Mobility and Human Resources How to "Unleash" Talent Management Date:   Wednesday , August 11, 2010 By 2013, there will be more people using smart phones with access to web-based applications than laptops. In the first three months of 2010, Apple sold approximately nine million iPhones—the first time that Apple sold more phones than computers. Research from IDC has predicted that 1.2 billion workers will be using mobile enterprise tools by 2011. This represents roughly one-third of the total global workforce. It is expected that the U.S. will lead with over 75 percent of its workers using mobile technologies. Other regions that heavily use mobile computing include Europe and Japan; however, Asia is among the fasting growing regions, according to IDC, and will have 62 percent of all global mobile workers by 2013. Other areas set for growth include South America, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. For Human Resources managers everywhere the question is “how do I leverage mobile technology to improve productivity and internal customer service?” Let’s take Recruitment for example. In a typical large enterprise the ratio of hiring managers to recruiters might be 50:1 or higher. For a business with 100 recruiters, this would equal 5,000 hiring managers that have to be trained on a web based applicant tracking or e-recruitment solution to complete standard HR tasks like approving job requisitions and job offers. In a retail environment, with little or no access to laptops and heavy applicant volumes to process, this creates tremendous latency in the process and creating huge inefficiencies for the business. Let’s do the math quickly. 5,000 hiring managers approving one job requisition and one job offer per open position equals 10,000 transactions. Using a traditional web based system from a PC this might take 2 minutes per transaction - which equals 334 person hours per position expended. Conservatively, if each hiring manager opens and fills two job requisitions per month on average (not unreasonable in a high volume retail environment with a mix of hourly and salaried positions), this would be the equivalent of approximately 8,000 person hours per year spent on approving requisitions and job offers. A better approach to solving this problem, breaking through the bottleneck and improving efficiency would be to enable hiring managers to use their smart phones (BlackBerry, iPhone, etc.) to view and approve job requisitions and job offers. Technology innovations now available on the market allow one to craft intelligent workflows in need of prompt approval or action to be managed via a BlackBerry or an iPhone. Imagine you’re a hiring manager who’s out of the office or has only periodic access to a PC, you can receive an alert on your BlackBerry or iPhone telling you that there’s an actionable task pending for you. This appears in the same way that new text messages or emails appear on your smart phone. You can open up a mobile app to view and approve (or reject) job requisitions and approve offers in 30-45 seconds Anyone who uses a Blackberry or iPhone will be familiar with the conventions of these applications. They are easy to use and require little or no training. The system is secure and all data is encrypted in transit. Your organization retains full control of who can access this mobile capability - and that access can easily be shut off if a phone is lost or stolen. All updates to the software are managed centrally. So now, from a human resources perspective, you’ve empowered your internal customers (hiring managers) and reduced transactional processing time by up to 75 percent — a huge improvement in customer satisfaction and productivity! Time to fill requisitions drops, quality of hire goes up and now hiring managers are fully productive while on the go! A fully integrated approach - incorporating a recruitment solution and mobile device-enabled workflows - will enable organizations to reap the benefits of improved productivity, cost reduction and happier HR customers. As such, this functionality will rapidly become a ‘must-have’ for all organizations! The author is Vice President, Product Marketing, Kenexa