WORKBOOK
How to Select the Right Hiring
Solution for Your Enterprise
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
Charting Your Future Direction
How this workbook can help
Are you evaluating hiring automation software vendors
right now? Looking to build a strategic relationship with
a partner whose technology can streamline your entire
“end to end” hiring process and quantitatively improve
your overall workforce quality? Seeking to understand
what a true “end to end” hiring solution actually is —
and isn’t?
We invite you to roll up your sleeves and use this workbook as a hands-on working document and a framework
for discovery.
Why we wrote this workbook
Your goal is to select and hire the best possible employees
and managers for your business. Our goal is to offer you
candid, no-nonsense advice as you research and select
the right technology vendor to help you in that quest.
This document is designed to help you:
• Evaluate which software features and functionality are best-suited to your hiring processes and
best-equipped to help optimize the quality of your
workforce across all your locations
• Obtain candid advice about the capabilities required
in a true end-to-end hiring solution that can work
seamlessly with your workforce management and
human resource systems
• Explore proven capabilities from Kronos that
combine selection science, automation, and backend analytics in a single platform
Not every customer is looking for the exact same set of
services, but nearly all customers seek the advantages
of a partner who can integrate the entire hiring process
in a single end-to-end solution.
We believe that only Kronos combines the benefits of
workforce acquisition and workforce management in one
integrated solution. We’re confident you’ll come to the
same conclusion.
End-to-End Hiring Solutions
Myth vs. reality
Many vendors talk about end to end hiring solutions
— but what do they really mean? Some vendors link
third-party software together and call it end to end.
Other suppliers claim that end to end means the totality
of their product sets, however limited that may be. The
myth is that there are many end-to-end solutions from
which to choose. The reality is very different.
Inside These Pages
2
pages 2-3 End-to-End Hiring Solutions
page 4
Source and Apply
page 5 Screen and Select
page 6
Hire and Onboard
page 7
Report and Analyze
page 8
Implement and Support
page 9
Kronos Integration With Workforce Management
pages 10-11
Dare to Compare Checklist
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
Buyer beware — before you choose your next hiring
vendor, ask them the following question and candidly
weigh their response against your company’s needs,
expectations, and requirements.
How do you define an “end-to-end hiring
solution” and how do your products/services
deliver against that promise?
Based on our experience at thousands of locations with
some of the largest high-volume employers in the U.S.,
Kronos has developed a vision of end-to-end hiring that
we believe best captures what today’s frontline organizations need and want. The question is, how many vendors
can actually deliver it?
The Kronos Workforce Acquisition™ application is an
integrated hiring platform that combines automation,
employee selection tools, and analytic capabilities in a
true end-to-end hiring solution. We invite you to explore
the capabilities of this solution and compare it against
other vendors’ products to see which is the best choice
for your organization. As you conduct this evaluation,
you should consider the key advantages of the end-toend delivery model and weigh, vendor by vendor, where
the greatest benefits to your company lie.
In a recent Aberdeen survey, 82 percent
of respondents said “quality of hire” is their
No. 1 measure of hiring effectiveness.
End-to-End High-Volume Hiring.
How does your vendor measure up?
TAKE THE KRONOS TEST.
If the vendor is unable to meet ALL these, it is not a true end-to-end hiring provider.
Integrates multiple key functions seamlessly within a single software environment: 1. Source and Apply
2. Screen and Select
3. Hire and Onboard
4. Report and Analyze
5. Implement and Support
6. Integrate With Workforce Management
Combines proven selection science (to select best possible candidates) with automation (to streamline
and reduce cost per hire).
Offers a robust, scalable tool set from a single dashboard that integrates ALL hiring tasks and creates a
friendly, intuitive experience for both candidates and hiring managers.
Offers comprehensive reporting with real-time visibility into what everyone is doing across all hiring
locations — by site, by region, or corporatewide.
Offers domain expertise in frontline industries like retail, hospitality, and healthcare — with some of the
largest data sets in the industry to validate that expertise.
Includes back-end analytics that let you quantitatively measure how your hiring process is performing,
so you can proactively improve hiring quality.
Integrates with other workforce management and HR solutions to generate strategic value for the
enterprise — the ultimate endgame.
