Partner Content
Everybody wants to be an employer of choice, to attract the best people and keep them. It’s a perennial dilemma for employers and typically seen as an HR issue rather than as one that takes input from the finance department.
That is changing as new technology enables business units to align budgets and financial objectives with the traditional HR domain of hiring and workforce planning.
“There are clear linkages between HR and finance,” says Oracle ANZ General Manager, HCM, Andrew Lafontaine.
HR and the chief financial officer are working together to ensure the best hires are made, training expenditure delivers measurable financial outcomes and that employees remain engaged.
Solairus Aviation is walking the talk, and seeing the benefits of aligning Finance and HR.
“With Oracle ERP and Oracle HCM Cloud, everything is integrated. We went from semi-automated, disparate systems to one integrated and automated system that enabled us to streamline our processes,” said Mark Dennen, CFO, Solairus Aviation.
Cloud-based technologies that link budget needs to employee needs, are enabling the organisation to make smarter hiring decisions.
Hiring can be based on the expected return on investment from a candidate’s skills, rather than who the company can get for how much salary.
Management can assess whether investment in training has delivered more sales or met other financial objectives.
“You can set up metrics around customer-facing roles, for example, and get insights into what better performance looks like and how much revenue that creates for the company,” says Lafontaine. “Then you can start to consider what kind of training and development are needed to drive that outcome.”
Use your technology to gather data on the talents of existing employees and the skills you expect to need.
This approach requires staff to be involved in their career planning and can help employers make informed decisions on what matters to employees, and identify which benefits are underused and wasting money.
It can also identify red flags when career aspirations are known.
If three people are aiming for one position, executives can act early to manage expectations rather than see two disaffected employees quit, says Lafontaine.
“You can keep employees in this situation happy and engaged by offering other types of opportunities, such as leading a project, doing a secondment or giving them other responsibilities.”
He says the business case for this type of analysis is clear. Employees who are engaged and able to participate in their career progression will be great ambassadors for the organisation and will help it outperform competitors.
When considering hiring strategies and engagement, first consider your “recruitment brand”, says Lafontaine.
Job candidates now go online to read reviews of organisations by former and current staff.
Your company will have a strong recruitment brand if people report positively on how they were hired, whether their career is being managed appropriately, when they feel engaged and when they consider the workforce culture to be a positive one.
Once you have business units collaborating, Lafontaine says your technology must be robust enough to evolve, as the organisation and employee expectations and objectives will change over time.
Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications and platform services. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com.
