Analysis and Recommendations: Automating the HR Function and HRIS
You are an HR Consultant who was hired to provide some recommendations to an office on how to automate their HR functions. There are several issues facing this HR office for which you will provide technology recommendations. Based on the scenario provided in this scenario titled 'Business Background', you will be providing some recommendations.
Criteria
You have been given some background for your customer. From this information, you will provide the following recommendation to you client.
1. Analysis: After reviewing the scenario below, how might you analyze the current situation and how would you share your analysis with this customer? Validate this analysis with theory (be sure to cite that is not your own thoughts or words) and practical application reasoning (critical thinking).
2. Recommendation: What technology solution(s) would you make for the current issues facing this HR office? What are some further advantages to technology and HR automation that you would recommend to this business and substantiate? What recommendations, through technology, would you give to this HR office to help them become more proactive business partners? Validate with theory, be sure to cite.
Business Background
The business is a manufacturing warehouse HR office providing products to a customer base of approximately 300 companies. Products include materials for construction contractors. There are approximately 1,200 employees in several offices around the state ranging from office workers, to warehouse crews, to supervisors, to managers. The main office is in a more rural area and has no HRIS system currently in use. They have been benchmarking against other HR offices and found that there are a variety of technologies that might help them manage the employee staff. The HR office currently has 13 HR staff: 1 director, 1 assistant director, 1 secretary, 2 receptionists, 3 specialists (benefits, compensation, recruitment), 3 recruiters/analysts, 1 labor relations officer, and 1 ADA compliance officer.
Right now, a big issue facing the business is growth at a rate of approximately 12% annually. This results in adding additional staff to handle this product increase. This typically is a lot of paperwork in hiring pushes for this HR office, which creates a lot of delays in processing new hires because of the manual processes. HR is typically reactive to internal customer requests vs. proactive, sometimes having teams wait 6 months to fill a vacant position. Many candidate applications are 'lost' and the volume of people applying sometimes for the entry positions creates office coverage issues. Recruiters barely have time to look for these 'lost' applications and review hundreds of others. Testing is required for all candidates (written). Again, these are manual processes. Sometimes people are offered jobs they didn't even apply for.
There is an automated accounting program that pays employees, which is managed by the financial department. HR enters new employees into this accounting database, through an HR Access database, into an excel report, and into the payroll system. The benefits are done only at the orientation meetings every two weeks. When employees/new hires have questions, it can take up to a week for the Benefits Specialist to respond due to all the questions, changes, and new hires.