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
Source and Apply
A true end-to-end hiring solution starts with state-ofthe-art multichannel sourcing capabilities to capture
high volumes of quality candidates. The goal is to
find and qualify applicants quickly and at the lowest
possible sourcing costs across dozens or even thousands of locations.
But sourcing is more than just attracting high-quality
candidates. It’s about creating an easy-to-use, easy-tounderstand online application process that:
• Presents a pleasant, positive experience for applicants, who don’t have to set up accounts or cut and
paste their resumes
• Seamlessly merges the hiring portal with the
company brand to strengthen your corporate identity
and make applicants feel like they’re still on the
company Web site
he applicant experience tells a candidate a lot about
T
your company. What does your prospective vendor’s
online application process tell you about that vendor?
“Allowing managers to search through
qualified candidates, review screening
information, using recommended followup questions, applicant pooling — the list
goes on and on with improved processes
and efficiencies.”
Darin Averill, Manager of Training and Recruiting
Holiday Stationstores
TAKE THE KRONOS TEST.
Can the vendor match the candidate’s online experience to the look and feel of your Web site so it’s a
seamless brand encounter? Take a tour of other hiring sites the vendor has done.
Can the vendor automate email communications with your candidates to include your logo and header?
Imagine the time savings.
Are job application templates configurable to each position and requisition to ensure consistency across
all hiring locations? Can the system handle all your different job types?
Can the entire hiring continuum be managed from one dashboard for both hourly and salaried hiring?
Or do you have to switch systems?
Can the vendor prepopulate commonly used fields to expedite requisitions and job postings? Find out how
automated the vendor’s solution actually is.
Can you view and print a standard application that matches the online application using e-signatures or
manual signing? If not, why not?
Can your applicants get a Realistic Job Preview — a video preview of a day on the job? It’s a helpful way
for poor-fit candidates to screen themselves before applying.
4
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
Screen and Select
The biggest decision a hiring manager will ever make
about an employee is whether to hire him or her. It
doesn’t matter how quickly you hire someone if the
person is the wrong fit for the job. What matters is that
you’re choosing the best candidate every time — the
candidate who is most likely to:
1. Reach full competency sooner
2. P
erform better and contribute to the best possible
customer experience
3. Stay longer
Employee assessment tools
Screening and then selecting which applicants to interview
requires knowing what to look for in a candidate — the
attributes and factors that predict the greatest likelihood
of success in a specific job and industry. Without this
information, the manager ends up relying on guesswork,
instinct, or intuition about whom to hire — a potentially
dangerous liability. This is where employee assessment tools based on selection science come in. These
assessments — which are built into and part of the job
application — help managers make objective, knowledgebased evaluations of a candidate’s likelihood of success in
a given job role. This gives the hiring manager a decisive
advantage when it comes to selecting which candidates
to interview and, subsequently, to hire.
Behavioral interviewing
The interview is where the hiring manager/recruiter
directly assesses whether the candidate is the right
fit for the job. Ideally, the decision-maker conducts a
behavioral interview utilizing proven strategies to:
• Screen for character and personality traits using behavioral interview techniques and standardized questions
• Interpret candidates’ responses to gain insight into
their attitudes and potential behavior as an employees
“A hiring process with superior selection
tools is what we were looking for. With
Kronos, we found not only that, but also the
added benefit of greater efficiency in our application management and hiring process.”
Lee Ann Lecheler, HR Director
Cambridge Healthcare Management
TAKE THE KRONOS TEST.
Does the vendor have integrated behavior-based assessments and selection tools that can accurately predict future job performance? Ask the vendor for specific examples in your industry.
Does the vendor enable hiring managers to quickly identify best-fit applicants to interview, using an automated scoring methodology? Or do your managers have to score and create their own A-lists of candidates?
What employee personality traits (sociability, persistence, etc.) does the vendor use to predict a
candidate’s likelihood of success? Is the vendor using the right attributes?
Does the vendor offer behavioral interviewing tools based on proven interview strategies? Do your
managers get a behavioral interview guide that’s built on the candidate’s specific application details
and assessment results?
Does the vendor have a blend of I/O psychologists, statisticians, economists, and psychometricians on
staff to analyze data from employee work histories and help validate results? Is there a data feedback
loop to measure how the hiring process is performing and where it can be improved?
