How HR and IT teams can work together for smooth employee transitions

Businesses sink a lot of time and effort into finding the right candidate for a position. One SHRM survey, for instance, found that the average cost-per-hire is more than $4100 (and that is on the low end of estimates). However, all that time and money becomes immaterial if the employee has a poor and inefficient onboarding process.

According to one online survey, 93% of employers agree that a good onboarding experience is critical to determining a new hire’s decision to stay. Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workforce report found that just 12% of employees “strongly agree” that that their employer does a good job at onboarding. Replacing an employee costs businesses an average of 21.4% of the lost employee’s salary. Businesses need to develop effective on-boarding processes that address this disconnect.

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One fundamental source of this problem with onboarding can be attributed to the delegation of duties within a business. While HR professionals are generally in charge of posting positions, conducting screening interviews, extending offers, etc., typically it has been IT that is in charge of collecting employee information — setting up enterprise software accounts, assigning employee devices, deploying applications to said employee devices and everything else associated with getting employee to work on company IT. And while HR professionals use often-sophisticated human resources management systems, or HRMSs, to manage the hiring process, IT organizations are often starting from scratch when onboarding employees, lacking access to all the important information already collected during the hiring process that could save them significant time. This not only drags down IT organizations, but also makes it harder for new employees to get acclimated to their new organization and do their jobs effectively.

This less-than-ideal situation usually is not the result of HR and IT jousting for responsibilities. Ask any IT person how they feel about onboarding and they will tell you they would prefer to focus on other priorities, like performing system maintenance and keeping company data secure. Moreover, most HR and IT professionals will agree that as much as possible of the onboarding process ought to be left in HR’s capable hands.

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How can IT teams that have long been in charge of this essential component of onboarding abdicate these key day-to-day responsibilities to HR professionals? The solution lies with automation. By leveraging integrations, typically through APIs, between the company’s HRMS and its identity management systems, IT can enable new employees to automatically be set up in the majority of the company’s enterprise systems, using the data collected from employees from new-hire (online) paperwork to automatically populate most of the necessary fields. Where that data is insufficient, the identity management system can be set up to automatically prompt new employees for information.

Similarly, for management of employee devices and other hardware, IT can use a mobile device management, or MDM, solution to automatically customize set up of devices using data provided by employees to the HRMS. And should any relevant HR data be changed, such as the employee’s job title or department, or even if the employee leaves, that information can automatically be replicated from the HRMS and the appropriate changes can be made.

This is what we call “zero-touch onboarding,” and the best part is once it is set up, IT and HR both have very little to do with day-to-day onboarding tasks with regard to IT. The essence — and the strength — of this approach is that it makes the HRMS, rather than strictly IT management systems, the source of all data related to employee attributes, including but not limited to pay, benefits, paid time off (PTO), and job title and function. More precisely, the zero-touch approach makes the electronic employee file or record the single source of truth for IT and HR data in cases where those two systems interact. Having a single source of truth drives data integrity which in turn drives consistency and accuracy.

Before going to IT to ask them to enable zero-touch onboarding, HR professionals will want to ensure a few conditions are met first. The first is to ensure that you are capturing the right kind of HR data. For instance, your HRMS might contain fields that are technically optional, but essential from the perspective setting employees up with IT. Once you have identified where the gaps in the data are, you will need to not only update data that is currently missing, but also update your processes and procedures so that this information is automatically captured and updated in the future. Another useful step is to ensure your current organizational chart and your HRMS’s representation of it are consistent. Having the organizational taxonomy be accurately reflected in the HRMS makes it easier for IT to customize applications so that they automatically assign people the right kind and level of credentials, which helps them maintain a secure IT environment.

To sum up, in today’s technology-driven business environment, onboarding with company IT is with few exceptions the precondition for an employee to start demonstrating their value in their new role. Yet onboarding at many organizations remains haphazard, in large part due to disconnects between HR and IT. With today’s HRMS technologies and APIs, however, HR and IT departments can collaborate to create a zero-touch onboarding process that not only saves both organizations time and money, but is also more efficient and empowering for employees.