The Top 5 Time Savers from Headcount Automation
Table of Contents
Automating headcount management not only saves time but also improves accuracy, efficiency, and decision-making processes. Here are the top five time savers provided by headcount automation, illustrated with specific examples of how these savings are achieved.
Single source of truth
Time Wasted: Thousands of hours
Key Waste: Manual data flow between people or systems requires numerous meetings and other processes to move data from one source to the next. This includes updates from the recruiting system, changes from hiring managers, attrition data from HR, or changes from finance. Finding context for these changes is even more labor-intensive and subjective.
Why Automation Works: Data is automatically synced between all systems in real-time. A change in one system is instantly reflected across all others. Headcount365’s SYNCiD tags these actions for easy research on their context. This process eliminates the need for team meetings, hiring manager sync meetings, financial reconciliation meetings, and reporting jams.
Requests, approvals & change management
Time Wasted: Hundreds of hours
Key Waste: Without an approval system for headcount changes, companies rely on workarounds that are difficult to track and often lack the information needed for decision-making. Inefficiency in the approval process necessitates status update meetings, holding patterns, and can lead to approval reversals affecting all stakeholders.
Why Automation Works: Transparency in approval status eliminates the need for meetings or emails requesting this information. Linking approvals to financial line items and records in the ATS or HRIS streamlines financial and operational approvals. Tracking variance streamlines reporting of approval changes, which is crucial for companies following Sarbanes-Oxley.
Headcount forecasting & OPEX efficiency
Time Wasted: Hundreds of hours
Key Waste: Manually tracking down the single source of truth for all hires and open roles, along with verifying their status, consumes significant time. Analyzing previous activity to forecast trends in hiring performance, employee tenure, ramp time, or revenue production is labor-intensive. Additionally, holding OPEX as "just in case" for potential overages is inefficient.
Why Automation Works: A real-time source of headcount truth improves forecast accuracy and eliminates the need for manually tracking headcount. OPEX doesn’t have to be held in reserve as spend is tracked in real-time. Predictive analytics provide finance teams with insights, reducing errors in forecast assumptions. Continuous updates keep finance informed, reducing start/stop changes in hiring plans.
Reporting
Time Wasted: Hundreds of hours
Key Waste: Collecting data to create a point-in-time source of truth and organizing it from multiple systems and spreadsheets to tell a story requires significant effort. Investigating actions of interest, such as budget overages or hiring misses, takes hours to answer single questions. Data from one reporting period is often not reused without substantial effort.
Why Automation Works: Automated systems eliminate the need for single source of truth meetings. Data from all plans, years, and people is centralized, making it easier to understand trends without manual assembly. Automation of key actions provides leaders with a clearer story, delivering insights that are impossible to achieve manually.
Change tracking and compliance
Time Wasted: Hundreds of hours
Key Waste: Manually tracking changes to headcount approvals and ensuring compliance with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley is labor-intensive. It involves constant monitoring, status updates, and audits.
Why Automation Works: Automated systems track all headcount approvals and changes in real-time, ensuring compliance. This reduces the need for constant monitoring and audits, saving significant time. Headcount365’s compliance features automatically generate reports for any required period, simplifying the compliance process.
Calculate your savings
Headcount automation significantly reduces time wasted on manual processes, meetings, and data reconciliation. By providing a single source of truth, automating requests and approvals, enhancing headcount forecasting, streamlining reporting, and ensuring compliance, headcount365 helps businesses save time and improve operational efficiency. This not only unlocks substantial OPEX savings but also provides a real-time picture of headcount spend, ultimately driving better business outcomes. Embracing these technological advancements can lead to more effective and efficient operations, enhancing the overall productivity of recruiting and finance teams.
