There has been a notable shift in the workforce as the worldwide pandemic has forced companies to maintain a remote workforce. One challenge is hiring and processing the best and brightest. Read on to learn how to process new applicants in Oracle Recruiting Cloud.
Challenging times make for hiring challenges
As Human Resource professionals know all too well, attracting qualified job applicants in today’s economy is no easy business. While finding and retaining top talent remains an ongoing challenge in an ever-churning labor market, the upheavals caused by Covid have only upped the ante for HR departments looking to coral the best candidates.
As the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) reports, a survey of U.S. employers conducted late last year found that recruiting was their top concern going into 2021. As the recovery picks up speed, the recruiting challenge is only likely to increase, with companies competing for workers returning to the labor force as well as those who never left but find themselves with more options.
Let’s say, though, that your organization’s HR department has their recruiting game down, providing hiring teams with brimming candidate pools full of top-level talent. Having got this much right, you know that, far from solving all your problems, such bounty brings its own challenges. A high volume of applications combined with inefficiencies in your candidate selection process can cause long lead times, putting you at risk of losing candidates’ interest, and resulting in lost productivity as openings stay unfilled longer.
With so many of us working remotely now—a change that looks likely to outlive the pandemic—another challenge for hiring teams is keeping in contact with candidates and each other throughout the selection process. While recruiting and hiring practices were moving increasingly online before the pandemic, the coronavirus served to hasten that shift while removing hiring teams from the common workspaces where they could share post-interview impressions around the proverbial watercooler.
Yet another challenge facing hiring teams is fairness. As more organizations strive to diversify their workforce, eliminating bias from the hiring process has assumed greater importance, underscoring the need for a standardized approach that helps hirers vet applicants impartially.
Oracle offers a hiring solution
How can hiring teams meet these challenges? In part, at least, by embracing two tried and true innovations of the modern era, standardization and automation. Oracle Recruiting Cloud offers both.
Standardize . . . so you can streamline
Since Henry Ford started cranking out Model Ts via assembly line, American businesses have seen the value of standardizing their processes. Today, that’s truer than ever, as organizations work to standardize everything from assembling hamburgers to executing global marketing campaigns.
While helping to ensure quality and consistency in the goods or services businesses offer, standardization also helps streamline an organization’s internal operations by establishing clear, consistent processes for executing tasks. That saves employees time and effort, boosting their productive capacity—and often their morale!—and lowering costs. And once a process is in place, companies can modify it as needed to optimize effectiveness, speed, and efficiency.
When it comes to hiring, standardization can also help to minimize bias by promoting consistency in the application and screening processes, leveling the playing field for candidates while helping hirers focus on what matters.
So, how exactly does Oracle Recruiting Cloud (ORC) help you standardize the candidate selection process? For starters, by harnessing the power of templates. Drawing on ORC’s delivered candidate selection process template, companies can build a standard process for vetting all applicants to a job or job family, establishing the same requirements for all comers and ensuring a set protocol for their consideration.
In building this process, HR departments can also create templates for interview questionnaires, hiring team member feedback, and requests to candidates for more information, all of which helps to standardize evaluation across candidates.
That can help to ease the minds of conscientious hirers eager to avoid bias—and avoid missing out on top talent. At the same time, standardization also helps to assure applicants that the process is fair—a crucial component in crafting a positive candidate experience. As HR analysts have noted, creating such an experience can help keep candidates interested in your organization, increasing the chances the best of those candidates may stick around for an offer, and maybe even accept it.
Automate the candidate selection process
If standardization proves important in meeting today’s hiring challenges, so too does its close cousin, automation. Oracle Recruiting Cloud enables companies to automate much of the candidate selection process, saving your hirers time and saving you money. During every phase of the process, you can set up actions to execute automatically based on set conditions.
Want to collect feedback from team members after candidate interviews are conducted? You can set up automatic feedback requests to trigger when a candidate advances to the “interviewed” state. Want to request that candidates complete a technical assessment once interview feedback is in? You can automate that, too.
