The News: Oracle made two announcements focused on the user experience within Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). The new Oracle Activity Centers are designed to provide information and tools to help increase job effectiveness and impact through a centralized action-focused hub tailored to each individual and their roles and responsibilities. They include the Employee Activity Center, Team Activity Center, Recruiting Activity Center, and Payroll Activity Center.
Oracle also added “Direct Apply” functionality within Oracle Fusion Cloud Recruiting, part of Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM to enable candidates to quickly and easily apply for jobs with a simplified application process.
You can read the press release focused on the enhancements within Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management and the announcement focused on the Direct Apply functionality.
Oracle Announces New Fusion Cloud HCM User Experience Enhancements
Analyst Take: Oracle has been making a significant push into human capital management, enhancing its Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM Suite to enable users to increase productivity and accelerate progress toward organizational goals. As such, the company made two announcements this week.
First, Oracle announced the availability of role-specific Activity Centers, designed to help improve job effectiveness and impact via a centralized hub of information and tools tailored to each role and its associated responsibilities. Oracle Activity Centers aggregate applications and information relevant to the employee, deliver tailored KPIs and insights, enable in-workflow communication and other engagement actions, and surface AI-driven recommendations and alerts to help focus users on what matters most.
The first four Oracle Activity Center experiences include:
- Employee Activity Center: This tool enables employees to boost productivity and quickly prioritize the most important actions at any moment. With a highly personalized view of critical data, KPIs, key activities, upcoming milestones, tailored communications, and AI-assisted peer feedback tools, organizations can improve employee engagement, build stronger workplace relationships, and enhance the employee experience.
- Team Activity Center: This tool enables managers to easily orchestrate individual and team activities while focusing on the immediate needs of the business. Organizations can maximize productivity and improve team performance with a single view of team priorities and KPIs, insights into team performance, development, engagement, visibility into open positions and requisitions, and AI-assisted manager feedback tools.
- Recruiting Activity Center: This tool lets recruiters quickly prioritize the most important tasks and move forward with next steps to reduce process bottlenecks. With a centralized view of recruiting activities and AI-recommended next-best actions, organizations can attract the best talent, accelerate hiring processes, and outmaneuver rivals in a competitive hiring environment.
- Payroll Activity Center: This tool enables payroll specialists to quickly identify and resolve errors to help ensure employees are paid accurately and on time. With a single view of payroll across global operations, proactive alerts, and the ability to take quick corrective actions, organizations can optimize payroll processes, reduce errors, and deliver on employee expectations for prompt and accurate payment.
The value delivered via these activity centers revolves around reducing the effort, friction, and time involved in managing HR-specific tasks. Leveraging role-specific workflows and AI to reduce administrative burdens can increase efficiency and positively impact job performance, helping HR staff focus on the most pressing issues.
Adding Activity Centers within the Oracle Fusion Cloud platform will provide additional value to organizations seeking to deploy technology applications built on a common platform. This can reduce tech sprawl, ensure data accessibility, improve the organization’s security posture, and enable cross-application workflows that drive more organizational efficiency.
Reducing Friction from the Application Process to Secure Top Talent
Another key challenge faced by many organizations is securing top talent. The job application process is fraught with friction, primarily around getting prospective applicants to complete the job application process fully. Organizations that fail to make the application process seamless and friction-free often miss out on highly qualified candidates who do not want to waste their time on what they perceive to be unnecessary hurdles and move on to other potential opportunities.
Oracle announced it has added ‘Direct Apply’ functionality within Oracle Fusion Cloud Recruiting, part of Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, to help its customers attract and retain the best talent, and deliver a positive candidate experience. Oracle partnered with LinkedIn, Indeed, Vivian, Bayt, and other talent management marketplaces to enable candidates to quickly and easily apply for jobs with a simplified application process.
According to Oracle, these partnerships and the new Direct Apply functionality enable organizations to:
- Streamline the application process: Candidates can complete the job application using their existing talent marketplace profiles without leaving the partner’s job marketplace or re-entering information, minimizing application-process drop-offs and saving time.
- Access talent pools: Organizations can attract quality talent from leading talent marketplaces, specialized industries, and region-specific talent marketplaces, thereby assisting them with accessing the largest possible talent pools and targeting hard-to-find skill sets.
- Improve the candidate experience: Candidates can quickly apply for jobs with just one click, and stay informed of their application status with automatic updates pushed directly to the partner talent marketplaces for easier visibility. This helps organizations keep candidates engaged and deliver a more positive candidate experience.
The Direct Apply functionality is a boon to organizations and prospective job seekers. Reducing the friction in the application process increases the likelihood that top talent will complete the process. In addition, with less friction, job candidates will begin their potential journey positively, enhancing their opinion of the company.
By setting up partnerships with major and industry-specific talent marketplaces, Oracle will likely be capable of demonstrating business results quickly. Application process friction is among the most prominent challenges that need to be solved, mainly when economic conditions make attracting and retaining employees difficult.
Oracle’s focus on addressing friction within the HR department is noteworthy, as talent acquisition and retention significantly impact a company’s overall health, reputation, and, in most cases, bottom line.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
