HRMS vs. Point Solutions... again

I've written a few times that the day of the huge enterprise HRMS solution is over. PeopleSoft, SAP... they just don't provide niche solutions that are as good as point solutions. So the recruiting tools in PS or SAP for example, don't compare to Virtual Edge, Recruitmax, or Taleo.

Then I think about the growth of talent suites. These suites are basically growing to encompass a large majority of HR functional requirements with the exception of core HR. Tese talent suites generally give employers the opportunity to double source vendors with one large talent suite and a core HRMS system.

However, Watson Wyatt's HR Technology Trends survey states that employers are more comfortable with multiple vendors than trying to get a vendor that does everything. The wonderful thing is that this is totally viable and possible with the good implementation of portal technologies.

Update on July 10, 2005:
Andrew wrote this about SAP eRecruit.

The tie in: Onboarding and Commitment

Vertitude put out this article that addresses some of my previous posts. It's interesting to me how many people think that onboarding starts with day 1. Without some enphasis immediately after offer acceptance, you miss major opportunities to influence and shape your new hire's concept of your culture. Anyway, here's an excerpt:

The minute a new colleague walks through our doors we work hard to motivate them to stay. Our “Welcoming New Colleagues” onboarding module in our manager’s toolkit helps managers to engage new colleagues from day one. This module outlines steps that a manager needs to take to ensure a new colleague is up and running on his or her first day. There is also an online component that allows managers to find all the forms they need in a quick-click fashion.

Onboarding Part 2: Integration

Let’s start this one off with a picture.



Let me first say that time also increases from left to right.

• So your first step would be recruiting and all the functions in the ATS system on the left.
• After that, you create an offer letter and direct the employee to the on-boarding site. This letter should probably have the hew hire’s userID and password as well. The letter may want to indicate that login cannot occur until the offer letter is returned, or whatever other contingencies need to be passed.
• Keep in mind that the new hire will not be able to log in until you have actually interfaced that person’s record from the ATS over to the onboarding system. You’ll probably need to have the appropriate field indicator in the ATS for this to work well. If your organization has contingencies around background checks, education verification or whatever, make sure that all that’s done prior to the data load.
• You should also give some thought to having your onboarding database be the primary data repository for your new hire data between the day of offer and day 1. This prevents you from loading data to your HRMS from 2 sources (ATS and onboarding) and minimizes any risk of conflicting data. In the onboarding system, the new hire can validate all the data prior to HRMS load (talked about later).
• Once in the onboarding database, there really isn’t much need for file transfers at any specific time. It’s more as you get the data. There’s a good chance that you can transmit new hire data directly to the network people so they can set up e-mail addresses ASAP. You might also have business card data (what name the employee wants to use) a few days later, so those fields can be transmitted to the appropriate person. It doesn’t really matter what technology you are using, so long as the data gets to where it needs to go in a timely manner. XML would be nice, but not every system is going to create or receive that. So in that case other asynchronous API’s might be needed. If all else fails, just pull a report and send it off in Excel or something.
• When does this go over to the HRMS? That’s actually quite a loaded question. I’ve been to companies that require the load to HRMS prior to day 1, and other places that have a high enough no-show rate that they don’t want anyone in there until they show up for work. This will be a tactical decision on your part, but my guess is that most companies can load data into their HRMS at least a few days prior to day 1. Keep in mind that once the core employee record is set up in HRMS, you can load any other data piecemeal. So if the employee sets up direct deposit preferences late, the interface will just refresh and capture latest changes.

For Part 3 (Systems and Vendors) I need to do a bit of research, so give me a couple days.