Talent Management Features and the Changing Workforce

As your workforce changes, expectations from your business  and employees are also changing!

With technology advancing and new workers entering the workforce, we see a shift in employees’ expectations. They are now expected to be engaged with their manager, have a work/life balance, strive for continuous professional development, be flexible, collaborate with co-workers across the globe and run their daily tasks on the go on a mobile device.

Also, businesses are now demanding more insight into what their employees are doing, and wanting real time updates on employee and departmental performance.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Talent  can help you transform your HR!

There’s been a lot of buzz around Microsoft’s standalone cloud based Human Capital Management (HCM) SaaS solution, and there’s a lot of questions on the functionality and capability of the product.

Let’s see what it has to offer:

• This is a cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) solution.
• Talent is helping to empower employees and HR professionals to transform Human Resources. I will explain how further on in this blog.
• Talent is part of the business application platform. This is our transformation platform for delivering these engaging employee and business transformation experiences using the capabilities of PowerApps, Power BI, Flow and Integrated Excel.
• Talent helps you hire the right people as quickly as possible and keep them engaged and working with you. Talent helps you meet this objective effectively and efficiently.
• Talent helps meet your changing workforce expectations by providing you with the tools you need to submit those deliverables.
• Talent offers the ability to run on mobile devices and tablets, which increases flexibility to access information on the go at any time.
• Koru is an addition to Dynamics 365 for Talent that focuses on building assessments.
• Talent allows you to embed external links within Talent in an employee self-service screen.
• Talent allows you to personalize and customize your work-spaces to fit your business needs.

What does the Talent Management application look like?

Attract

• There are less employees entering the workforce, so this puts the shift in focus on workplace culture and employer brand. Talent offers easy out of box hiring processes that businesses can use to hire quickly. Talent helps you quickly find the right candidate and get them onboard. This is critical for high priority roles. Once hired; Talent enables you to keep your employees engaged and working for you. Talent helps to hire the right candidate with the right skills, education, and the right fit for the work culture. Talent also has a configurable hiring process which allows you to custom create a hiring process that fits your business.
• Engage with employees during their hiring process to create an aligned and personalized talent experience using email notifications through a central candidate portal or mobile application. One central location for the recruiter, manager and candidate assists in keeping track of the hiring process and the next steps.
• Reduce the cost of recruiting by using LinkedIn embedded in the Talent Attract modular app. Microsoft is continuously expanding LinkedIn integration to create a seamless experience for recruiters. You can post a job application to LinkedIn and review candidate’s LinkedIn profiles within Attract. LinkedIn Recruiter allows you to see who has applied for the position, whether they are already captured in Talent and any other potential matches. Candidates that have applied using the app appear within Talent.
• Advanced interview scheduling capabilities offers the ability to manage multiple calendars (internal and external) as well as coping with changes that come up last minute. You can send notifications right within Attract to attendees if there are any changes to the schedule. This saves time for the recruiter by sending less emails back and forth. All attendees can view each others’ availability in real time.
• After the interview, all interviewers can come into a central location (i.e. the Attract app) to record their feedback for the candidate. Additionally, each interviewer can view feedback provided by other interviewers.
• The offer can be made electronically, and the candidate can sign electronically and start the onboarding process.

Onboard

• Once the applicant accepts the offer, they will be pushed to the Onboard app.
• Onboard allows you to create and streamline a customized onboarding process for one or various positions. You can save a template and use it for one person or a group of people.
• You can assign tasks to a new hire. Once a task is completed, they can record their completion of the task. Onboard offers HR professionals and managers the ability to track completion of the new hire’s onboarding process. Also, the product offers the functionality of including a contact the new hire can reach out to if they have any questions regarding completing those tasks. You can allocate tasks that the new hire needs to complete before they join the company, and tasks they need to complete once they join the company. This is controlled via an email address the employee uses to log into Talent. Depending which email address is used, it controls the visibility within the Onboard app. Alternatively, you can use Onboard not only for new hires but for those who recently joined your team or your project.
• You can track the activities that other departments need to finish before the new hire gets on board.
• Functionality within Onboard can assist in making your new hire feel welcome at their new workplace. You can familiarize your new hire with the workplace and ensure they have the right resources, tools and contacts before/on the first day of their new role. Sharing contacts within Onboard allows the new hire to get to know co-workers, their manager and other key individuals from the company. The new hire can proactively reach out and introduce themselves.
• Often employees are given a generic job posting and are not sure of their roles and responsibilities when they start their new role. Onboard and Attract cater to this concern.

Core HR

• Core HR allows employees to make transactional entries in the system, so the business and HR professionals can focus on HR Strategy. It allows employees to make personal information changes through employee self-service right in the Talent application, so HR professionals don’t have to do data entry. This makes employees feel empowered. You can set up an approval process if you’d like to control when changes are requested. Engaging customers and empowering employees can help you achieve your departmental goals.
• Talent helps you stay compliant with OSHA 300A report, VETS-4212 report and EEO-1 report.
• Talent offers access to KPIs and people insight. Talent offers insights and analytics for every workspace to enable HR professionals to make sound decisions.
• You can stay engaged with employees by giving them instant feedback.
• You can customize a learning path for each employee that helps them develop and grow. In a recent article, Hays (a recruiting company) mentioned that “Employers say the main reasons for the shortage (of workers) are a lack of available training and development, and fewer people entering their industry”. Using the tools and capabilities of Talent will help you keep your employees engaged, learning and developing in their job. As mentioned before this is one of the expectations of employees.
• Talent helps you keep track of skills and certifications that employees hold and helps the manager be aware of the skills that the team possesses, and see the skills that are missing. The manager can either recruit candidates that possess those skills or train existing staff. In the same press release, Hays said that “Skills shortages are already affecting business, with 92 percent of employers surveyed saying it is having a negative impact on areas such as productivity, staff turnover, and employee satisfaction”. This is where you can leverage Talent’s skill mapping search capability to help managers bridge the gap in skills.
• Talent’s capabilities are not limited to the above, but also include leave and absences, benefits, compensation management, employee development, and learning.

Koru

• Koru is a third-party company that integrates with Attract, it applies predictive analytics to assess, score, and rank candidates’ fit for an organization. Hiring managers and recruiters can add a Koru project as an assessment activity to the hiring process. Candidates then take the Koru assessment, and the result is directly accessible from within Attract.

NOTE: Microsoft is heavily investing in Dynamics 365 for Talent and there are updates each month. Please keep in mind that information in this blog may become outdated as Microsoft releases new updates with the latest features to the Talent application. For the latest news on Talent please visit:

• Latest Release Notes: https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications/release/#release-notes
  
• Document Site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/unified-operations/talent/
  
• Talent Application Overview and Pricing: https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/talent/overview/

If you have any questions about Dynamics 365 for Talent, please connect with us.

Download this eGuide that gives an overview of Dynamics 365 for Talent’s features and capabilities.