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How New Technology Helps Small Companies with HR

Learn how new tech solutions improve HR in SMBs

James Douglas Burbank

January 19, 2017

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A company's size is a huge factor when it comes to how well this company will be able to do HR. Large companies employ entire departments which handle hiring new people, onboarding them and making sure they have the best possible experience as employees. For smaller companies, however, HR has traditionally been something of an afterthought and they have been missing out on some great things due to this.

Luckily, over the last two decades, we have seen a number of new tech solutions that are bringing HR to the small business, allowing you to do great HR even though you only employ 20 or 30 people.

But, how exactly has tech changed the different HR practices in the small business arena?

Finding New Employees

Just two decades ago, small companies were very limited in reaching out to potential employees. They could run a job ad in the local paper or with the local government and they could ask their employees to spread the word. It was highly unlikely that they could reach or attract someone who lived outside of their area.

The internet has changed all of this. An SMB can now post a job ad and reach out to a job market that is global. It does not matter if your SMB operates in London, or Boston or Singapore or any other city in the world, with job websites and communities; you can reach out to potential candidates everywhere.

In addition to this, thanks to social media (both corporate and your employees'), SMBs now also have a much wider social reach when it comes to attracting new customers.

Candidate Analysis and Interviewing

One of the areas where SMBs have traditionally struggled is candidate analysis and interviewing. Quite simply put, these are things that take expertise and experience and the majority of SMB owners and managers do not possess them. As a result, SMBs used to often hire the wrong people, thus increasing the chances of suffering high employee turnover, which can be quite costly.

Today, there is a whole slew of software solutions that are tailored specifically to small-to-medium companies and that were developed to help with this. Through the use of this software, SMBs can more precisely analyze the candidates that applied for the positions and predict how they would fare if they were hired.

The interview process is also streamlined, allowing companies to conduct more interviews since the candidates do not necessarily have to come over for every one of them. Video communication software is nowadays so advanced that it is like having the candidate in the office. Furthermore, SMBs can nowadays employ software that helps them automate certain parts of the interview process, ensuring that every candidate knows where they stand and how they are doing.

Onboarding and Day-to-Day HR

When we are talking onboarding new hires, new technologies can be of immense help there. For example, paperless paperwork and legal can definitely speed things up and make them more comfortable for everyone involved. Also, new learning management systems can enable an SMB to put their new hires through training that was previously only affordable to large corporations.

When it comes to everyday HR, it has recently been made much easier for smaller companies thanks to the various new technologies. Something like the Humanity schedule maker, for example, can ensure that even in high-pressure businesses like stores, people are not being overworked or mistreated. Various payroll and benefits solutions also make sure that employees do not have to worry about anything but doing their job.

Thanks to improved communication, getting great feedback from the employees has also become easier, allowing SMB owners and managers to have a better idea of where their people stand and how the company is "breathing".

Finally, it has also become easier than ever before for the management to keep all the pertinent information about their employees and their work in one place, which makes for fewer mistakes and oversights simply because the info was wrong.

Closing Word

Technology has truly revolutionized the way in which smaller companies do HR and it is a great thing, both for the companies in question and their employees.

And the best thing is that this is just a start.

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