Lauren Burke Frequently, CHROs ask for reports on recruiting and other essential HR activities to get a sense of the health of the business – trying to align future activities with business objectives like hiring a new sales team or adding to the customer success team to boost customer satisfaction scores.
However, much of the information about the existing team, vacant positions, and key attributes for those positions is socked away in a variety of spreadsheets, static organization charts, and non-connected payroll systems that makes the decision about how to allocate resources and available funds an exercise in futility.
Compiling performance metrics into a usable report format can take days or weeks, so that by the time it even reaches the CHRO or business executive that needs it the most, the data is outdated and incomplete.
The setup creates massive visibility gaps across the org chart, puts data quality at risk, and limits a team’s control over their own information.
Since most HR and payroll SaaS systems are built with particular information about position — title, location, pay rate — tied directly to an employee record (as in, the person who presently occupies that position), the position and the person are indistinguishable.
This creates numerous headaches for team members, such as:
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Disappearing data: When an employee is promoted, changes roles, or leaves the organization the employee record is altered or deleted — along with all the information about the role.
- Limited visibility into staffing needs or vacancies: Many teams find that they can’t even be sure what roles they have to fill or whether they’re hiring for new requisitions or backfills because of a lack of information. The data deleted along with an employee record is critical for HR teams to see open or ”unoccupied” positions. Without it, they’re mostly guessing.
- Error-prone processes for updating deleted information: Compiling data from multiple spreadsheets and systems into a unified single source of truth is time-consuming and fraught with risk of miskeyed entries or other mistakes common to manual processes. A misplaced decimal point, a misclick on a drop-down menu, or other inadvertent data action can wreak havoc on payroll, recruiting, and training plans.
Dirty or non-existent data can quickly turn from an annoying inconvenience to a competitive disadvantage.
Legacy systems centered on employee-level data put companies at extreme risk of severely over or understaffing key roles, struggling to define compensation plans that can directly impact the bottom line, and generally falling behind competitors by missing out on core talent because it took too long to identify open roles.
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