Self-Service HR Portals – Get More From Your xRM System

Your employees spend a lot of time looking for information on your internal intranet, and on the public Internet. If you’ve already invested in a Customer Relationship Management application like Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.com, you have the foundation of a powerful HR system. As workplace models evolve, so do the information access needs of your staff, and potential employees for:

• Job applications
• Benefits forms
• Training videos and content
• Expense approval requests
• Request forms for new hardware, tools or supplies

In many cases, administrative functions occur frequently, and often require assignment and approvals and sharing with several people within the organization. The simple act of updating an employee’s profile and emergency contacts can be done via email, but it will often require manual entry, which can cause errors, and take up the time which would be better spent on high-value tasks.

Here are three key ways a self-service HR portal can deliver value to your company, whether you have ten employees, or a thousand.

Onboarding Process Efficiency

Let’s say you are currently publishing employment opportunities on your corporate website. A candidate sends an e-mail to HR@yourcompanyname.com, and it goes to one of your HR team members, who happens to be on vacation. It would have been a great candidate if someone else received the application, but they went to a competitor instead when they didn’t get contacted.

When your recruiter gets back from vacation, they give the candidate a call, who says they found another job, and their resume goes into the deleted folder. With a self-serve portal connected to your CRM system, you could have a workflow set up to alert all of the interested parties of a job candidate, and you can store their resume and profile information on file. The whole lifecycle of the hiring process can be enabled by a mobile-friendly web portal:

• The initial application submission, which alerts hiring managers and creates a candidate profile
• If there are any documents, or information such as references or background check approval forms need to be filled out, they can all be accessed from the candidate’s secure portal
• If a candidate is hired, they can be easily converted to employee status, and access documents such as tax forms, Non-Disclosure Agreements and business policy training

If your business has multiple offices, or remote employees, provisioning access to this information via a portal is an effective way to manage the onboarding process. As new hires reach specific milestones in “learning the ropes” and gaining seniority, an Intranet connected to your CRM is a great way to track and report on their progress, relative to their colleagues.

Veteran Employees

Just because an employee has had the privilege of working for your company for a few years doesn’t mean they won’t benefit from a portal that is accessible from outside your firewall. Online employee community sites, or social intranets, encourage employees to share ideas, connect with employees from across the organization, and increase engagement. They can find news, groups and discussions to join and contribute to.

If you have employees with specific skills, experiences, or even language abilities, it’s far easier to find a colleague to:

• Team with an opportunity
• Resolve a customer support case
• Deliver on a project
• Engage a partner for a project or opportunity
• Assess your risk with a legal matter
• Publish and reuse job descriptions in your CRM system

Conversations on the phone, in private email conversations, and in the office can happen once, and never get captured for future use. HR portals, which are integrated with an xRM application can retain community conversations, store any documents related to the business matter, and help your company to meet audit requirements, and establish a knowledge base for continuous improvement.

Other benefits of HR portals include:

• File storage for benefits forms
• Providing access to videos and role-based training materials
• Publishing employee directories and calendars of events, which can be updated on the portal itself, or maintained via your CRM system
• Initiating approvals for expenses, vacations and keeping employees informed about ways to progress their career within your company with cross-team employment opportunities or soft skills training courses.

Access to Important Data

Providing all of your employees with full access to your CRM system, just for the HR capability is not only expensive, but it is easy to forget that employees have access to customer data until it’s too late. Many of the data breaches which occur are from inside of unsuspecting companies. With an employee Intranet, you can build an “ethical wall” in front of your CRM data, and ensure your customer data doesn’t get into the hands of your competitors.

Whether your organization is small or large, it’s important to ensure that the right data is available to the right people. Your company should have full control over what data is available to employees, which is why it’s important for data to be secured. Self-service portals can be configured to only provide access to documents and tools that are relevant for that particular employee. Building HR workflows in your CRM system, and establishing security roles and permissions are critical to keeping your data safe.

A Social Intranet for employees that is connected to your CRM data provides modern collaboration capabilities to everyone within your company.

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Self-Service HR Portals – Get More From Your xRM System