LMS, MOOC & Mobile Learning (eLearning tools)

Technology has evolved at a mindboggling pace in the past few years and it plays a very vital role in our lives in this 21^st century. Be it education, research, training, or job - one can’t think of thriving without the help of technology.  I have attempted to throw light on some key tools/resources in learning space made possible by technology. These tools/resources play even a more vital role for HR personnel by making knowledge management tasks easier.

LMS- Learning Management Systems (LMS) are software applications designed for the management of training and educational programs. LMS combines the administration and documentation of learning initiatives, content development tools, virtual learning, social learning, online testing and assessment functionality to achieve a single goal: improving employee development while cutting costs and risks.

         It’s very difficult to run a successful business if employees aren’t continuously learning, and an LMS ensures that a business is constantly growing while allowing the employees to connect and learn from each other in new ways. A Learning Management System is also known as "Course Management System", "Pedagogical Platform", and “E-Learning Platform.

MOOC-A massive open online course (MOOC) is a free Web-based distance learning program that is designed for the participation of large numbers of students. MOOCs do not always offer academic credits; they also provide education that may include certification, employment or further studies. Here, are some key online resources:-

•    Udemy is a marketplace for online courses. The platform currently offers over 13,000 courses, with more than 2 million students and 7,000 instructors
•     Udacity is the outgrowth of free computer science classes offered in 2011 through Stanford University. It has 9 full courses & 24 free courseware and around 90,000 students enrolled in the initial two classes as of March 2012.
•    Codecademy is an online interactive platform that offers free coding classes in six different languages. As of June 2012, the site had over 5 million users who had completed over 100 million exercises.

Mobile Learning-Mobile learning is defined as "learning across multiple contexts, through social and content interactions, using personal electronic devices". Best part of this is that learners can learn anywhere and at any time. M-learning technologies include computers, MP3 players, notebooks, mobile phones and tablets. M-learning also brings strong portability by replacing books and notes with small devices. For instance, SMILE, the Stanford Mobile Inquiry Learning Environment, is a learning management system that allows students to create, share, answer, and evaluate questions in a collaborative manner through the use of cell phones.

All these learning tools enhance employees’ skill and engage employees in an appropriate way to grasp more accurate or advanced knowledge through advanced technology.

HRIS Blog Four- Cloud and its risk and benefit/opportunity, Onboarding and background verification

"What's the cloud?" "Where is the cloud?" "Are we in the cloud now?!" These are all questions you've probably heard or even asked yourself. The term "cloud computing “means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer's hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet. Cloud computing comes in three forms: public clouds, private clouds, and hybrids clouds.  Public cloud is basically the internet. Service providers use the internet to make resources, such as applications (also known as Software-as-a-service) and storage, available to the general public. Private cloud is owned by a single company that provides flexibility, scalability, provisioning, automation and monitoring.  Hybrid cloud is companies can maintain control of an internally managed private cloud while relying on the public cloud as needed.        

          But the cloud may also mean loss of control, and potential security, compliance and privacy concerns. Like most things in life, the benefits come with risks—it’s just a matter of knowing if the benefits outweigh the risks and vice versa.

Let’s take a look at some grounded facts about cloud computing to help you decide if you are ready to go up, up, and away.

Risk	Benefit
Network dependency	Flexibility
Difficulty in creating hybrid systems	Cost Reduction and Increased Efficiency
Centralization	Reliability
Data Integrity/Security	More timely and effective and efficient updates                       and defaults

Corporate spending on third-party-managed and public-cloud environments will grow from $28 billion in 2011 to more than $70 billion in 2015, according to IDC. In addition, according to recent McKinsey research, 63 percent of business leaders who responded agreed that the cloud can make their entire organization more business agile and responsive.

And we also discussed about the success factors of onboarding. Onboarding is a critical part of HR to handle it without the help of advanced technology. Loads of paperwork, missed details and busy managers often fail to make new hires feel welcome; it creates a poor first impression, and slowing down time to productivity. For an efficient embedding is important to solve these challenges by making the hiring process more efficient and personal. For a successful Onboarding process it needs to take a fresh approach to ramping up with new hires by more strategic onboarding activities – connecting, informing and empowering new hires with the right people, tools and content they need to start contributing in record time.

SuccessFactors Onboarding is one of the IT solutions that provides a more structured and efficient support for onboarding by providing:

·         Improved process efficiency and compliance 

·         Faster time to contribution

·         Better employee engagement and retention

Similarly, SilkRoad's RedCarpet, the global onboarding software, is an easy-to-use cloud-based HR solution that has helped organizations of all sizes, and from all industries, to onboard over a million employees while saving millions of dollars.                                                                                            

Lastly, we looked at background checks and verifications. The HR may want to make sure that candidates are telling the truth. It's estimated that up over 40% of resumes can contain false or tweaked information, so, HR wants to ensure that what they are getting from the candidates is true and reliable.    

Sterling global background check is a company that helps to make the right hiring decisions. It offers employment verification services offered by Screening Direct online portal provide the most accurate results with the fastest turnarounds, securely and privately, in real-time . Having a system and advanced  techcnology like this helps HR prfessionals save a lot of time and paper work & its also beneficial for a new candidate to get their result faster.

HRIS Blog Three- QR codes, iCIMS, Zoho, HR Suites and Pay scale.

