A Top Insurance Company Transforms Hiring and Retention…

The importance of Human Resources in a company is undeniable. In addition to handling vital business functions such as employee benefits and payroll, it is HR’s job to supply the company with qualified, reliable talent. Strategic hiring is critical to the sustainability of any company and recruiting top talent can be a major challenge without the right processes and tools in place. Relying on inefficient, outdated candidate management systems (CMS) and recruiting procedures can drastically lengthen the hiring cycle. This causes frustration for both hiring managers and candidates.

Unfortunately, this was a situation all too familiar to our client. They were fighting an uphill battle with their recruitment process – constrained by outdated technology that was expensive to maintain and offered limited functionality. Their recruiting system did not integrate with their existing Workday platform (Human Capital Management (HCM)), causing them to have duplicate data in disparate systems and a lack of visibility into the hiring process. While Workday HCM has a robust mobile app, the client’s legacy CMS offered no mobile capabilities, preventing round-the-clock access to recruiting information from anywhere. Additionally, scalability of the system was an issue. Yet yearly application submission volume had increased 40 percent, with an expectation for continued growth in the future.

Decide What to Achieve

Design, development, and management of technical solutions can keep you busy all day, but if those solutions are not meeting business needs and strategic objectives, the end result will disappoint. As part of the project’s kick off, CapTech facilitated a two-day session to collaboratively determine project objectives, initial requirements, and high-level design decisions. We also developed key foundational planning documents that outlined the plan, milestones, deliverables, resources, and responsibilities that set expectations for the rest of the project.

Plan Ahead to Implement Change

Due to the large change impact that this initiative had across the entire company, a solid plan encompassing change management, communication, training, and resistance management was required in order to support a smooth transition to and ongoing user satisfaction with the new system. To help the client formulate an effective plan, CapTech organized an organizational change management (OCM) session to outline best practices and common pitfalls. The client used this session as a springboard to create a plan focused on awareness, desire (buy-in), knowledge, ability, and reinforcement. This plan also outlined a schedule for key messages/activities and training and established a framework for ensuring that senior leaders were engaged as active and visible sponsors of the change.

Reduce Risk, Generate Value

In development, CapTech used an agile approach to divide the project into incremental “builds” with rapid cycle times for quicker results. Each build began with a cycle of requirements, progressed to configuration, and finished with testing. Based on requirements for each build, CapTech iteratively configured the desired functionality giving frequent demonstrations to the team and stakeholders for refinement purposes. Once the configuration phase of a build was complete, the client was given the opportunity to test the system and ensure it met their specifications.

Assure User Satisfaction

Throughout User Acceptance Testing (UAT), the team held numerous knowledge transfer sessions with the client to ensure they was ready and able to maintain the system after the go-live date, with each session focused on a defined area of Workday configuration. Our lead configuration architect walked the client product owners through every piece of configuration and fielded all questions about the system, and we supported the client with all remediation of errors until they felt fully capable of managing it themselves. This approach encouraged product ownership and a seamless hand-off following CapTech’s departure.

Prior to full deployment, CapTech validated all configuration in a pre-production testing environment to make sure the system was operating as expected and that all configuration had been migrated properly. CapTech provided two weeks of post-production support after the go-live date to ensure the client was able to handle any incoming requests and was confident in their ability to maintain the system on their own.

The implementation of Workday Recruiting took eight months to complete and revitalized the client’s talent acquisition process. Leveraging Workday Recruiting resulted in a single view of the associate by integrating with Workday’s HCM system and supported the client’s corporate initiative to move IT systems to the cloud. Decommissioning the legacy candidate management system reduced the client’s overall business costs and enabled them to reevaluate and optimize their entire internal recruiting process. In turn, the improved workflow, combined with Workday’s configurable User Interface (UI), significantly enhanced the internal hiring experience for both the hiring team and candidates as evidenced by positive feedback from survey results. The new system also strengthened inter-departmental communication as Workday encourages collaboration and ensures visibility.

William Gibson

Director

As our Workday service offering lead, William helps organizations make the most of their Workday investment. Aided by a best-in-class team of cross-functional consultants, William partners with clients to assess system health, develop product roadmaps, and drive business value through Workday.