5 ways spreadsheets fail the recruiting process
It’s time for a change... Spreadsheets are the industry standard tool for recruiting leaders to manage their recruiting workload. They are difficult to configure, time consuming to maintain, and inefficient for reporting. It’s time recruiting leaders had a software that streamlined the headcount plan data, connected with your ATS, HRIS, and Finance systems, and had tools designed to improve your recruiting operational efficiency.
Here are the 5 ways the fail Recruiting Leaders:
1) Spreadsheets are never truly accurate
The Spreadsheet Problem:
Recruiting leaders run a “master spreadsheet file” that houses the source of truth recruiting demand for interactions with finance or executives. Each hiring manager or department maintains their own spreadsheet, requiring a manual reconciliation process to keep the master file up to date.
Change Management: Changes are not tracked and often have a delay from when they are entered by a department to when they are represented on the spreadsheet.
Time Inefficiency: Each sync meeting takes time. If there are discrepancies, there's even more time investigating the cause or seeking approvals.
Data Accuracy: There is rarely a moment where all departments are fully reconciled to the master file. In order to get your data accurate and produce an executive summary, QBR, or board slide, there must be a time intensive and costly team wide meeting.
No Sync with ATS: Offers are manually tracked and require a flow of information from the recruiting team to the master file. If a reconciliation happens and an offer is accepted afterwards, the plan is instantly out of date.
The headcount365 Solution:
With headcount365 every user gets a unique login so their plan and changes are instantly reconciled to the “master file”. We provide customized user permissions to limit access to sensitive information. Approvals workflows are built into the system to track and control plan adds or changes. Financial impact of changes, hiring delays, and hires are automatically calculated, eliminating errors and providing finance real time hiring impact data.
Why it’s better:
Data Integrity: The hiring plan is always up to date. Real time data provides accurate information for executive meetings. Real time data also provides a foundation to create new tools that help talent leaders manage their recruiters and overall recruiting demand.
Time Savings: We eliminate the need for hiring manager reconciliation meetings. We reduce the amount of manual work HRBPs or recruiting leads do to maintain plan accuracy. We reduce the amount of time recruiting operations team members use to build manual reports in spreadsheets. Headcount365 saves thousands of hours per year per company.
Confidentiality: Critical information can be restricted by user, helping keep confidential information confidential.
2) Spreadsheets house formulas in cells, that can be broken or overwritten by users
The Spreadsheet Problem:
Spreadsheets require the use of complex formulas that live in individual cells, that are too often deleted, changed, or incorrectly configured, causing major pain for teams trying to leverage this data for reporting.
Human Error: Cells get deleted, formulas get broken. Copy and paste errors mean the source data may not be accurate. Spreadsheets are vulnerable to mistakes made by human data entry.
Labor Intensive Maintenance: Maintaining a spreadsheet takes a lot of time and effort to ensure all data entering and exiting is accurate. It take even more time if something goes wrong. Recruiting leaders need a tool that can keep track of things automatically, so they can spend less time maintaining data, and more time actioning on it.
The headcount365 Solution:
headcont365 is pre-configured to collect and display data in key tools and reports without the need for custom formulas, pivot tables, or synchronized spreadsheets. Roles status are automatically changed with activity, eliminating the need to manually change a cell upon hire, job opening, or delay. We eliminate the need for the “notes” column, with an activity feed that tracks all changes, so talent leaders don’t have to update a spreadsheet with subjective context. With modification approvals and detailed activity feeds, gone are the days of having to wonder if a value changed and who changed it. The result is much more reliable data for all teams involved in the hiring process.
Why it's Better:
Accountability: With our modification approval process and activity tracking, changes go through an approval process to ensure that all stakeholders are in alignment before changes are made to the headcount plan. Information is no longer missing because of a typo or bad formula.
Maintenance Free: headcount365 requires no structural maintenance for the data to be accurately logged.
New tools: headcount365 can aggregate data and present it to recruiting leaders in ways previously impossible with spreadsheets. See our section below on recruiting tools.
3) Spreadsheets don’t stay in sync with other systems
The Spreadsheet Problem:
The only way data gets into or out of a spreadsheet is if a human makes it happen. If a requisition is ready to be published, it has to be manually entered into the ATS. If a company is using a unique requisition identifier, the responsibility of accurately entering it between systems is on the person performing the data entry. When hires are made, a report from the ATS must be manually input into the recruiting leader’s spreadsheet.
