Microsoft delivers solutions that enable businesses to build winning teams and create a workplace where people can succeed. To help ensure we are providing the very best solutions to empower employees, and as we look at LinkedIn’s unique strengths in the talent acquisition market, we plan to refocus our HR technology roadmap and partnership investments for Dynamics 365 across four key areas:

• Transforming employee experiences: Empowering employees with modern, mobile, mixed reality, self-service experiences that enable information access, guided learning, and task execution without requiring intervention from HR.
• Optimizing HR programs: Improving people operations with optimized benefits, compensation, leave and absence, certifications and training, compliance, and payroll programs.
• Improving organizational agility: Helping people thrive as the business changes with adaptable, secure, and scalable HR solutions that are easy to tailor, extend, and connect to current systems.
• Enabling workforce insights: Centralizing HR data to get insightful people analytics and guidance delivered by Microsoft’s leading business intelligence and AI technology.

As part of this, starting February 1, 2020, our current core HR capabilities will be renamed Dynamics 365 Human Resources. The new name reflects our commitment to helping HR professionals create data-driven programs that improve the employee experience. In October, we announced our investments in the rights to strategic solutions from FourVision and Elevate HR to accelerate HR operations innovation within leave and absence, time and attendance, and benefits administration. These new capabilities will begin rolling out within Dynamics 365 Human Resources in early 2020.

Dynamics 365 Human Resources will provide the workforce insights needed to build data-driven employee experiences across compensation, benefits, leave and absence, compliance, payroll integrations, performance feedback, training and certification, and self-service programs. Dynamics 365 Human Resources will connect people and operations data to ensure businesses can optimize workforce costs and take better care of employees.

As we focus on the capabilities for Dynamics 365 Human Resources, we will be transitioning away from development efforts around talent acquisition specifically and our Dynamics 365 Talent Attract and Dynamics 365 Talent Onboard applications will be retired. To ensure customers have time to plan, the Attract and Onboard services will continue to be available until February 1, 2022. You can learn more about this topic in our community.

We will work to transition Attract and Onboard customers to a solution of their choice, including LinkedIn Talent Hub a new Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that lets you source, manage, and hire all in one place. LinkedIn Talent Hub allows complete visibility at every stage of the hiring process, from candidate pipeline, interviews, or feedback to extended offers. It uses the actions, skills, and experience of more than half a billion LinkedIn members to deliver insights about potential talent pools and candidates. LinkedIn also has the option of Recruiter System Connect (RSC) that connects LinkedIn Recruiter with some of the largest ATS providers to allow you to more efficiently recruit talent and see up-to-date LinkedIn profiles directly within your ATS.

With LinkedIn solutions to attract, hire, and develop talent and with Dynamics 365 Human Resources to optimize HR programs and enable workforce insights, Microsoft can continue helping business leaders digitally transform HR practices and build winning teams where people can thrive.

Creating value for any part of the talent organization is a huge opportunity, and we look forward to sharing more on how we plan to work with LinkedIn in the future to innovate and bring more seamless ways to digitally transform HR practices.

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Human Resources

Learn more about LinkedIn Talent Solutions 

The post Building a more successful workforce with Dynamics 365 Human Resources appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Last month, I had the immense privilege of inviting Josh Bersin to meet with the Dynamics 365 for Talent team to discuss the HR tech market landscape. In his recent blog, Guess Who’s Looking At The HR Tech Market? Microsoft, Josh shared his perspective on his time spent here in Redmond. While he points out that “The DNA of Microsoft is now focused on the empowerment, development, and inspiration of people,” I wanted to take the opportunity to share how these principles shape our product vision.

In our meeting,  we delved into HR digital transformation challenges, specifically the future of work and how our expectations of the workplace are changing.  The following three points underpinned my perspective:

Culture is the key to business success

HR faces more than just a scale, automation, and process optimization challenge. A new paradigm is necessary to create a modern workplace, as Josh outlines in his overview of HR in the flow of work article. And, of course, diversity and inclusion are fundamental to corporate culture and core values. Organizations that master creating recruitment, onboarding, engagement, and retention programs that foster inclusion and diversity will be better equipped to meet the needs of their customers.

