In the H1 2024 release there are two new features in onboarding, specifically a ‘Final Review’ step before the candidate lands in Manage Pending Hires (MPH) and the ability to enable ‘Automatic Hire’ in Manage Pending Hires’
These two features alongside New Hire Data Review and MPH give the opportunity to really tailor how you review your new hire data during the hiring process. However, enabling all of them could create certain challenges.
Working on a ‘design principle’ that you should review data at least once before the person is hired into Employee Central, these new features mean you should consider your hiring process as a whole and not just what happens in onboarding.
In this blog we will look at these new features alongside existing functionality and provide insights in how they could be used in the hiring process.
New Hire Data Review
This step sits after onboarding has been initiated from recruitment but before the onboardee is asked to complete their personal data. This step is not a required step and can be removed.
The downside of this step is it can ‘slow down’ or ‘block’ the onboarding process as you are waiting on a specific user to review the data. Feedback from customers suggest that when the assigned user is a line manager it can slow the process down as they are unsure of what to do. Increasingly we see lots of customer remove this step. However, it can be really useful for customers who use a third party ATS especially if the onboarding process relies on specific job/organizational data. Therefore, this review allows users to check the data before the onboardee is contacted for their personal data.
Given the ability for ‘Automatic Hires’ out of MPH, rather than doing the ‘data review’ in MPH it would be possible to do the ‘data review’ before the onboardee has completed their data. This will depend on a whether there are any compliance related processes needing you to review the onboardee personal data before they are hired, e.g., checking right to work, or the complexity of your Employee Central rules.
Final Review Step
Before the H12024 release when a candidate completed personal data collection, additional data collection and signed any specific forms they would drop into MPH.
In H1 2024 there is a new feature which allow you to have a ‘Final Review Step’ after the candidate has completed personal data collection, additional data collection and signed any specific forms but before they drop into MPH.
This step could be particularly useful for those organizations who may need to review personal data which is not available to them at New Hire Data Review. This step would allow them to process specific transactions before they are moved to MPH. For example, booking travel for international hires.
If this step enabled, then it could replace New Hire Data Review. There would need to be specific business requirement to have this step enabled as well as a data review in MPH.
Automatic Hire from Manage Pending Hires
In H12024 there is a new feature to ‘Automatically Hire’ employees from recruitment or onboarding directly into Employee Central. If this is enabled, then to meet a the ‘design principle’ of one ‘data review step’ then you should use New Hire Data Review or the ‘Final Review Step’ in your hiring process. The feature has the flexibility to allow Automatic Hires for certain parts of the organization by using the rule ‘Trigger Automatic Hiring of Applicants for Onboarding’. Organization who have volume hires may find this feature useful. However not all hires are supported with the Automatic Hire, specific exceptions are listed in the guide.
If you enable Automatic Hires, you will need to consider the following points:
- The complexity of your Employee Central configuration. For example, if you are using complex pay structures/tariff/union agreements with various ‘oninit’/’onchange’ and ‘onsave’ rules you will need to be 100% confident that all these permutations execute correctly.
- Need to ensure that all the fields required to execute any logic are displayed and rule execute during the onboarding process specifically in New Hire Data Review or Final Review Step
- Whilst you may enable ‘Automatic Hire’, MPH does not go away so you will still need to design a process to ensure all hires are processed correctly and allow for any manual intervention when needed.
Summary
With these options available the starting point should not focus on the ‘functionality’ but first define the ‘Personas’ in your end to end hiring process, not just the onboarding process. I.e., ‘Who does what and why’. Once this has been defined it will quickly show you what feature are needed to support your process.
Remember you can have multiple process variants and with the flexibility of the rules engine you could have different processed for different parts of business. For example, retail stores could have a different process than Head Office.
Finally, it would be on very rare occasions that a hiring process would warrant New Hire Data Review, Final Review and MPH review for the same onboardee.
