Employee Engagement Software Critical To HR Recruitment Bundle

In a tough recruitment environment, many US companies are switching their prime focus from bringing new talent on board to keeping the best talent where it is and preventing employees from disappearing onto competitors’ payrolls. Employers know that it is much easier to retain good staff than to find new employees and so an industry has bloomed around monitoring staff engagement, finding ways to keep them happy in their roles and showing them how their career path can play out in their existing company.

At its most basic level, this has turned into trends around flexible working hours and conditions, employment benefits such as free meals, massages and gym memberships, but there has also been a boom in more technological ways of monitoring and maintaining engagement.

Because QJumpers research into companies around the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area and our experiences at this year’s HRSouthwest Conference has shown how important employee engagement has become, the company is currently looking for a partner to help build a continual engagement platform into the QJumpers system.

Good examples in the US over the past couple of years of platforms that have proved to be successful include Facebook’s Workplace which acts as a kind of social media intranet to foster collaborative networks and teamwork, and Fuel50 (like QJumpers, a company born out of New Zealand and making headway in the US) which helps employees map their career paths and helps connect them to mentors, coaches and colleagues.

The benefit to companies of including employment engagement software as part of their overall HR bundle is that managers are able to identify unhappy staff early – and potentially before they start to look elsewhere – and then seek ways to get them more engaged.

Another key element to employee engagement is the rise of artificial intelligence which is able to provide unbiased and real-time feedback and performance evaluation of employees while also speeding up the identification process of work that deserves reward or teams that may be underperforming.

The key is to have a platform which works seamlessly to keep in touch with employees to gain feedback about how they view their role and the company while also providing feedback to managers in an intuitive way to let them know how their teams are performing.

For example, research from the Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends Survey has shown that employees not “attached” to a company within the first 180 days are likely to leave within two years, it’s clear that it’s vital to have fast, accurate and unbiased reporting on induction processes and feedback on how new recruits feel about their new organisation to help prevent constant (and costly) turnover.

President Simon Oldham said the engagement sector was an exciting place heading towards 2018 because of how difficult it was to find good talent. “There’s now software which is designed to have continual conversations with employees online – just through little pokes and questions,” Simon says. “And these continual engagement platforms are becoming more and more important so I’m looking for partners to work with QJumpers in that engagement space.” What’s allowing QJumpers to move into this area is the global trend for companies to benefit from open APIs and easy integrations to move away from a common HR system towards specialist software providers.

“These things go in cycles but because of the pace of change in technology and new suppliers coming on stream all the time, companies know they’re missing out if they go with one supplier for all the different parts of their HR processes,” Simon says.

“So companies are starting to see the benefit of, say, keeping an HR platform for payroll and performance management and then looking to cherry-pick integrations which work best for their scenario. Because integrating is now so easy there’s no excuse for not using the best of the best.

“So if a company wants an employee engagement platform, they should go and get the best and integrate it with their HR platform, and if they want the best recruitment system they should use QJumpers and integrate it into their system.”

To experience QJumpers’ fresh, innovative approach to recruitment and customer support, or for more information on how QJumpers can integrate into your business to develop a successful recruitment strategy and system, email us at [email protected].