Talent success is the objective

Leaders must focus on creating a culture where people can thrive. This requires more than inspirational leadership, fun break rooms, and driving organizational change. Just as customer experience (CX) professionals discovered when mapping the customer journey, the transformation of the employee experience (EX) must center on driving outcomes for your talent. CX and EX journeys are not linear and can’t always be sliced into moments in time. A great example of this is moving from an onboarding experience that focuses on new hire paperwork and orientation to an onboarding that provides new team members with a step-by-step guide to success. An employee onboarding experience that is guided by leveraging unique data signals of behavior that leads to faster time to productivity and impact.

HR technology is the catalyst

Vendors need to move away from HR software that focuses on managing people and holds the workforce to archaic hierarchies that reinforce fixed mindsets and stunt innovation. The next wave of HR technology will focus on removing the barriers that impact productivity, creativity, and collaborative teamwork. As HR is now being tasked with improving employee productivity and engagement, they need to look beyond traditional HR technology solutions. The partnership between IT and HR has never been more important. As HR maps out end-to-end EX, they will need a view of all the technology that impacts employee communications and productivity. However, changing HR technology can be incredibly disruptive, as it touches every employee and future employees. Most organizations can’t afford the disruption that is caused to rip and replace their entire HCM system. Vendors will need to ensure that their technology integrates well with legacy systems to eliminate challenges caused by data silos and a disjointed EX.

While our discussions were quite in-depth, these three points have really impacted how I envision we move forward with our investment in the HR technology space and the opportunities available to Microsoft. As Josh indicated in his article, Microsoft is in a unique market position as the only vendor in the market that has talent marketplace, productivity, teamwork, workplace analytics, customer engagement, and financial and resource planning solutions in our portfolio.

With the Microsoft Power Platform underpinning Dynamics 365 for Talent, we have the ability to meet our customers where they are in their digital transformation journey—another unique advantage for IT as they partner with HR. The common data service (CDS) centralizes employee data from a variety of applications to ensure HR can get the people insights needed to drive culture and EX transformation. The current focus of my team is to ensure Dynamics 365 for Talent helps our customers transform the talent acquisition experience. By leveraging the Microsoft Power Platform, LinkedIn, Microsoft Office, Teams, Workplace Analytics, and Dynamics 365—IT can partner with HR to ensure employees are not only empowered with the right tools to do their jobs and deliver outcomes for customers, but also the right tools to grow their career within your company.

Learn more about how we’re helping companies attract, onboard, and retain top talent in our live webinar series.

The post Hot HR trend: Reimagining the employee experience (EX) and flow of work appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Yesterday, Adobe announced new innovations for Financial Services and HR industries to provide customers with more agile and secure business processes than ever before.  These innovations include an exciting new integration between Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Talent and Adobe Sign.

Far too many HR organizations are drowning in paper. In fact, a recent study by Adobe uncovered that 80% still rely on paper—especially in their talent acquisition processes. Complex compliance and risk regulations often slow down the digital transformation of HR, and the impact goes beyond file storage costs. In talent acquisition alone, paper processes can result in a delayed time to hire and lower offer acceptance rates. In today’s highly competitive talent marketplace, businesses can no longer afford to lose top candidates due to inefficient processes. Solutions like Adobe Sign simplify going paperless, making it quick, easy, and secure.

By adding Adobe Sign to your Dynamics 365 for Talent workflow, you can accelerate the offer experience and make it easy for candidates to say yes right away. Adobe Sign works from directly inside Dynamics 365 for Talent, so HR and people managers can work within the business tools they already rely on.

Eliminate the administrative overhead of overnighting paper documents or insecurely attaching offers to emails. Now you can simply log in to your Adobe Sign account to access built-in e-sign capabilities within the Attract module of Dynamics 365 for Talent, and no additional software or configuration is needed. Your candidate will receive an email alerting them about the offer and they just need to follow a few prompts to sign—from any device.

The powerful combination of Adobe Sign and Dynamics 365 for Talent allows HR to:

• Create an engaging candidate experience
• Reduce business risks in the approval process
• Enable mobility
• Shorten the time to hire
• Improve offer acceptance rates

Adobe Sign is the first e-signature solution to be released for Dynamics 365 for Talent, enabling joint customers to adopt e-signatures into the employee experience across recruiting, onboarding documents, and more.

