How to use Salesforce for human resources

When you’re hiring for a new role, you may need to manage and sort through hundreds of applications, keep track of where each candidate is in the application process, and maintain internal and external communication around the status through each stage. Salesforce can help you manage this process with any of the applicant tracking apps (ATSes) that integrate with the solution.

An ATS can help you log every new candidate and tie them to the role that they’re applying for; filter candidates based on skills or experience; automate workflows and standard processes; and digitize the paperwork process to ensure that you can securely store contracts and signed documents. Once you’ve narrowed down your pool of candidates, you can present integrated candidate profiles that include data from numerous sources, including background checks, education, skills, licenses, references, and more, ensuring that your hiring team has a complete picture of each candidate. An ATS app from Salesforce can help you to streamline and expedite the hiring process, helping you find the right candidate more quickly.

If you work in HR, much of your time may be spent answering employees’ questions about benefits and HR policies. These questions can be repetitive, and may take time away from other important work.

With Salesforce, it’s easy to build an employee self-service portal where they can find the answers to common questions on their own, and put in tickets for support when needed. You can use chatbots where employees can input questions around benefits and policies, and receive links to helpful resources. You can also use the solution to automate employees’ enrollment process in different benefit programs, tracking where they are at any point, sending reminders when needed, and digitizing the signature process.

This automation can provide a better employee experience, where they can get on-tap access to the information they need—while freeing up your HR team’s time to focus on more strategic work instead of day-to-day requests.

Particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s an important role of HR to track employee wellness and safety data, so that you can understand when team members are ready to work in the office, or provide additional support or resources to employees struggling with illness or other issues. It’s also important to maintain accurate records of team members’ COVID testing and vaccination status, so that these details can inform important decisions around work policies and scheduling.

Using Salesforce employee wellness apps like Workplace Command Center, you can easily manage and automate employee operations to ensure compliance with your organization’s health and safety regulations, and gain data insights to help you shape operations strategy going forward. For example, you can send out surveys to understand each employee’s exposure level to COVID-19 and their concern level around returning to the workplace, helping your HR team to plan a return-to-work strategy that’s based around solid data and your employees’ stated priorities.

Learning on the job is important, and it often falls on HR to ensure that employees are focusing on meeting goals around required compliance and safety training as well as role-specific certifications. Using one of Salesforce’s learning management solution (LMS) apps, your HR team can set up customized training modules for each employee based on their specific job needs, and monitor progress on an ongoing basis. You can verify whether an employee has completed watching a required training video, and measure success in knowledge retention with quizzes and assessments.

This will help your team easily get a solid overview of how well teams and individual employees are meeting their goals in terms of gaining new skills and meeting compliance requirements. You’ll be able to automate reminders to encourage them to revisit training materials in progress, and share next steps once a specific piece of training has been completed. This will contribute to a more efficient training protocol, where employees can easily be assessed in real-time based on their training and knowledge retention.

While Salesforce started out with a primary focus on helping organizations manage relationships with its customers, in the HR industry, it’s also an ideal tool for helping HR teams manage relationships with job candidates and team members throughout the entire organization.

With HR-focused apps that integrate with Salesforce, you can manage typical HR functions such as scheduling and automating document processes and compliance initiatives. This can boost efficiency and eliminate many manual processes, saving staff time and reducing the risk of manual errors.

You can also use Salesforce to gather more detailed data insights that help you make more strategic decisions, such as understanding which team members are meeting organizational training goals or coming up with a COVID-19 workplace safety plan. Salesforce enables you to integrate all of your data in one centralized location, so you have the right information to help you make smart decisions.

By using Salesforce for HR, you can manage your people operations more effectively and with better data to guide you, helping you build a more productive and engaged workforce.