Automating the hiring process on Office 365

How to Eliminate Chaos and Achieve Hiring Harmony on Office 365

4/11/2017

Hiring new employees can be a tedious, chaotic process. Post a job and hundreds of applicants, if not more, immediately inundate your email inbox. Wading through the mass of resumes and reviewing applicants for the right experience and skills can be arduous.

Finding the right people is often the number one challenge to growing the business. So it’s important that a structured hiring life cycle is implemented in an organized, well-planned way so that HR staff and managers don’t waste time on applicants who don’t fit the skill and experience level, and instead focus on the ones who do.

The process often starts with defining a need for staff. What is the process for new positions? Is there a requisition process that requires approvals? In large enterprises, this is often well-defined; but, in small to medium businesses, this process often just involves word of mouth or sending an email. Once the opening is defined, you have to get the word out. The posting has to be created, which in and of itself is time-consuming. Then the position must be published on any one or few of the hundreds of job sites available online. With the number of job sites available, it can be overwhelming choosing where to post the position to attract the best applicants. Some job sites cover all areas of employment while others cater to specific industries and roles.

Additionally, depending on the size of your business, you might want to post the job internally. If your business has multiple facilities and locations, this can be problematic because you have to post it to each department or share it with each department manager.

Then there is the issue of how to capture interested applicants in an organized way from all sources. Does your website have an applicant interest form that you can direct interested people to upload their resume? Or do they just randomly send them to your email as attachments? How do you gather all resumes to search and analyze them?

Once you have weeded through all of the resumes and chosen the best applicants, then the work and coordination begins. You have to schedule the interviews, keep track of the candidates, determine who is going to participate in the interview process. Very often the hiring process includes second or third interviews and, depending on the position, might even require that the candidate be tested or perform a mock project to ascertain his or her skills.

This manual way of managing the hiring process is challenging, chaotic, and exhausting. But being able to automate the hiring process saves everyone involved time, frees up resources, and eliminates a huge amount of stress.

With a hiring application that is built on Office 365 and SharePoint, the chaos of manually creating a requisition, receiving resumes, and tracking candidates is simplified. Chaos is eliminated; peace of mind emerges.

Often though, these recruiting and hiring applications are out of financial reach for many small to medium businesses. There are hosted applications that allow businesses to manage some parts of the hiring process, like recruiting, but not others like tracking candidates.

What if you could leverage a platform you might already have, such as Office 365, to automate the hiring process? One that also can also plug into a larger HR solution? SP Hiring Application is an out-of-the-box Office 365 and SharePoint application that automates and supports the entire hiring life cycle. With an application such as this, those who are directly involved in the hiring process can automatically and intuitively manage and track the entire hiring process from their own role-based portal, such as the Manager Portal, HR Staff Portal, or Employee Portal. Managers can submit requisitions, be alerts and review new applicants, select candidates and schedule interviews all in Office 365.

Applicants can be directed from job posting sites back to a careers web page. They fill out the application form and upload their resume. The information is routed to an applicant database that is linked to their resume and any other documents submitted, such as writing samples, marketing campaigns, and so on.

HR staff and department managers can easily collaborate, see and share calendars of upcoming interviews, receive alerts when an application is submitted, filter candidates based on categories or skills, and even add notes and set a customized status for each candidate.

Notifications for upcoming interviews can automatically be sent in Office 365 and even be conducted via Skype for Business. Through the SP HR Portal, those involved in the hiring process can see information associated with a candidate, such as their resume, certifications, references, background checks, and other pertinent information.

Once you make an offer to the right candidate for the position and the company, their information can be submitted directly to SP Onboarding application that automates that process. So while the hiring process might be challenging and time-consuming, it doesn’t have to be with Office 365 and SP Marketplace HR Solutions.

To learn more about SP Hiring Application and how it can save your HR staff time and resources, visit us online at www.spmarketplace.com.

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