Learn more about how Dynamics 365 for Talent can help you transform talent acquisition and create an engaging candidate experience by watching our online demo videos.

The post Accelerate time to hire with Adobe Sign for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Talent appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

66 percent of CIOs state they believe there’s a scarcity of talent and it’s approaching “crisis” proportions. With digital transformation changing the nature of how we work, finding people with the skills required to drive business results is becoming even more critical and more challenging.

Nothing has a bigger impact on business results than hiring—and empowering—the right people. And yet almost no one wants to spend time on recruiting, interviewing and onboarding new hires. People managers and leaders are busy and struggle to prioritize the time to finding and hiring the people who will become your competitive advantage. Often, legacy recruiting, applicant tracking, and talent acquisition software were put into place to automate processes that were created back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. These processes are not only outdated and obsolete for the talent-driven market today, they are complex and focus only on the needs of the business. The unfortunate result is a poor candidate experience, low offer acceptance rates and roles that go unfilled for long periods of time. Without high-performing people, the productivity of a team suffers, products and services take longer to get to market, customer expectations go unmet, and ultimately businesses fail.

Talent acquisition programs must shift from treating people like ‘human capital’ to delivering an engaging candidate experience. That’s why Dynamics 365 for Talent is focused on creating collaborative people experiences. Our goal is to help talent professionals partner with managers to find people that have both the right skills and are the right culture fit for the company. Then ensure new team members are set up for success and accelerate their time to impact. Empowered people deliver extraordinary business results. When you prioritize the digital transformation of HR, you can accelerate the culture transformation required for the business change.
We understand that today’s talent professionals require a breadth of technologies to recruit world-class talent. This often leads to errors and interrupts communication between recruiters and the hiring team. LinkedIn Recruiter offers talent professionals access to the largest talent network in the world. And now Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract is fully integrated with LinkedIn Recruiter. This allows talent acquisition teams to quickly see the full context of an applicant’s hiring journey without toggling back and forth between applications and losing critical information and context.

Dynamics 365 for Talent is fully certified with LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect. We will be showcasing how this powerful integration enables high-performance hiring across your business departments this week at LinkedIn Talent Connect. Using these two solutions together provides better insight into both systems, including:

In LinkedIn Recruiter

• Enhanced in-ATS indicator
  Easily view candidate information, like application history and status, directly within LinkedIn Recruiter to prioritize new leads and avoid duplicating outreach. This ensures a personalized experience for the candidate, as recruiters are more informed during every interaction. Recruiters can also avoid reaching out to a candidate that has applied and is already speaking to the hiring manager.
• Past Applicant Spotlight
  Easily identify candidates that have previously applied at your company. This allows recruiters to improve response rates from qualified candidates, as they understand the application history and can personalize outreach.

In Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract

• Data linking
  Recruiters can access the information they create in LinkedIn Recruiter from Dynamics 365 for Talent, including any notes they create about candidates and communications history such as InMails.
• Enhanced Profile Widget
  Members of the hiring team can now view the candidate’s up-to-date LinkedIn profile directly from Dynamics 365 for Talent. This ensures everyone on the hiring team can have more informed conversations and results in a more structured interview experience.

And this is just the start of how Dynamics 365 for Talent will leverage the full power of LinkedIn and Recruiter. We are excited to continue to partner with the LinkedIn team as they extend the capabilities available to modern recruiting platforms, like Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract.

I’d like to extend an invitation to view our latest on demand webinar, which highlights how the Dynamics 365 for Talent + LinkedIn Recruiter partnership can help you quickly build winning teams. Don’t miss the opportunity to see how combining these two powerful solutions can help you modernize hiring and win top talent.

[msce_cta layout=”image_center” align=”center” linktype=”blue” linkurl=”https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-A-New-Approach-to-Developing-Winning-Teams-video.html” linktext=”Watch this webinar to learn a new approach to talent acquisition” ][/msce_cta]

The post Dynamics 365 for Talent + LinkedIn Recruiter = Hire performance appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This week at the SHRM18 Annual Conference and Exposition, we will be showcasing how to empower employees in the modern workplace with Microsoft solutions for Human Resources. While I am excited to attend my first SHRM conference and meet with HR leaders from around the globe, I’m invigorated to see the Microsoft 365, Workplace Analytics, and Dynamics 365 teams come together with the Microsoft HR organization to share our best practices on the digital transformation of HR.

