Replacing good people is never going to be easy. Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that the cost of replacing a competent member of staff equates to approximately a year of that person’s salary.

Another key recruitment issue is that the selection process is not an exact science. HR professionals are required to jump through a series of administrative loopholes, running a series of interviews, sorting out contracts and inevitably picking someone that they think provides the best fit.

And as we all know from our interaction with new employees, there is no such thing as a perfect fit; organisations simply have to hope that the person selected through the timely and costly recruitment process proves an asset to the team. Recruitment is, therefore, a bit of a ‘finger in the air’ process.

But it doesn’t have to be like that. While any new employee is likely to come with a degree of risk, organisations can make use of specialist software to help ensure that the transition to fully-fledged team player is as painless as possible.

The right human capital management (HCM) software can provide a valuable asset to any recruitment strategy. From identifying a gap in the workforce and sifting through the candidates’ applications through to awarding the contract, HCM software can help generate significant efficiency and cost savings during the recruitment process whilst increasing the chance of recruiting the right type of person.

Look for automated HCM technology that will help you to match potential employees against established criteria. Integrated HCM reporting tools will also highlight the recruitment methods that have been most successful and at what cost. Such tools will also enable you to track the success of costly recruitment agencies, creating a preferred supplier list of worthy partners.

Finally, look to automate as much as possible to free-up the HR team’s time. Automating response letters and other recruitment correspondence can help slash administration costs. Meanwhile, electronic recruitment forms which can be automatically uploaded to the HCM system, will help save both time and expense.

Attempting to find the right person is never going to be easy. But it doesn’t have to be a struggle. And with the right software in place, you will have a good head start and the intelligence needed to do the best job possible as you attempt to identify that perfect needle in that rather large haystack!

Using software for smarter recruitment is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

It has long been the case that the old Med3 was often illegible – I should know, I was an HR manager trying decipher them! Hence one of the Fit Note reforms was to have them printed out A4 size and electronically.

One also wonders if certain GPs who are worried about the recriminations if they say too much are making the form difficult to interpret. They should not need to know about the employee’s job as all they are supposed to comment on on the form is the impact of the condition on what the employee can and cannot do, for example unable to reach to a high shelf or needs to sit down regularly. Let’s hope these controversial but well intentioned reforms don’t fail simply due to form filling.

Fit notes failing due to poor handwriting – what’s new for employers? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

Their first task will be an immediate review of all regulations in the pipeline for implementation which have been inherited from the previous Government. The cost of implementing this amounts to £5bn annually before April 2011 and £19.1bn per annum thereafter, as identified by the Better Regulation Executive that sits within the Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) remit (it will be interesting to see what will get the chop – for example additional paternity leave and pay will be costly for business but both parties are committed to extending ‘shared parenting’).

A one in, one out approach to new regulations – Labour were allegedly doing this anyway

What would you do away with in the payroll and HR arena? My vote would be for student loans to be collected through direct debit in the first instance and only payroll as a last resort (they do this for the last 23 months of the loan anyway) and a proper scrutiny of all the paper enquiries that government departments still send to employers when they already have the data in the public domain. Come on, you share our data with the world when you don’t mean to perhaps you could share it to help us instead!?

Kate Upcraft
Payroll writer and lecturer
ISIS Support Services Ltd
kateupcraft@btconnect.com

Will the Cable plan unravel? is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

We were all working to the Labour plans to reduce tax relief to 20% for those with income above £180K, with even those with income of £130,000 at risk too. With pension saving a tax inefficient option for such individuals the move has been to look at CGT related options such as shares and corporate ISAs. Now we are plunged back into uncertainty with CGT on the increase and no clear steer on tax relief – let’s hope we know more on 22^nd June.

What was in yesterday’ agreement was:

• Confirmation that the default retirement age will be phased out, not just increased – will that hamper your successional plans?
• Confirmation that the state pension age will rise to 66 – this is less ambitious than Labour who had already set a timetable for a rise to 68 for both sexes by 2046
• Abolishing compulsory annuitisation at 75 i.e. being forced to trade in your pension pot for a pension – this is controversial, as is allowing individuals to dip into their personal pension funds early. The reason we have a 25% cap on lump sums in the UK is to avoid the situation in countries like the US where individuals can cash in all their funds and then find as we are all living longer they have to go back to work or rely on the state
• Auto-enrolment is here to stay. Both parties recognise that the 9m non-pension savers have to be ‘encouraged’ to start looking toward funding their extended old age, but it’s certainly not clear that the NEST scheme or the contract awarded to Tata Consultancy to run the scheme (they were the only bidder in the end!) will survive in its current incarnation
• A commission will look at the political hot potato of the affordability of public sector pensions
• Restoring the link between state pensions and earnings will be brought forward to 2011 – a year earlier than Labour had said, and 3 years earlier than the Conservatives had previously promised

Kate Upcraft
Payroll writer and lecturer
ISIS Support Services Ltd

Pensions and the coalition – what we know and what we don’t! is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment