Oversee the onboarding process. Manage employee relations. Maintain benefits programs. Ensure legal compliance. Make policy recommendations. Have you ever taken the time to list all that’s expected of you as an HR manager? Depending on the size of your company, your list could take up pages.
Because you already have so many “big picture” projects going on at any one time, you rely heavily on the help of your HR employees, especially when it comes to hiring and recruiting new talent. Without them, time-consuming tasks like posting open positions online and reviewing applications would fall back on you, greatly reducing the time you can spend working to better the company as a whole.
This is just one reason you want to ensure your HR employees are happy and satisfied with your hiring process. So how do you know if they are dissatisfied? How do you know if how your company hires and recruits new employees is causing them to feel overworked and unhappy? Here are four common signs:
1. Their Attitude is Changing
It takes a certain kind of person to excel in human resources. You need to be upbeat, energetic and hardworking. If you notice a typically chipper and productive member of your staff is growing increasingly apathetic and disengaged, there’s a good chance she’s no longer happy in her job. Perhaps she’s overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applications she’s expected to process. Or maybe the opposite is true: She’s become bored completing tedious and time-consuming hiring and recruiting tasks.
2. They’re Increasingly Stressed or Sick
According to a recent Gallop poll, 40 percent of American workers say their job is very or extremely stressful. More than half (52 percent) say they’ve called in sick when they weren’t ill, 62 percent of them saying it was due to stress from work. When you think about what you’re expecting of your employees—that is, to find the best hires for your company quickly—and then you think about your manual hiring and recruiting process, it’s easy to see why they’re increasingly stressed.
3. Their Quality of Work is Suffering
Like you, your employees have to juggle several responsibilities. It doesn’t matter how organized a person is or how well he manages his time: If he has too much to do (like manually post open positions, review applications and communicate with candidates), quality of work will suffer. What’s worse, quality of hires for your company could suffer.
4. They’re Dropping Hints
Nobody wants to seem like they’re bellyaching about working hard, which is why your employees are more likely to drop subtle hints that they’re feeling dissatisfied with your company’s hiring and recruiting process. They’ll tell you they didn’t complete a project because they spent most of their day sorting and delivering applications. Others will pepper in how they had to work extra hours to complete their normal workload.
If your employees are increasingly demonstrating these signs, it’s time to address the thing that’s likely causing them to feel overworked and stressed: your company’s hiring and recruiting process. As a company grows and its applicant flow increases, it becomes more and more difficult for HR to complete hiring and recruiting tasks efficiently and effectively using a manual process. That’s why more companies are turning to applicant tracking software.
Applicant tracking software (ATS) automates the hiring and recruiting process so your employees can post positions and evaluate and communicate with applicants more efficiently. This greatly reduces the time and effort it takes HR employees to find and hire qualified candidates and decreases the probability they’ll feel overworked and unhappy in their jobs.
To learn more about the benefits of applicant tracking software, see our helpful guide.