According to a recent study by tilr, a skills-based recruitment platform provider, some sixty-three percent of human resource leaders report that it is increasingly difficult to fill open positions in the current tight labor market. Facilitating the HR operations that support talent acquisition has become a key goal of most retail and business organizations, and the way to do that is increasingly via mobile.
For many global enterprises mobile applications are being used more extensively to acquire top talent and accomplish other HR related functions, including timesheets, approvals, work scheduling, and performance appraisals. Paycom Software, a provider of cloud-based human capital management, has just released a new mobile tool called Manager On-the-Go that provides 24/7 accessibility to all manager-side functionalities within the Paycom HCM.
Manager On-the-Go enables managers and supervisors to edit and approve timecards,
handle time-off requests, manage employee schedules, approve expenses for reimbursement, and respond to employee inquiries anytime, from anywhere. With this tool employees can use any mobile device to perform tasks like requesting time off, submitting time cards, or trading shifts.
Paycom has also added a new tool called Ask Here that gives employees a direct line of communication with managers to ask work-related questions and receive timely answers as part of Paycom’s self-service technology.
Another Paycom competitor, Hireology, billed as the recruitment CRM for multi-location, decentralized enterprises, recently announced the upcoming release of their new mobile application. This app is aimed at giving hiring managers an easy way to engage with job candidates on-the-go, to hire faster and avoid losing applicants in today’s challenging labor market.
Integrating and Validating Mobile Workforce Data
Oracle is a big believer in the power of mobile human capital management applications. The Oracle HCM suite boasts a mobile-responsive model designed to deliver a unified conversational experience for managers and employees alike across all devices and browsers. Oracle’s Utilities Mobile Workforce Management application is a commercial off-the-shelf product that optimizes and automates the management of any field workforce, including orders and activities, by leveraging computer-aided planning, routing, dispatching, and data collection over mobile communication networks.
StreetSmart is another global leader in the mobile workforce management sector, boasting an array of cloud-based mobile HR solutions and currently serving over 10,000 companies.
StreetSmart’s growing success recently led to their acquisition by Think3, a one billion dollar Austin-based fund that focuses on software companies.
One of StreetSmart’s success stories comes from Kaiser Permanente one of the leading healthcare providers in the United States. Their Oregon and Southwest Washington division serves over 600,000 members, and that division recently incorporated mobile workforce management technology from StreetSmart. The new solution integrates all of Kaiser’s mobile worker information, including mobile worker locations, current job activities, and specific shift information. Dispatchers can manage all job assignments of their mobile workforce in the field with the StreetSmart software.
With StreetSmart, Kaiser Permanente can now manage workers involved in hospice, palliative, and home health care. Kaiser reimburses mileage expenses for home care employees who use their personal vehicles to drive to patient appointments. Until the adoption of StreetSmart employees had to manually fill out reimbursement forms and timesheets, and then managers had no straightforward way after the fact to verify time spent on the job. StreetSmart now provides two key ways to improve this process:
• Mobile timesheets that employees can fill out on the road to clock in and out and record breaks.
• Trip reimbursement data can be validated by using StreetSmart GPS location services that provide managers with visibility into the real-time details of their employee field work movements and activities.
Kaiser Permanente’s HR department managers have reported that StreetSmart technology has helped them improve home care operational efficiencies, increase revenue, and reduce non-compliance risks.
The Mobile-Centric Generation
According to the latest ManpowerGroup survey, talent shortages in the US have increased dramatically over the last decade with 69 percent of employers now struggling to fill open positions, up from only 14 percent in 2010. Millennials make up the largest percentage of the labor force at 35 percent, with Generation Z close behind. Talent acquisition teams are now looking for the most effective ways to engage this mobile-driven workforce.
Millennials are frequently labeled as mobile pioneers, and members of Gen Z are considered mobile natives, with some 98 percent of this age group having grown up with smartphones as their primary form of communication. Finding and engaging talent among these young workers requires reaching out to them via their preferred channel of communications, and that means going mobile.