How does SuccessFactors support the HR lifecycle
by Umesh Khandke
The employee lifecycle
Identifying all the stages in the employee lifecycle is essential to delivering a superior employee experience. This HR model encapsulates the complete employee journey within a business, from the hiring process to the performance and finally retirement. An HRMS that individually targets and optimises each of these stages is essential to nurturing and retaining the best talent.
A management software like SuccessFactors can offer a suite of modules and tools that do just this. From onboarding to performance and development, businesses can use one, all or a combination from the suite to answer their HR challenges and fit their specific employee lifecycle.
Hiring
From the very first contact a candidate has with a business, whether its browsing vacancies or submitting an application in response to an ad, they become a potential advocate for the company. A poor employee experience at the hiring process could put off new talent and drive them into the arms of competitors and probably won’t be shy in warning off others. Whether you end up hiring them or not it’s important that each candidate walks away with a good impression.
SuccessFactors Recruitment offers a range of tools for sourcing new talent and managing the hiring process, enabling companies to create a set recruitment procedure designed to offer the best employee experience including:
- Source from a wide range of job boards, social networks, schools and universities from all over the world. Integrated.
- Engage top talent with a self-service responsive career site.
- Mobile apply, interview scheduling, online offer letter management.
Onboarding
The challenge of employee retention begins the minute you take on a new hire. More than 80% of new employees decide whether or not to stay with a company within the first six months of being hired, and 1 in 4 ends up leaving in their first year. To make sure you keep the best talent and make the most of the time and effort already spent in the hiring process, it's important that businesses deliver a superior onboarding experience.
With SuccessFactors Onboarding this experience can start even before the first day with a pre-day one engagement program designed to connect new hires to all the information and support they could need quicker than ever. This includes any internal platforms to help them network both formally and informally for a smooth transition into the work environment.
The onboarding process is made easier for everyone including hiring managers with a step-by-step guide for preparing new hires and an easy-to-use dashboard that can be used to track progress and monitor the process. All the paperwork needed is accessible all in one place with SAP Signature Management by DocuSign, ensuring businesses stay compliant and onboard the new hire properly.
Performing
Monitoring and managing performance is arguably one of the most important parts in the employee lifecycle not least because it has such direct and tangible effects on the business itself. With the right insight and tools performance can be accurately measured to ensure that employees are in line with business goals and reaching their full potential.
With SuccessFactors Performance & Goals this all starts with the library of over 500 SMART goals that managers can set and control, even using cascading goals to see individual, team and company wide progress. From here managers can track the metrics that matter most and make decisions accordingly to ensure performance stays on track.
Managers and employees can also connect with each other across devices and from any location in the world to ensure dialogue with a continuous feedback loop between both parties. Employees can ask questions and make suggestions while managers can track progress and coach teams to success.
Developing
Employee development should be a continuous process through the lifecycle but it most important as they learn their new role and aspire towards a successive one. For training purpose SuccessFactors Learning provides an interactive platform to help employees fit into their new role quickly and easily. They can access training material and videos as well as connect to other employees, making each worker a teacher as well as a teacher for more productive development. It’s easy to create tailored courses for each role and track employee progress, as well as ensure that any necessary qualifications and certifications are achieved for legal purposes.
When it comes to succession, SuccessFactors Succession & Development can help HR teams create a superior succession strategy that efficiently identifies current and potential gaps in line with changing business goals, search and nominate candidates to fill critical roles and create talent pools across the organisation. Companies can even set up mentoring programs and proactively suggest to roles to encourage employees towards succession and accelerate the whole process, saving precious time and money in sourcing new top talent and motivating employees at the same time.
Rewarding
Rewarding employees is essential to keeping them motivated and happy at work but balancing the budgets can be extremely challenging. Nurturing and retaining existing talent need to stay affordable while still offering attractive benefits, otherwise companies’ risk either losing talent to competitors or spending even more than they would on new hires.
SuccessFactors Compensation can help manage this balance with an unparalleled overview of insights that keep track of and help allocate compensation budgets. Employee performance is then monitored to identify and reward the top talent. Compensation modelling can be used to forecast base, bonus and LTI plan designed to find the balance between business strategy competitive pay and affordability.
Find the right combination for your lifecycle
While each of the SuccessFactors suite can help to optimise a specific stage in the lifecycle, many modules cross over and be used to meet the needs of one or more of the stages while each lifecycle will be something different in each business. If you’re not sure which one or more of the suite could be used to answer your current lifecycle challenges, our team can help you identify the best combination for your business.