Time Inefficiency: Manual movement of data takes time. Whether it’s the meetings used to manage this process, or the time it takes to physically do the data entry, recruiting leaders lose time that could be spent helping producing hires.
Missing or Inaccurate Data: ATS systems, reporting spreadsheets, and other manual data movement tools require a diligence that often gets sacrificed in lieu of production. Why fill out a spreadsheet or all the information in the ATS, if getting a hire for a role is the company’s top priority.
Human Error: Mistakes happen, especially when a spreadsheet takes multiple reconciliation meetings to be accurate.
The headcount365 Solution:
headcount365 integrates with the modern HR tech stack. Offer data is pulled directly from ATS systems and kept in sync with HRIS and finance systems instantly. Gone are the days of trying to track down discrepancies between systems and how they got there.
Why it's Better:
Cross Platform Data Accuracy: Information across systems is updated in real time, with unique identifiers to ensure accuracy.
Time Savings: headcount365 eliminates meetings and hours of labor to keep the main plan in sync with the HR tech stack.
4) Spreadsheets don’t track changes effectively
The Spreadsheet Problem:
If the hiring plan is reforecasted, typically an entirely new spreadsheet is created, or the existing one is updated to reflect the new headcount plan. Changes to individual requisitions on the headcount plan are often lost causing head scratching moments in the future during reconciliation.
Lost Data: When a reforecast requires the creation of a new spreadsheet, the old spreadsheet is often deprecated, losing the data that helps tell the story of the recruiting demand.
Untraceable Changes: The only way to tell if a cell has changed is to remember the previous value. Activity tracking on spreadsheets is too broad to drive accountability to those who make changes. Any context for a change has to be noted manually, and can not be a requirement for a change.
The headcount365 Solution:
headcount365 has detailed activity tracking that logs and categorizes all changes automatically so that every action is traceable.
Why it’s Better:
Accountability: Detailed activity feed and change history allow us to easily understand why and how changes were made to the hiring plan. Eliminating hours of digging through old slacks and emails to find every one-off change.
Reporting: Recruiting leaders have a clear story about how changes in the headcount plan impact their ability to produce hires.
Financial accuracy: headcount365 users can compare their plan’s current expected spend to the original expected spend from an earlier version in real time and quickly and easily identify changes to the plan and view why they’ve changed.
5) Spreadsheets require outside systems to manage approvals
The Spreadsheet Problem:
If a hiring manager wants to add a new role or backfill request to the hiring plan, they have to seek approval via email, slack, or await a reconciliation meeting to request the change. Once the change is submitted, there is no transparency to the status of that change. Financial calculations for the impact of the proposed changes are dependent on the requestor or financial reviewer and can cause unnecessary operational delays that can be costly for the business.
Missing Transparency: There is limited notice to plan changes for talent leaders and finance, making it difficult to plan for the resources needed to accommodate the change.
Missing Safeguards: If a hiring manager wants to add something to the plan with a start date that does not give enough time for a recruiter to fill the role, there are no safeguards or warnings to do so. This applies not only to time, but compensation, level and other key factors that may need sign off before being accepted into the hiring plan.
Time Inefficiency: A change recognized by a hiring manager will not make it to the recruiting team without a reconciliation meeting.
The headcount365 Solution:
headcount365’s built in approval system can be customized to meet your businesses need for headcount changes and backfill requests. In addition, hiring managers benefit from increased transparency into where their requests are in the approval process via their request dashboard.
Why it's Better
Time Savings: Approvals can be submitted and approved as needed without having to wait for headcount meetings to make the request.
Increased Hiring Manager Transparency: Hiring managers can view the status of their approval within the system without the need for additional emails or slacks.
Change Tracking: All approval activity is tracked giving stakeholders the ability to easily understand why and how changes that impact the hiring plan were made.
Increased Efficiency: Customizable request field requirements ensure that requests are created with all necessary information before being sent to approvers. Cutting down on the unnecessary back and forth to get the required information to make decisions.
Spreadsheets are great at solving problems for many use cases, but can never fully solve one. Recruiting leaders have been dealing with the inefficiency of using a broad solution for a specific problem for too long and deserve a tool like headcount365 to help save time and drive efficiency.
To schedule time with someone from the headcount365 team, please use this link to sign up for a demo!