At Isagenix, an 800-employee networking marketing company in the health and wellness industry, Luke Haden’s days were often tiresome and frustrating.
In recent years the company has been hiring between 100 to 200 people per year, ranging from IT professionals to salespeople to doctors and scientists. As the company’s head of recruiting, Haden found himself stymied by a clunky and outdated applicant tracking system that managed to alienate candidates and hiring managers alike.
“The system had almost no resume flow, it wouldn’t integrate with our core HR system or much of anything else, and if we had to have something built, the cost was astronomical,” he says.
The ATS’ lousy integration capabilities often meant that candidates who tried to click into Isagenix’s careers page were directed to dead links or would get error messages instead, says Haden.
This was an especially critical situation for the fast-growing company, which not only prides itself on its unique culture but must also attract hard-to-find talent amid the tightest labor market in decades.
“Finding salespeople with the type of network-marketing experience we need can be challenging,” he says.
The need for a new recruiting system was readily apparent. In addition to an easy-to-use, end-to-end system, Haden and his team needed something that would easily integrate with other tools and would quickly send postings to job aggregators such as Indeed and Simply Hired, he says.
“We wanted something that would be as automated as possible and that we could train our hiring managers on within 15 minutes,” says Haden.
The company ended up going with a system from iCIMS.
“Everyone is much happier now,” he says.
There were some important lessons learned during the implementation, however.
“The No. 1 thing that any talent acquisition department needs to do for this sort of project is to have a process map,” says Haden.
By having a visual representation of corporate processes, a project team can determine whether or not a change they make will impact another department. For example, prior to the new system, each time a new hire was made emails would have to be manually sent out to various departments. During the implementation, Haden created a new email template that would automatically be sent out for each new hire. In so doing, however, he inadvertently left out some people who needed to be looped into the process and also changed the coding, which confused the IT department.
“In the end, we ended up creating an email that didn’t need to be there and it created more work for IT, because they already had the ServiceNow platform built out to interact with the hiring managers,” says Haden.
Since then, Haden and his team get out their process map anytime they’re considering making any changes to ensure it won’t disrupt the work of other departments or duplicate an existing process.
Another important lesson is having IT involved each time a department is considering implementing a new platform to ensure it knows the type of information that’s needed and which systems will be affected.
Haden says he’d counsel his fellow HR practitioners to “not be afraid of change. HR and legal tend to be the last two departments that get rid of manual processes. So I’d say, don’t fear change and embrace automation.”
Changing to a new system has made life easier for Haden and his recruiters, he says.
“When I was first hired, my job was so administrative I’d have to drag myself into work each day. Now, our work is much more efficient and streamlined–and we like coming into work.”