QR codes

If you are new to recruiting world or want to pursue your career in recruiting, than its very important to be aware of the technological miracle called “QR” code.    A QR code (quick response code) is a type of 2D bar code that is used to provide easy access to information through a smartphone via a QR Code Scanner. It looks like a maze in advertisements or in posters and that can be mistaken for a black design box or patterned square. However, this little square has the capability of encoding large amount of relevant information for a recruiter regarding a candidate such as-(his/her) name, education, mobile no. etc. 

Some of the recruiting situations where QR code can come handy are :

• In job postings, social media and blogs - QRcode can provide detailed reference or follow-up information without taking up lots of real estate
• Job alerts/calendar events — individuals can sign up for specific job alert notifications and calendar items can be easily saved on a phone’s calendar.

It’s noteworthy that QR code can be created for free and because it’s so small, saves space (both storage and display) leading to reduced advertising costs.

 iCIMS

iCIMS, is a leading provider of innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) talent acquisition and Software Satisfaction solutions focused on solving corporate business issues through the implementation of easy-to-use and scalable solutions. For instance, iCIMS' Talent Platform is a talent-management software that enables Recruiters and HR Professionals to develop, connect and guide the strongest hiring and employee management decisions such as applicant tracking or onboarding. iCIMS also offers easy HR tools built upon a core applicant tracking system that powers seamless and efficient recruiting by offering :

• Simplified social media and job board posting
•  Branded career sites for online resume submission
•  Electronic onboarding documents and communication
•  Robust searching and reporting within a centralized database
•  Complimentary 24x5 customer support

Zoho

Zoho is a company that offers valuable HR comprehensive suite of online business, productivity & collaboration applications. Most of the companies use Zoho Applications to run their business processes to manage their information and be more productive. It also helps recruiters to manage all HR and benefits programs by making it easy to attract, retain and reward top talent. All this can be achieved while reducing costs, saving time, and integrating & aligning the HR efforts with the rest of an organization.

PayScale    
              

PayScale, Inc. or payscale.com is an online salary, benefits and compensation Information Company that was developed to help people obtain accurate real-time information on job market compensation. 

The service works via the Internet by enabling individual employees to submit their job profile and salary data, which is then compared to others.

Compensation & benefits plays a huge role in HR or recruiters professional work life.  HR professional must be able to recognize needs and opportunities as they occur, whether immediate or strategic long-term, and convert them into action to give the organization a competitive edge and contribute to its ongoing success.  The most important insight for a recruiter is “How much should I pay” and “what is the salary range for the selected candidate”. And this is where Pay scale provides lot of helpful information to recruiters by providing :

• Access in Real-Time and On-Demand
• Streamline Salary Benchmarking
• Set and Adjust Pay Ranges
• Get Pay Right and Identify Flight Risks
• Price Jobs in Multiple Geographies
• Industries or Company Size with MDA
• Allocate Pay Increases and Create Executive Reports.

Because a very large number of people utilize the service every month, the company is able to use the volume of information statistically to determine accurate real-time salary information.

My Experiences with HRIS – Session Two

Last Thursday in HRIS class I learned about what comprises Big data, difference between Active & passive candidates, Recruiting Strategies, ATS (applicant tracking system) and most importantly, usage of LinkedIn for recruiting. Some key takeaways:

Big data:  Going by definition, Big Data refers to massive volume of structured and unstructured data collection that is difficult to process using traditional data processing tools. The insights derived from Big Data are changing the way organizations work and HR as an enabling function is no exception.   Big Data for HR can help organizations tap better candidates, create more effective recruiting strategies viz. a viz. competition and create a robust Talent Pipeline.

LinkedIn: I was a member of LinkedIn but it was only after this class, that I understood how to use it for professional recruiting. LinkedIn, as everybody knows, is the world’s largest professional networking site with directory of professionals and companies. Individuals and companies can use this site for networking, job searching, hiring, and organization search. It can also be utilized effectively for connecting with affiliates including alumni, industry and different business groups.

LinkedIn also provides advanced search techniques such as Boolean search. The basics/operator of Boolean searches are 

·         AND   
·         OR                    
·         NOT

Boolean Modifiers are symbols that are used for specific searches ;-

·         “ “                                
·         ( )                                    
·         *,%,$

Apart from standard features available to all the users, LinkedIn also provide certain additional features for recruiters (via paid subscription) such as: 

·         Ability to view the full list of who’s viewed your profile
·         Ability to contact anyone (even somebody outside your network) with InMail
·         Ability to see expanded profiles (outside your network)
·         Additional search filters and results

While LinkedIn caters to professionals from all backgrounds, there are some specialty sites for job seekers and recruiters of specific professions such as GiHub (for coders), Proformative (for accountants) and Dribbles (for designers).

Apart from LinkedIn, technology provides few other tools that make the life of a HR recruiter more efficient. The initial days when hiring managers and recruiters picked hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes by hand to uncover the best job candidates are long gone. Today, the task is computerized; an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is now frequently used to narrow down the candidate pool to those candidates who meet the requirements of the prospective employer. An applicant tracking system is a software program that stores and organizes resumes, allowing recruiters to screen, sort, track, and rank all the resumes they receive. ATS uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, which simply means that your resume is scanned into the software so that it becomes searchable.