How big is the data set that the vendor is using to develop its assessments and selection tools? How
many samples are being used and across how many industry segments?
5
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
Hire and Onboard
Everyone wins when your organization leverages cuttingedge technology to speed the onboarding of a new
employee. For the company, it means faster time to
productivity. For the employee, it’s faster time to payroll
and a more positive experience as a new hire.
The key is to use hiring automation software to replace
manual, time-consuming, and error-prone onboarding
processes wherever possible. This includes:
• Eliminating the costs, delays, and errors associated
with manual rekeying and paper-based processes
• Helping to ensure regulatory compliance with all
new-hire paperwork
• Allowing frontline managers to focus on delivering
an excitement-filled approach to onboarding, rather
than an experience centered on filling out paperwork
• Automating the transfer of new-hire data and integrating with internal and external systems to rapidly
get the new hire into payroll and other systems
”While many focus on metrics such as time
and cost to hire an employee, it is actually
the time to productivity that is critical for
new employees.”
• Using e-signature and other features to automate
the electronic completion of federal, state, and
corporate forms
Aberdeen Group
TAKE THE KRONOS TEST.
Can your vendor customize individual hiring work flows based on specific job types, positions, and
company rules? Or are you forced into a “one size fits all” approach?
Can the vendor integrate all hiring-related tasks and information gathering for each position into a single
automated process? Or do you have to switch between systems?
Does the vendor offer automated “information checks” that can be placed at any point in the hiring
process to ensure that the applicant moves forward only after these requirements are met? Criminal
checks, retail theft, drug testing, education, employment verification, etc. — these checks are vital.
Does the vendor expedite compliance with INS Form I-9 (mandatory for all new U.S.-based employees)
by offering e-signatures and automatic creation of the form as a PDF? If not, you’d better be prepared to
fill out the form very, very carefully.
Can the hiring solution integrate with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify service so you
can quickly verify the legal working status of your new hires? Is the vendor an E-Verify Designated Agent,
or do you have to use a different system or provider to access E-Verify?
Does the vendor offer sophisticated self-service capabilities to guide new hires and managers through
onboarding? Take a test-drive to see how friendly the new hire experience actually is.
How many new-hire forms can be prepopulated with employee data already captured during the
application process — such as federal and state forms, corporate policies, ID badges, uniform orders,
parking permits, business cards, online security requests? Get an exact list so you can quantify the
time savings per new hire.
Can the vendor integrate your payroll and Human Resources Management Systems (HRMS) to eliminate
double entry and manual mistakes? Or will you be plagued with delays and human-induced errors?
6
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
Report and Analyze
Improving workforce quality means making informed
hiring decisions based on the ability to predict which
candidates are most likely to succeed in a specific job.
This requires science-based software that can minimize
guesswork in the decision-making process.
But it also requires in-depth reporting capabilities that
allow you to analyze hiring data across the organization in an effort to probe what’s working — and what
isn’t. The goal is to measure how effective your hiring
decisions have been so you can improve your decisionmaking in the future.
To turn hiring data into actionable business intelligence
you need to be able to produce and analyze detailed
ad hoc reports at will — reports that generate visibility
into key areas of your hiring processes such as sourcing,
screening, retention, and separation. The vendor’s
analytic capabilities should include:
• Analyzing retention rates and turnover/separation trends, with insight into why employees were
separated and what that tells you about the type of
employees you have been choosing
• Monitoring applicant-to-hire ratios so managers
can pinpoint — and resolve — problem regions or
job types
• Tracking and measuring hiring compliance —
including EEO — across your company so you can
minimize risk
TAKE THE KRONOS TEST.
Can you generate with ease and flexibility ad hoc reports that contain virtually any information captured
in the hiring process? Or does the vendor force you into a limited set of preconfigured reports?
Can you generate both static and dynamic reports with access controlled by role and permission? Can you
easily control who gets to view what reports and when?
Are compliance reports on EEO and other metrics readily available to minimize risk of violation? Or will
these reports have to be created manually, creating delays and potential errors?
Are real-time retention and separation reports available from the vendor? Can you easily measure how
your hiring strategies are performing?
Can you monitor hiring practices at a specific location and then zoom out to a report covering 1,000
locations? How scalable is the reporting capability?
