Benefits of Unifying Staff Management Tools with headcount365
Table of Contents
What are Staff Management Tools?
Staff management tooling is the software teams use to manage all existing and to-be-hired employees. While every company has its own recipe for how these tools work together, one thing is consistent.
There are Two Categories of Staff Management Tools
Individual Staff Management Tools
Individual tools are administered by a singular team. HRIS for HR, FP&A for Finance, and ATS for Recruiting, and arguably spreadsheets for hiring managers.
Difficult or expensive to provision users outside of the core team’s users.
Lack of communication with other tools requires manual entry of data when making changes.
Difficult to align data to other individual staff management tools.
Collaborative Staff Management Tools
Spreadsheets, Communication apps, and Project Management tools prioritize collaboration over focused functionality.
Workaround heavy. Multi-purpose tools that aren’t built for a use case have trade-offs for functionality.
Historical activity tracking is difficult. i.e., you can not track how many times an individual cell in a spreadsheet has changed.
Disconnected from core systems. Challenging to get data from one to sync to another, or reference data to make a decision.
Weak Analytics. Workaround tools don’t aggregate staff management data into a unified story – especially when trying to add context to long-term planning like reasons, impact, or timing of changes.
Disparate Staff Management Tools Cause Chaos
Staff management for most companies is disparate systems catered to specific users with limited cross-functional automation, usually due to data security or the cost of licenses.
Example: Backfilling Attrition is 13 Steps Across 8 Tools
Requested in email/slack by hiring manager
Tracked in the headcount tracker by the hiring manager
Processed by HR in the HRIS
Backfill requested in email by hiring manager
Approved in google form/Jira/Asana
Given to Recruiting via email/slack
Track by recruiting on a spreadsheet
Shared with FP&A in a meeting
Backfill manually entered into the FP&A tool for tracking
Manually entered into an ATS to start recruiting
Status updates on backfill tracked in project management tool, communicated to managers in meetings/email updates
Hired candidate manually entered into HRIS
Hired candidate details manually reconciled with the FP&A tool in a meeting
Headcount365 Unifies Individual Staff Management Tools
Added Context: Each individual system is enhanced with context from other systems, where data or activity from one system can be added to another without compromising data privacy or security.
Reduced Manual Data Entry: It’s easy to port data about staff from one tool to another when they are linked with a unified requisition ID. Requesting backfills, pushing jobs to the ATS, and reconciling the budget all happen with a click.
Improved Data Frequency: By eliminating the collaborative tools like spreadsheets and directly connecting systems, each individual user has real-time access to the relevant data without needing a meeting, email, or sync to get it right.
Improved Data Accuracy: By replacing disparate sources of truth from individual users and reducing manual data entry, there are fewer errors in the data. This could be something small, like a typo, or something big, like accidentally hiring an additional requisitioner.
Improved Intelligence: Consolidating staff management data into one unified dataset captures information that would normally be lost in the collaborative tools. Context about a request from an email can now be tagged and tracked.
Headcount365 Improves How Staff Management Tools Work Together
Unified staff management tools help tell the story across multiple systems and teams. Let’s explore further using the attrition example from earlier.
Common FP&A Issue With Disparate Staff Management Tools
Let’s say a company has 100 people, and an employee making 100k quits, creating attrition in the HRIS. The hiring manager wants to replace that employee with two 50k employees as their backfill.
The HRIS only logs the backfill of one 100k employee.
The hiring manager requests the 2 backfills in an email to their budget owner/department leader, who approves this backfill as it appears to be “neutral”.
The Recruiting team opens two backfills in the ATS and fills both.
The HR team adds both new employees to the HRIS.
The finance team learns of these new employees during a monthly reconciliation and enters them into the FP&A system.
The labor burden (cost of employment) of 2 employees exceeds the cost of 1 employee, even though it was salary neutral.
Problems Resulting From This Scenario
The individual scenario creates problems like adding positions, being over budget, and a lack of visibility from key stakeholders. What likely happens is that Finance is upset about being over budget and launches an investigation into how it got here.
Disparate systems do not link backfills + attrition.
Approval systems neglect Finance in this specific scenario.
By the time finance finds out about the problem, the new staff has already started, making it incredibly difficult to remedy.
In the aggregate (think Macroeconomics), it’s difficult to see how often changes like the above happen, who the main offenders are, and what the impact could be on future forecasts. It creates unrest between teams who are pointing figures after they followed their individual process. Disparate staff management tools mean creating even more failsafes within finance to build in buffers for variance like this.
This is just one, very simple example of how cross-functional data and activity in staff management tools can create pain, inefficiency, and budget issues, and hundreds (if not thousands) of these actions are happening every year.
Unifying Staff Management Tools Creates Value
All of the data, across all staff management tools, is now housed in one place, with improved intelligence creating the following improvements:
Linked Staff Data: Hiring managers request backfills in HC365, linking the outgoing employee to the new requisitions.
Proactive Alerts for FP&A: Finance is alerted of budget changes BEFORE the requisition is recruited to agree on the budget.
Integrated Data: Recruiters automatically create the jobs in the ATS without manual data entry.
Activity Tracking: Hiring Managers can track all activity related to these backfills self-serve, without the need for a meeting.
Automatic Reconciliation: Hired role budgets are automatically reconciled between the HRIS and ATS and sent to Finance in real time.
One Unique Identifier Used Across all Systems: New Position IDs are recognized from the HRIS and sent to FP&A.
YoY Data Context Creates Accurate Future Plans: This data is tracked in a YoY Workforce planning report to help all stakeholders forecast how often this will happen & its impact on the budget.
Every interaction that can be automated is automated so that each individual team can do its work without impacting the quality of another team’s work. Headcount365 pays for itself in time savings alone, but we’re constantly catching OPEX errors created from disparate staff management tools.