You can even set up the process to reject a candidate or advance them to the next phase based on assessment results or other predefined criteria. ORC’s automated Move actions not only help to expedite the process, shortening your time-to-hire. By automating candidate advancement based on pre-established conditions, they also help to minimize the chances that qualified candidates will be unduly rejected.
To keep all parties concerned in the loop, you can also set up automatic notifications to alert recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates about application-related events and status changes. This allows you to update applicants easily and often on their progress in the selection process, again helping to ensure a positive candidate experience and reducing the likelihood of unintended attrition. For members of your hiring team, automatic notifications can alert them to needed actions and keep everyone up to speed, making for a smoother, more coordinated hiring process.
As we’ve discussed in this space before, another feature that enhances communication with candidates is Oracle’s Digital Assistant. Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, this self-learning program can instantly field many candidate questions, delivering on-the-spot responses so you don’t have to.
How to Process New Applicants in Oracle Recruiting Cloud
Okay, now that we’ve looked at how Oracle Recruiting Cloud can help you streamline the candidate selection process, let’s turn to how to actually process new applicants in Oracle Recruiting Cloud.
Oracle’s standard candidate selection process includes five default phases, as follows:
- New
- Screening
- Interview and Selection
- Offer
- HR
Note: Of the five, Offer and HR are the only phases that must be included in ORC application flows.
In turn, each of these phases includes several possible states in which to place candidates. In the New phase, for instance, candidate states might include To Be Reviewed, Reviewed, and Selected for Screening.
As mentioned, you can set up notifications to alert recruiters and hiring managers when new applications arrive for review. From ORC’s Job Requisitions page, hiring team members can find the current number of applications for a requisition and access those applications, along with any supporting documents, for review. The following screenshot displays the Job Requisitions page:
By drilling down to a requisition’s Job Applications page, hirers can review at a glance all active applications for that requisition. From this page, you can also take various actions, including confirming applications, sending interview invites, and sending messages to applicants or the hiring team.
The following screenshot displays the Job Applications page:
Drilling down one level further takes you to the page for an individual application, where you can find full application details along with tabs for reviewing information on candidate interactions, candidate responses to questions, assessment results, and more. From this page, team members can schedule interviews and upload internal documents for review.
The following screenshot displays an example of an individual application page:
From the application page, hirers can also find an applicant’s current phase and state in the process as well as their progress history, allowing hirers to review at a glance the candidate’s journey to date.
Once they’ve reviewed an application, recruiters and hiring managers can use the application page’s Move button to manually move an application forward in the application flow, with certain exceptions. Users cannot bypass mandatory phases when moving an application. In addition, if move conditions are placed on an application at a given state, those conditions must be met before a recruiter can manually move the application from that state.
Note: Administrators can grant recruiters the ability to override this constraint.
The Takeaway?
Oracle Recruiting Cloud provides organizations with a comprehensive solution to today’s hiring challenges. Enabling companies to standardize and automate processing of new job applications, Oracle Recruiting Cloud can help you streamline the hiring process, making it faster, fairer, and more efficient. Offering an intuitive and user-friendly interface, ORC gives hiring teams the tools to manage candidate applications easily and effectively, reduce time-to-hire, and support a positive candidate experience.
Still have questions?
You can access detailed walkthroughs on Oracle Recruiting Cloud processes and more with ENGAGE by Maverick, Maverick Solutions’ comprehensive subscription-based training content on Oracle Cloud applications. Offering fully customizable Training as a Service (Taas), Maverick Solutions can provide your organization:
- Training available anytime, anywhere
- Content that’s always current with software updates
- Interactive simulations
- Learning consultation to determine your organization’s training needs
To learn more about our fully customizable training services, speak with one of our training experts today!
The article was written for Oracle release 21B. Due to the nature of Cloud software and updates, this article may no longer be accurate. If you would like access to the most up-to-date version, please reach out to our team to learn more.[/vc_column_text]