The way we work has not kept up with the pace of change in the world today. We have seen an exponential growth of digital connectivity, devices, technology, and data. And yet, our workplaces and workforces still operate according to the early 20th-century assembly line models of repetition, efficiency, and scale. Modern workplaces are more than just exceptional places to work—they are cultures where people are inspired and empowered to innovate, create, and collaborate. Achieving this vision requires HR to build a modern workforce—bringing together people to pursue their passions and realize their purpose. A modern workforce is made up of people with the right skills and capabilities, in the right places, at the right time. And this all starts with your talent acquisition team reimagining your hiring process.

At SHRM our session on “The new rules of the modern workplace” will focus on key principles to keep in mind while digitally transforming the employee experience. We are partnering with Chuck Edward, Microsoft’s corporate VP of Global Talent acquisition to share our own digital transformation story and how we are using Dynamics 365 for Talent: Attract within Microsoft. The session will cover HR trends that are changing the way organizations hire, engage, develop and retain talent today.

As I prepare for SHRM, I am also in the midst of building out my team here at Microsoft. I like to compare the employee experience (EX) to a customer experience (CX). As companies have prioritized CX over the last decade, the missing piece has been how they empower employees to deliver customer outcomes. While EX includes every employee interaction that delivers talent success, the hiring experience is the first phase, and thus critical to overall success. Here are five new rules of a modern hiring experience for you to consider as you reimagine the EX:

• Rule #1 – Your culture is your employer brand

Attracting the right people to your company starts with defining your culture and bringing it to life. Modern workers are looking to work at companies with an aligned purpose where they can live their passion. Ensure your culture comes to life during your hiring process and look for people who not only have the right skills but also live your corporate ideals and values.

• Rule #2—Job posts and applications are advertising

Typically, the number one visited page on your website is going to be your Career site—creating an ideal advertising platform. Your job posts are no longer just about attracting a person with the right skills. They should highlight who you are as a company, show your differentiation, and advertise the value of the products and services you offer. Job posts and the application process form the first impression for candidates. You want readers and potential candidates to have a clear view of the role, your culture, and how they can grow their career at your company.

• Rule #3—Your candidate experience is marketing

With talent shortages predicted for skilled knowledge workers across every industry, it’s no longer enough to just post jobs. Just like you need to build a sales pipeline with demand generation campaigns, you need to build talent pipelines with an extraordinary experience to win top talent. If that’s not enough, most candidates who don’t hear back on a job application say they would not recommend a company’s product or service. As your recruiters and hiring team are interacting with candidates they are forming an impression of your company and brand. It’s imperative to deliver a transparent, engaging experience for all applicants—especially those who aren’t a good fit for the role. Ultimately, just like successful marketing creates brand value, successful recruiting will build brand ambassadors through the candidate experience.

• Rule #4—Interviews are selling

If the beginning of your hiring process is equivalent to attracting new customers, the interview phase is where the selling begins. It’s no longer enough to get top talent in the door, you need to focus on winning the right candidate. Most companies today spend more time on scheduling interviews, then they do on executing them. Interviews filled with skills or problem-solving questions are a thing of the past—leave those questions for pre-interview assessments. Focus your critical interview time on getting to know the candidate and letting them get to know what success would look like in the open role.

• Rule #5—The hiring process does not end when the offer is signed

Your talent acquisition strategy should not end at the offer phase. Ensure candidates understand how they will be set up for success through your onboarding experience. And provide them with career development guides and access to your learning experience.

Stop by and visit us at SHRM at booth 2232 and learn about Microsoft solutions for HR.

Learn more about how Dynamics 365 for Talent can help you deliver an exceptional hire and onboard experience.

Learn how you can improve employee engagement in your organization and empower people in the modern workplace with Microsoft 365.

Learn how to connect collaboration to business outcomes with Workplace Analytics.

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