Can the hiring system improve its own performance by feeding employee outcome data (actual work
histories) back into the database? Can the vendor improve your decision-making over time by fine-tuning
the system and improving its predictive accuracy?
7
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
Implement and Support
The bottom line with any hiring automation solution is
how expediently it can get up and running and whether
the vendor meets the performance expectations that
compelled you to partner with it in the first place.
As you weigh your options with different hiring vendors,
remember this — the vendor’s solution is only as effective as its ability to implement, support, and optimize the
solution.
How many software-based solutions have failed to
meet their promise when actually deployed? The business landscape is littered with countless examples. To
avoid being the next casualty, your vendor should have
a versatile and highly experienced professional services
team with a range of support and value-added services
to help optimize the return on your investment. The
vendor should be able to generate value starting on Day
One, with services that include:
• Implementation that speeds time to value with a proven
methodology based on thousands of deployments
• Training that maximizes adoption and usage of the
system within your team
• Help
desk and customer/technical support available
to your enterprise 24x7x365 — with problem resolution and escalation processes you can count on
• Personalized
account services that can make the
difference between a failed implementation and a
hiring solution more productive than you anticipated
• Value-added
services to enhance the system, provide
detailed back-end analytics, and add new functionality in a visible product road map
TAKE THE KRONOS TEST.
Does
the vendor have a proven implementation methodology to minimize risk and speed time to launch?
Ask for a specific timetable and benchmarks so there are no surprises — and get examples of similar
deployments with other customers.
What are your training options? Can your vendor “train the trainer” so you can quickly and cost-effectively
bring your entire team up to speed on getting the most out of the system?
Does the vendor offer 24x7x365 systems support worldwide? What is the escalation process, and how
quickly can you expect problem resolution?
Does the vendor offer value-added services like assessment mapping, strategic sourcing, seasonal
sourcing, and optimized assessment scoring? If you want to unleash the true potential of your software
— can you?
Is there a clear product road map to future enhancements that adds demonstrable value to the solution?
What is the vendor’s vision for the software one, three, five years from now?
8
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
Integration With Workforce Management
Higher productivity
As an end-to-end solution, Kronos Workforce Acquisition
offers a range of features that place it in a unique and
enviable position in the hiring automation marketplace.
But for many organizations, the true value of Kronos is
its ability to offer a complete workforce management
suite that combines hiring with other key workforce
management functions, such as scheduling, time and
attendance, and payroll. This integrated environment is
the ultimate endgame and, for many executives, the true
definition of an end-to-end solution.
By comparing candidate data (original assessments) from
the hiring system with employee data (actual work histories) from the workforce management system, Kronos
can help evaluate the overall success of the selection
process and where it can be improved. What are the
patterns for absenteeism? Tardiness? Involuntary terminations? Retention? By comparing the performance of
new hires against their original job assessments, Kronos
can identify the characteristics of best-fit employees
and refine the assessments accordingly.
Better scheduling
During the online application process, Kronos Workforce
Acquisition captures data about the candidate’s availability and preferences. This data is then brought
forward into the Kronos Workforce Scheduler™ system
to expedite scheduling of that employee when he or
she becomes a new hire. This saves time, eliminates
scheduling errors, and facilitates a smooth transition
for the employee.
Faster onboarding
New-hire data from Kronos Workforce Acquisition can
be uploaded to the Kronos Workforce Timekeeper™
database to expedite the processing of security badges,
timecards, and other personalized materials for the
new hire. This reduces manual tasks for managers,
eliminates redundant data entry, and speeds time to
productivity for new employees.
“The workforce management suite has
provided significant benefits for TSI. By
linking our Kronos HRMS system with the
selection and hiring technology, we avoid
multiple points of data entry and instead
have instant visibility into our new hires
regardless of the location that they are
hired in. It’s a perfect fit for us.”
Jim Rizzo, Senior VP of HR
Town Sports International
TAKE THE KRONOS TEST.
Does the vendor have an integrated workforce management suite or are you limited to a stand-alone
hiring system? What are the implications for your long-term success?
Has
your vendor developed (or can it develop) interfaces between hiring automation and other
workforce management and HR systems? If not, do you have the in-house IT resources, expertise,
and money to do it yourself?
