Public sector budgets are often stretched to their limits and inflexible. HR efficiencies can give your organization new ways to do more with less.
Making human resources processes and systems more efficient does more than reduce direct HR expenses. HR efficiencies save money at all levels of the organization. The return on investment can be significant through efforts such as centralizing information, automating tasks, and modernizing technology.
Here are five ways to save money when your human resources have the tools it needs to be more efficient.
1. Save money by reducing staff time
One of your organization’s most important, limited, and expensive resources is your staff’s time. Every step in the employee lifecycle is a potential drain on this precious resource. The faster you identify qualified job applicants and turn them into successful employees, the less staff time you waste. Take too long to process job candidates, and the most talented and qualified people may get snapped up by someone else.
An integrated talent management system is, by design, a time-saving system. Much of the system’s efficiency comes from automation, which can do everything from minimizing slow-paced manual data entry to swiftly routing people through new hire trainings. The software can also let you pinpoint which parts of your HR processes are causing bottlenecks.
Los Angeles County, California moved from a fragmented grab bag of software to a unified system that handles recruitment, applications, testing, and hiring. It’s a move that has saved the county days of staff time for every position it needs to fill.
2. Save money by reducing risk of litigation
Human resource lawsuits are expensive. One way to reduce the cost is to resolve lawsuits quickly. But the best way to save money is by preventing lawsuits in the first place.
To reduce the risk of employee-initiated litigation, your organization needs to do more than follow the letter of the law. Proactively prevent behavior that may open you up to lawsuits by making sure every employee receives required trainings and understands workplace policies. Detect and stop problematic behavior by continuously monitoring employee performance. Avoid lawsuits over common human error mistakes by minimizing manual data entry.
If a lawsuit happens, the integrity of your human resources data and your ability to quickly access it is essential. Lose track of key documentation and you can lose the case.
A talent management system creates an auditable and defensible record of all applicant information, your hiring process, and employee management data.
3. Save money on printing, mailing, and storage
Comprehensive, easy-to-use public sector HR systems can’t be run on paper. Modern software that stores information in the cloud minimizes the purchasing, operating, and IT costs associated with consumable physical resources. Your organization saves on paper, envelopes, ink, postage, photocopying, physical storage space, and digital servers.
Keeping important data and documents in filing cabinets and on local computers also does your organization a disservice. Maintaining an archaic system is unnecessarily complicated, risky, and expensive.
The human resources office in Santa Clara County, California was held back by its old paper-based processes and hard pressed to trim its budget. With approximately 1,000 positions to fill every year, a comprehensive talent management system was the right solution for making the most out of valuable tax dollars.
4. Save money on advertising
Getting your job descriptions in front of more candidates is key to giving your organization a greater talent pool to choose from. But advertising each open position on dozens of career sites is expensive and time consuming.
A subscription to GovernmentJobs.com lets you easily and affordably put your job descriptions in front of thousands of people who are interested in public sector careers. You can also let people fill out online profiles about the kind of job they want, and use your talent management system to automatically push out a notification when your organization adds a position matching their interests.
Modern HR software can also lower your advertising costs by making it easy to proactively look for qualified candidates in the pool of people who previously applied for positions at your organization.
5. Save money by increasing retention
It costs less to hold on to quality employees than it does to find and hire new ones. Employees often leave because the job doesn’t match their expectations, they receive few opportunities for professional growth, or they have no outlet for sharing feedback.
A comprehensive talent management system helps you start employees off right on their first day on the job, and continue to support them every day thereafter.
You can set up a smooth onboarding process, engaging new employees in everything they’ll need to do and and setting a path to help them grow. With learning management features, your organization can streamline how you provide employees with the trainings they need to meet your expectations. And with performance management software, your public sector organization can increase productivity and keep employees happy.
