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CNA International
ANALYSIS
FUTURE WISE
Payroll and HR in 2010 according to Toby Conibear and Roger Moore
What does the future hold for payroll and HR according to Roger Moore, general manager, Bond TeamSpirit?
“Overall, people are increasingly likely during 2010 to want to integrate HR and payroll more tightly together,” he believes, “both from a technology standpoint and in terms of processes. This move can, and most likely will, reduce the resource overheads that come with running two separate departments and/or systems.”
Open channels
Moore continues: “For example, HR data on absence, qualifications and training (to name only a selection of criteria) can all affect a person’s salary and are all therefore equally relevant to the payroll department, and many companies have recognised that an ability to seamlessly share this data between the departments is important.
“At a bare minimum, the HR system has to be able to ‘talk’ to its payroll counterpart, but ideally the information input into the HR system should be fed directly and automatically into payroll, saving on double entry and possible errors in doing so.”
And what of recruitment in general in 2010? Toby Conibear, sales director at Bond International Software adds: “2010 is likely to see a further increase in the use of social networking sites for recruitment purposes – they are simply too rich in information to ignore – but such a growth in use will span beyond the simple trawling of LinkedIn and the like.
“There is instead likely to be similarly increased demand for, and supply of, integration between recruitment systems and social networking platforms, such that potential candidate details can be extracted and stored automatically and accurate criteria-based searches can be run across the Web 2.0 world.”
Conibear adds: “Linked to this, we have seen throughout the latter part of 2009 a greater emphasis on single search interfaces, enabling recruiters to search across multiple information sources for candidates. In one single step, all candidate-rich resources subscribed to can be searched simultaneously from the same criteria – a huge time and cost saving. The demand for this functionality is a trend that we can only see rising throughout 2010.”
And while HR and payroll are making moves through 2010 to share their data and ensure a two-way relationship with the input of new data, corporate recruitment is likely to follow suit with technological integration with the HR department. On successful hiring, candidate data can then be fed to the relevant HR department, removing the danger of incorrect or missed entries, and saving the time overhead involved.
Conibear continues: “Further functionality in high demand as we enter 2010 is the ability for the agency to integrate their own processes, data and software with that of the end client.
“This allows the information gathered by the agency during the candidate sourcing process to be mapped accurately and automatically straight into the recruitment and even HR systems of the corporate itself.
“Indeed this same requirement is being seen in the other direction i.e. the release of vacancy details from the corporate being automatically fed into the agency’s application, without the need for needless and time-consuming data copying and entry.
“The arrival of this demand shows two things in a stark light – firstly the increasingly competitive nature of the industry at the moment and the need to cut down time per hire, but perhaps more gratifyingly, also the fact that the recruitment industry in growing in its appreciation that technology can be relied upon to aid in daily processes, and can and should be called upon to do more.”
Missed opportunities
Moore continues: The recession has understandably reduced the amount of R&D that can be carried out within the industry, and so many of the developments that we expected in 2009 such as a continuation of the flurry of acquisitions and greater development of mobile access to applications simply did not occur.
However, arguably out of the cash-strapped economy and the need to simplify infrastructures and reduce physical assets, cloud computing and hosted software provision has gathered considerable pace.”
Despite many fears, 2009 remained a strong year on the agency software side, supplemented by increased interest from the European corporate sector and the UK public sector. This has principally been because of the overall slow-down in recruitment, freeing up time to roll-out new software, and also ensuring that the ‘bedding-in’ period for the new software is during a period of lower activity.
As in almost all technology sectors, discussions have grown on Cloud Computing and the related topics of software rental and software as a service. 2010 is likely to see a growth in interest in technology solutions that do not require internal hosting overheads, both in terms of cost and labour, as the market shifts to insist on greater reduction of costs and more visibility of return on investment and performance.
“Overall, people are increasingly likely during 2010 to want to integrate HR and payroll more tightly together,” he believes, “both from a technology standpoint and in terms of processes. This move can, and most likely will, reduce the resource overheads that come with running two separate departments and/or systems.”
Open channels
Moore continues: “For example, HR data on absence, qualifications and training (to name only a selection of criteria) can all affect a person’s salary and are all therefore equally relevant to the payroll department, and many companies have recognised that an ability to seamlessly share this data between the departments is important.
“At a bare minimum, the HR system has to be able to ‘talk’ to its payroll counterpart, but ideally the information input into the HR system should be fed directly and automatically into payroll, saving on double entry and possible errors in doing so.”
And what of recruitment in general in 2010? Toby Conibear, sales director at Bond International Software adds: “2010 is likely to see a further increase in the use of social networking sites for recruitment purposes – they are simply too rich in information to ignore – but such a growth in use will span beyond the simple trawling of LinkedIn and the like.
“There is instead likely to be similarly increased demand for, and supply of, integration between recruitment systems and social networking platforms, such that potential candidate details can be extracted and stored automatically and accurate criteria-based searches can be run across the Web 2.0 world.”
Conibear adds: “Linked to this, we have seen throughout the latter part of 2009 a greater emphasis on single search interfaces, enabling recruiters to search across multiple information sources for candidates. In one single step, all candidate-rich resources subscribed to can be searched simultaneously from the same criteria – a huge time and cost saving. The demand for this functionality is a trend that we can only see rising throughout 2010.”
And while HR and payroll are making moves through 2010 to share their data and ensure a two-way relationship with the input of new data, corporate recruitment is likely to follow suit with technological integration with the HR department. On successful hiring, candidate data can then be fed to the relevant HR department, removing the danger of incorrect or missed entries, and saving the time overhead involved.
Conibear continues: “Further functionality in high demand as we enter 2010 is the ability for the agency to integrate their own processes, data and software with that of the end client.
“This allows the information gathered by the agency during the candidate sourcing process to be mapped accurately and automatically straight into the recruitment and even HR systems of the corporate itself.
“Indeed this same requirement is being seen in the other direction i.e. the release of vacancy details from the corporate being automatically fed into the agency’s application, without the need for needless and time-consuming data copying and entry.
“The arrival of this demand shows two things in a stark light – firstly the increasingly competitive nature of the industry at the moment and the need to cut down time per hire, but perhaps more gratifyingly, also the fact that the recruitment industry in growing in its appreciation that technology can be relied upon to aid in daily processes, and can and should be called upon to do more.”
Missed opportunities
Moore continues: The recession has understandably reduced the amount of R&D that can be carried out within the industry, and so many of the developments that we expected in 2009 such as a continuation of the flurry of acquisitions and greater development of mobile access to applications simply did not occur.
However, arguably out of the cash-strapped economy and the need to simplify infrastructures and reduce physical assets, cloud computing and hosted software provision has gathered considerable pace.”
Despite many fears, 2009 remained a strong year on the agency software side, supplemented by increased interest from the European corporate sector and the UK public sector. This has principally been because of the overall slow-down in recruitment, freeing up time to roll-out new software, and also ensuring that the ‘bedding-in’ period for the new software is during a period of lower activity.
As in almost all technology sectors, discussions have grown on Cloud Computing and the related topics of software rental and software as a service. 2010 is likely to see a growth in interest in technology solutions that do not require internal hosting overheads, both in terms of cost and labour, as the market shifts to insist on greater reduction of costs and more visibility of return on investment and performance.
