What is HRMS? Everything you need to know

An HRMS is a technology that helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with candidates, and employees throughout your life-cycle with them.  This includes finding new candidates, interacting and engaging them, testing and hiring them, and supporting them throughout the relationship.

There is also a range of HRMS software available in the market depending on the unique shapes and sizes of businesses. For example, Freshteam is a comprehensive HRMS software that works with you in the complete life cycle of an employee. From when he is a candidate to the new hire to an employee until he exits the company. Freshteam can help you automate a ton of workflows such as storing employee data, collecting and parsing candidate resumes. You can get a professional-looking career site in minutes, and easy-to-use talent pool, time-off management, proactive onboarding and offboarding, all with Freshteam. 

A Quick overview of HRMS

The usage and demand for HRMS started when a lot of talented recruiters could not bring cadence to their hiring and onboarding workflow. Considering adopting a culture for their company, HR professionals realized they need to focus more on employee onboarding for better employee retention. This would be workable only if they could automate their monotonous HR workflows, enabling them to laser-focus on things that require human intervention. Automating HR workflows comes with an added advantage of personalizing and customizing the entire employee journey according to different employee persona.

Nowadays businesses use HRMS in a variety of ways including staying compliant to data regulations, expanding their candidate reach, increasing employer branding, etc. For example, if a business is concerned about onboarding its new hires effectively, they might require an employee onboarding software. While if a business is worried more about increasing its employer brand, they should probably look into optimizing their career site to attract more candidates. A business that wants to understand and measure the HR KPIs requires an intuitive dashboard that helps them learn their metrics on the go! A complete and ideal HRMS gives all of this in one place. 

Gartner predicts that about 46% of employees remain dissatisfied because of poor employee experience. To increase employee satisfaction, organizations need to start focusing on how employees feel about it from day one. A HR can majorly do this by putting the time needed for it. Most hours of an HR’s life is spent at tasks like paperwork, posting jobs, calculating KPIs, things we could automate. From engaging new candidates to retaining potential new hires, an HRMS helps in improving employee/candidate experience by enabling HRs to automate repetitive processes and focus on more human, paperless process. This involves everything from scheduling interviews to communicating and engaging with candidates to e-signing documents, sending welcome kits, etc. 

How does an HRMS work?

A Human resource management system helps you find new candidates, evaluate them, and keep them happy by organizing your onboarding program and welcoming them in a way that helps you build stronger relationships with them and grow your employer brand faster. 

• HRMS systems start by collecting candidates’ email, telephone, social media data, and more, once it receives a resume inside its database. The HRMS tool organizes this information to give you a complete record of individuals, so you can better understand your relationship over time.

• An HRMS can give you a clear view of your employees and candidates. Employees can make use of the Employee self-service portal to upload their details on their own thus avoiding human errors. 

• An HRMS platform can also connect to other business apps that help you get your hiring process up to speed. HRMS solutions today are more open and can integrate with your favorite business tools, such as document signing, google calendar, and assessment tools.

Components of HRMS

The major components of an HRMS are ATS, Employee Onboarding/Off-boarding, Time-off management, Payroll, and most importantly, Employee Information System.

There is a range of HRMS software available in the market depending on different shapes and sizes of businesses. For example, Freshteam is a comprehensive HRMS software that can help you automate a ton of workflows such as storing employee data, storing and parsing candidate resumes, saving potential candidates’ profiles in the talent pool, managing timeoff, onboarding and offboarding along with giving easy to use org charts and information system for employees. 

To understand what exactly an HRMS does, let’s study the different components of HRMS in detail

ATS

An applicant tracking system(ATS) helps HR professionals to manage job postings, source candidates from different sources, screen resumes, engage with candidates, assess and make offers, and do more. Some of the major concerns of HR professionals these days are to do all of these from a central location and this is exactly what an HRMS serves for. 

Let’s try and understand some of the common HR challenges without an ATS:

Customizing application forms and job descriptions.

An ideal ATS should allow you to customize your candidates’ application based on the role that they are applying for. Another herculean task is to write job descriptions each time you post a new job. With a comprehensive ATS, you can easily reuse the template that’s been readily provided with a few edits to bring in your org’s brand. 

• Your company and job postings need to be omnipresent wherever your candidates are. Using an ATS, you can source candidates from multiple channels like — LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook thus not restricting yourselves to just job sites.

• Screening resumes and storing them has always been hard. Ensure that your ATS helps you not just screen and store your resumes but also parse them for you so that you don’t have to shell out time doing manual data entry.

Onboarding & Off-boarding

Onboarding involves tasks like monitoring onboarding tasks, sending out onboarding checklists to new hires and internal teams, sending welcome kits, getting candidates to e-sign are some of the onboarding tasks that your HRMS can help you automate and do in a breeze. 

Challenges in onboarding include sending out multiple documents, knowing how many have signed and how many have not and sending reminders to those, sending easy emails about day one, and more.

Employee Information System

Human errors are very common in Human Resource Management. Providing your employees the ability to self-service, lets them set up their profiles with the right information. It’s also important to understand who belongs to which team, who reports to whom to understand the organizational structure inside out. This is where org charts can be of great help. All your employees’ documents can also be recorded and maintained in one place using an Employee Information System. When you want to look up to someone, you can directly look into the employee directory for their email ID or phone number. You can also configure to restrict users from seeing specific information based on their roles.

Time-off Management

When you have multiple remote offices, it becomes tedious to communicate the time-offs/public holidays according to every region. An HRMS enables you to create custom time-off policies, define rules, and manage holidays. One of the main challenges with time-offs is keeping track of the carryovers and available ones. An HRMS should help your employees check their time off balances and book time-offs in just a few clicks. The manager receives an instant notification and can approve or decline it right away. It also helps managers keep track of unauthorized leaves thus reducing administrative time and costs.