Articles by: Zaid Dabus

Attracting Top Talent With an Effective HR Strategy

The Health and Human Services industry has been on the rise for many years.  Last month, Deloitte University Press reported that employee growth in the industry has increased by 42% since the year 2000, a staunch contrast to the overall private sector’s employment growth of just 9.8%. The report concludes that the competition for highly skilled clinical staff is becoming increasingly aggressive and demand doesn’t seem to be letting up.

Differentiating yourself from the competition to attract and retain top talent begins with implementing an effective HR strategy. Here are a few key ways you can develop your organization into an employer of choice for today’s workforce.

Develop Your Company Culture Instilling a strong company culture and employer brand is key. Highly skilled prospects know they have options, leaving it up to you to show them why you are their best option. During the hiring and onboarding process, it’s important that the new hire has a clear understanding of what the organization has to offer outside of salary and benefits and to decide if the two are a good match. With an industry turnover rate over 20%, establishing a good fit early on is vital to retaining top talent.

Step Up Your Online Presence Even with a strong culture as a competitive advantage, you still need to get the word out about your organization and the open positions. This involves communicating the characteristics of your workplace across various channels. According to a recent Workforce Management Trends survey DATIS conducted, 84% of respondents said they use as many as five different channels, including the organization’s website, job boards, employee referrals, social media, and word of mouth. The more visibility your job openings have, the more likely you are to recruit top talent. In addition to common recruiting channels, demonstrate how much your current employees love working at your organization by sharing real employee experiences. To get started, even something as simple as an “About Us” page with team pictures and bios can help prospective candidates connect with existing employees.

Keep Your Team Happy Reward hard work and make advancement opportunities known. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 33% of organizations are now offering their top talent greater benefits packages when they can’t match competitor salaries. Communicating your organization’s benefits and growth opportunities is a great way to keep employees engaged and satisfied. Establishing goals for the entire organization and monitoring them closely will allow for maximum alignment and will overall increase employee engagement.

The Health and Human Services industry is growing at a rapid pace, and the need for highly skilled clinical staff is more competitive than ever. Get ahead of the crowd and step up your HR strategy to attract and retain top talent with even more tips by downloading our ebook: Recharge Your HR.

This DATIS Blog was written by Zaid Dabus, DATIS, on June 8th, 2017 and may not be re-posted without permission.

HR Analytics: Automation, Unification & Executive Oversight

We have written plenty about the emergence of an increased reliance on technology for HR analytics. As we move into the third quarter of 2017, a new survey conducted by CareerBuilder reported that 45% of organizations plan to move to new HR & recruiting technologies this year. Amongst the greatest concerns is the need for data driven solutions for automated recruiting, interdepartmental communication, and executive oversight. With so much raw data available, HR analytics are now the vanguard of the HRIS industry.

Can You Trust Your Automated Processes? Recent years have introduced an influx of automated recruiting and hiring tools that are lightyears ahead of traditional job boards. These recruiting platforms offer A-Z solutions for the hiring process and have innovated the workflow of hiring professionals. However, many HR pros are still finding themselves in the dark about what is and isn’t working in their hiring process. Though many applicant tracking systems do offer analytics, the emphasis on data analytics and results just hasn’t made it into the mainstream.

To ensure that your automated process is doing the job, you need to be able to analyze these results and implement real, actionable initiatives. This is where applicant tracking data comes in to play. From analyzing the verbiage of your job posts, to reporting features that allow you to report on number of vacancies, recruiting days, manager progress, and daily lost revenue per open positions. This enables constant monitoring of the recruiting process and the opportunity for continual improvement.

A CFO, CTO and CHRO Walk into a Bar… It is evident that now, more than ever, aligning organization-wide strategic plans can create powerful partnerships that transcend departmental goals and exceed organization objectives. Unifying expectations through interdepartmental communication reduces information silos. We recently discussed the negative effects of information silos, and concluded that there seems to be a direct correlation between the number of systems used within an organization and the number of internal communication issues caused by informational silos.

Removing information silos is key to unifying the benchmarks of each department to achieve the goals of the organization at large. With cross-departmental access to data and the ability to effectively communicate HR analytics, finance is never in the dark about HR issues and HR is constantly supported by IT. While HR works to fill a vacant position, finance can know exactly how much that vacancy is costing per day, and plan accordingly. No more over-hiring, no more under-staffing. Everyone is on the same page.

Executive Oversight, Without Micromanaging The role of an executive in the Health and Human Services industry is often one of the most demanding roles, habitually a balancing act between program development, fundraising, planning, and people managing. Therefore, executives need concise and relevant reporting of HR Analytics to view trends and identify key workforce issues. Robust real-time reports provide innovative and actionable insights and save valuable time.

The DATIS Workforce Analytics module is a powerful business intelligence and HR analytics toolkit. This toolkit includes executive, administrator, and manager dashboards, delivers robust standard reporting, and provides an easy-to-use custom Report Builder. Download our comprehensive data sheet today to discover DATIS Workforce Analytics.

This DATIS Blog was written by Zaid Dabus, DATIS, on July 13th, 2017 and may not be re-posted without permission.

Why Workflow Automation is a Game Changer

Over the last decade, the speed of business has increased by leaps and bounds; open jobs are posted and filled within days and contracts are sent and received within seconds. Despite the increasing speed of business, preliminary results from an upcoming survey conducted by DATIS have concluded that 93% of Health and Human Services organizations surveyed are still handling some aspect of their workforce management processes manually. While some stand by the mantra “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the emergence of ultra-efficient workflow automation software has shown us that not only are manual business processes broken, but also how to easily they can be fixed.

Manual processes decrease efficiency and lead to three main business process failures; wasted time, information silos, and human error.

Wasted Time Whether it’s the process of filling a vacant position or onboarding a new employee – these three failures can cause an organization to waste valuable time and resources. Many Health and Human Services organizations find themselves with unfilled positions due to high turnover and inefficient recruiting & onboarding cycles that are riddled with manual processes. Hiring Managers are often tasked with sending job descriptions back and forth to the HR Director and tediously prescreening each applicant before forwarding them to a department head for an interview.

Throughout the entire process, time has been wasted on menial tasks that can easily be automated. Workflow automation allows busy organizations to maximize efficiency in the business process.

Information Silos The time spent performing manual processes also inevitably causes the emergence of information silos, where crucial information is virtually unknown to various departments of the same organization. Though information can now be shared and tracked in real time, information silos continue to cause communication problems and make interdepartmental communication an ongoing battle. For example, while HR is actively searching for the ideal candidate for their nursing team, Finance still may not have approved the salary needed to find this candidate, resulting in a complex situation once an offer letter is sent out or accepted. All the while, Nursing is still scrambling to keep up with the extra workload resulting from the vacancy. Workflow automation can unify the departments during these complex processes and foster transparency and understanding throughout the entire organization.

Human Error In addition to these two main process failures, one of the greatest threats stemming from manual process is human error - the inevitable extra zero or accidental deletion of an important document. The more individuals involved in a process, the more likely human error will arise. The addition of manual and paper processes only increases this chance even further. With workflow automation, vital documents are protected and redundancies in the process are eliminated and thus ensure the right person gets the information they need on time.

Workflow automation is no longer the future of the business process; it is changing the way we work right now. Workflow automation provides the structure, efficiency and accuracy needed to keep pace with today’s business environment. Unifying processes throughout various departments can eliminate wasted time, information silos and human error to create a more effective and successful organization.

This DATIS Blog was written by Zaid Dabus, DATIS, on August 10th, 2017 and may not be re-posted without permission.