company and seek other job opportunities.
The right hiring, payroll and employee benefits provider can make HR processes seamless, keeping employees engaged and saving time that can be spent on their day-to-day responsibilities.
3. Save Your Team Time and Money
Many businesses have different, standalone systems in place for onboarding, taxes, benefits administration, hourly time tracking and time off tracking, and other HR needs. But one of the main drawbacks of tapping into a variety of systems is they don’t interact with one another, meaning your HR team will need to log in to multiple systems and manually update information each time a new hire begins, an employee has a life event that impacts benefits, or an employee leaves your company. Ultimately, these manual tasks take up a lot of time, money and resources.
Rather than using multiple different systems for your HR needs, by instead partnering with a seamless hiring, payroll and benefits provider, you can cut back on manual tasks. For example, if an employee changes his or her benefits election leaves your company, the change will automatically be reflected across your payroll and benefits, rather than your HR team needing to manually make updates and ensure all information is accurate.
4. Reduce Costly Errors
Payroll and related costs can make up about 50 percent of a business’s total expenses, so it’s important to avoid all payroll mistakes and aim for complete accuracy. But when you’re updating employee benefits, payroll and other information manually across several different systems, this poses a risk for human error.
Mistakes related to payroll, employee benefits and other tasks can cost your business in many ways – including from a compliance and employee satisfaction standpoint and financially. In fact, about one-third of businesses face IRS penalties each year due to payroll errors. But by partnering with a seamless hiring, payroll and employee benefits provider, many tasks on the HR side of the business can be streamlined, reducing costly errors.
With the right partner, you can complete a mock payroll run before you officially make the switch to a new platform. Switching to a new payroll provider is a significant undertaking for any business – and mistakes can easily be made if the information is not migrated to the new platform correctly. Working with your hiring, payroll and employee benefits provider, you can time a dry run a few weeks before you officially make the switch, to ensure you avoid the risk of paying employees incorrectly due to administrative errors.
In addition to mistakes related to switching providers and ensuring payroll accuracy, an integrated hiring, payroll and employee benefits provider also enables you to automate benefits reconciliation. When reconciling benefits manually and line by line, your team might mistakenly overlook critical information, and the associated costs can add up.
For example, if a team member quits or is terminated and the news doesn’t get to the HR team in a timely manner, your company might end up continuing to pay for their benefits for months – or even longer longer. With the right platform in place, you can review an automated benefits reconciliation report with each payroll run, saving significant time and helping your team avoid errors.
A seamless hiring, payroll and employee benefits platform can set your team up for success when it comes to hiring top talent, keeping current employees engaged and driving efficiencies for your HR team. For additional tips on selecting the right partner, read our resource, “The Hireology Payroll Buyers Guide.”
