Over the past 6 months, my organization has been in the midst of transitioning to the Oracle HCM suite. The decision to go to an HCM system was largely based on our disjointed and highly antiquated HR systems, which led to mountains of manual processes. In the name of consistency, employee engagement & transparency, regulatory compliance, and centralized data warehousing, we understood the opportunity to centralize our system through an HCM solution.
The HCM route has proven to be the correct choice, and it will significantly improve our employee experience and the execution of our people processes. The journey, however, has provided us with a quite a few learning moments… also known as problems.
HCM is the hot ticket these days, so I’m sharing our experience thus far for those who are considering a switch to an HCM system.
Some sacrifices needed to be made.
While the Oracle HCM system is robust, we quickly learned that it was not considered an upgrade for all teams involved. When looking at our recruiting and onboarding tech, we already had an industry leading ATS, iCIMS, and our internal processes were already aligned to optimize those technologies. As for our HR/Payroll processes, our systems were anything but best-in-class – multiple software, spreadsheets, and our payroll team had a process that would drive ANYONE crazy. Every day our company grew larger, every day their job got harder. That’s not a great recipe when you’re growing quickly!
The goal of our HCM implementation never changed. We all agree from a stakeholder standpoint that it’s the right direction for our company as we continue to bolster our people technologies. What did change was our openness to outside integrations that would allow us to maximize the benefits of a truly connected HCM solution.
As we went through the implementation phase, we began to understand the true capabilities of the system and also where we would require integrations to support our current recruiting process. For example, the proposed recruiting suite lacked key partnerships that came out of the box with our current system. It had no resume or profile parsing, it featured a long-form application process, and it didn’t include candidate texting. These features would need to be addressed through integrations. Based on these learnings, we made the decision to continue our partnership with iCIMS and integrate with Oracle.
Looking at the big picture, we get to have best of both worlds: Utilizing Oracles powerful HCM solution at the core of our people processes, while still leveraging the tools we’ve grown accustomed to by integrating our current ATS.
This decision wasn’t an easy one and we had to weigh the cost-benefit of considering an outside ATS integration. While our cost would increase and the implementation time-frame was extended, benefits to the productivity and effectiveness of our team overshadowed those considerations.
Like many others, Corey Burns fell into HR & Talent Acquisition by accident. He got his first taste of Recruiting at a Fortune 500 company, where he quickly found his niche. Fast forward, Corey is now the Director of Recruiting & Development at General RV Center, a parent company comprised of 3 organizations in the Recreational Vehicle industry, Corey has led talent initiatives that have contributed to more than 300% growth in both employee count and revenues.
He formed the company’s Recruiting & Development division in 2013, as the company entered a hyper-growth stage, and he now leads all recruiting, learning, and organizational development strategies. Corey’s approach begins with building trust-based relationships, which lead to talent solutions that support the four pillars of the company’s talent strategy: Attract, Develop, Retain, Grow.
While Corey focuses on strategic initiatives and managing his two teams (Recruiting and Learning & Development), he is a player-coach who thrives on facilitating training’s and picking up hard-to-fill reqs. You can talk to talk to Corey via email or LinkedIn…