Can
your vendor leverage high-quality information to help you improve not only sales per workhour,
but also absenteeism and tardiness? Do you have the visibility to identify and resolve key strategic
issues affecting workforce productivity?
Does the system provide a measurable business impact beyond just reducing time and cost to hire?
What proof can the vendor offer to support its ROI claims?
9
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
Dare to Compare
Kronos Workforce Acquisition is an integrated hiring
platform that combines automation, employee selection tools, and analytic capabilities in an end-to-end
hiring solution. Workforce Acquisition utilizes complete
automation to eliminate paperwork and reduce costs;
selection tools to assess candidates and select for
traits that drive performance so managers can find the
people who will fit best and stay longest, and highquality information to proactively measure and improve
hiring quality.
END-TO-END DELIVERY MODEL
SINGLE CONSOLE
Lets you manage the entire end-to-end hiring process from
a single, easy-to-use, web-based management console:
1. Requisition management
2. Sourcing
3. Selection
4. Hiring
5. Onboarding
6. Reporting and analytics
7. Integration with workforce management
HIRING COMPLIANCE
Creates a measurable and repeatable hiring process that
facilitates corporate hiring compliance across all sites
with clear standards everyone can follow.
WORK FLOW MANAGEMENT
Lets you customize hiring checklists to ensure consistency and compliance with hiring standards. Checklists
can be configured to reflect the unique hiring tasks
associated with each job and applicant type within a
geography, brand, division, or company.
FRONTLINE EXPERTISE
Has proven domain expertise in such frontline industries
as retail, hospitality, and healthcare — with large data
sets to validate that expertise.
TOOLS FOR HIGH-VOLUME HIRING
Offers easy-to-use tools specifically designed for highvolume hiring — like prepopulated new-hire forms and
e-signatures — so hiring managers spend less time on
hiring and more time running the business.
10
Using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model operated over
the Internet, Kronos is easy to own, offering a 100 percent
hosted solution that eliminates the IT costs and headaches
of managing and supporting an on-premise installation.
We invite you to explore the capabilities of Kronos
Workforce Acquisition and compare it against other
vendors’ products to see which is the best choice for
your organization. As you conduct this evaluation, you
should consider the key advantages of the end-to-end
delivery model and weigh, vendor by vendor, where the
greatest benefits to your company can be achieved.
KRONOS
VENDOR 2
VENDOR 3
How to Select the Right Hiring Solution for Your Enterprise
END-TO-END DELIVERY MODEL
KRONOS
VENDOR 2
VENDOR 3
REPORTING
Offers comprehensive reporting on virtually any aspect of
the hiring process, with detailed real-time visibility into
what everyone is doing across all hiring locations — by
site, by region, or corporatewide.
AUDIT TRAILS
Creates comprehensive audit trails of all hiring
decisions to help ensure compliance, minimize risk,
and avoid potential legal action.
SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE MODEL
Handles implementation, maintenance, upgrading, and
support of the hiring system as a 100 percent hosted
solution over the Internet. Offloads the entire application
management burden from your in-house IT team.
Kronos helps organizations across a variety of industries manage their most valuable, and expensive,
strategic asset — their workforce. How? By giving them the tools they need to help them control labor
costs. Minimize compliance risk. And improve workforce productivity. The easy-to-own workforce
management solutions from Kronos make complete automation and high-quality information a reality.
Our hiring, time and attendance, scheduling, absence management, HR and payroll, and labor analytics
solutions give Kronos customers the edge they need to compete in the global marketplace. With
thousands of installations in organizations of all sizes — including over half the Fortune 1000® — we’re
proving workforce management doesn’t have to be so hard.
Call (800) 355-4547 or email us at [email protected].
www.kronos.com/hiring
Kronos Incorporated
297 Billerica Road
Chelmsford, MA 01824
(800) 225-1561
(978) 250-9800
www.kronos.com
©2009, Kronos Incorporated. Kronos and the Kronos logo are registered trademarks and Workforce Acquisition, Workforce Scheduler, and Workforce Timekeeper are trademarks of Kronos Incorporated
or a related company. All other product and company names are used for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective owners. All specifications are subject to change.
All rights reserved. 25001-63603