Oracle HCM steps up personalization of the employee experience with new recruitment tool
- Summary:
- A new add-on to Oracle Recruitment introduced at Oracle CloudWorld aims to provide a more frictionless and engaged experience for candidates.
With many organizations struggling to find enough candidates to fill vacancies, the HCM product news at the opening of the Oracle CloudWorld conference today is focusing on recruitment. A new add-on to Oracle Fusion Cloud Recruiting called Oracle Recruiting Booster aims to automate and personalize the recruitment process. I learned more in a pre-briefing with Yvette Cameron, SVP Global Cloud HCM Product Strategy at Oracle. She says:
We feel like recruiters and organizations have a new job to do, a new different kind of job, they have to focus on meeting candidates where they are, they need to be much more personalized in their approach and ensure a consistent experience.
The new add-on aims to replace a variety of point solutions that have grown up around the early stages of the recruitment process, to provide a more streamlined, end-to-end experience for candidates. Cameron elaborates:
It's important to understand that the market is filled with a lot of niche technology providers, who focus on the interview management process, or the the event management — creating and and communicating the hiring events of your organization. [There are] different tools for the actual ATS or the onboarding process.
Every one of those individual processes, where you have to integrate them, is a friction point for the candidate that introduces new experiences and is a potential drop-off point for your candidate. Every time there's a friction point, that's another opportunity to lose the candidate in your hiring process.
The main components of the new add-on comprise:
- Hiring event functionality, built into the Oracle Recruiting job portal, which makes it easier for recruiters to create event listings, registration pages and prescreening questionnaires, or promote to specific candidate groups, and then track registration and attendance.
- Two-way messaging via SMS and email, with full visibility into the engagement history with each candidate.
- Expanded digital assistant capabilities to help automate key steps of the hiring process.
- Interview scheduling support and a single centralized location for viewing all candidate and interview information.
Joined-up experience
At the same time, other supporting tools, such as aptitude testing and interview behavior analysis, can still be integrated into the solution. What's important is to provide a more joined-up experience that flows from first contact through to the employee experience after joining, as Cameron explains:
The tools that we're using, the look and feel, the interaction, the use of mobile and digital assistant, is the same experience they're going to have once they are hired and onboarding into the organization and then throughout their career. One of the challenges, I think, for organizations today is you have these assembled experiences, you try to put a very unique, compelling, engaging experience together for the candidates. And then when they come into the HR organization, it's different. We're unifying that for better promotion of your culture and just not having that jarring difference between pre- and post-hiring.
A new component of the employee experience is Oracle ME, a new suite of tools introduced earlier this year to proactively delivers highly personalized contextual support, all within a consistent user experience, technology and security framework. Cameron comments:
We bring information to individuals proactively. We ensure that information and support is easily accessible. That support is everything from transactions to information to even connecting you to others in the organization very easily. So it's a consistent unified experience, fully secure, all in that consistent look and feel and interaction.
More frequent check-ins
One of the components of Oracle ME is a new 'touchpoints' capability, which encourages more frequent check-ins on employee sentiment and manager feedback managers than the traditional quarterly or annual review. AI provides timely nudges and suggestions to make connections, and managers can track sentiment trends both of individuals and across their team. Cameron adds:
Our driver behind that functionality was to improve the relationship and the trust between employees and managers, and help managers actually be more accountable to employees, while they are also understanding the daily sentiment of their teams in the workforce.
Alongside today's recruitment announcement, Oracle has also reiterated its HCM offerings for healthcare customers, as part of a broader focus on the industry at this year's Cloud World in the wake of the Cerner acquisition. These include enhancements to scheduling, which focus on a particular need in healthcare providers at the moment. Cameron elaborates:
The way you schedule your workforce is very different than, of course, how we schedule in high tech or retail, etc. We are enhancing our scheduling capability to meet those very unique needs of hospital customers. Effective scheduling is not only a compliance issue, but it's an employee experience issue — the ability for individuals to have the right shifts, have the right balance, be able to swap appropriately, but all within the compliance and requirements of say union contracts or hospital policy, etc. It's a big part and contributor to overall employee experience and well being, but it's also an incredible need to ensure that you are delivering the right skills and individuals to support patients.
My take
Strong focus across the board here from Oracle on the improving the experience of individual employees and giving them more agency in their own work journey.