How your employees are hired and onboarded into the organization can determine how well you are able to attract—and more importantly—retain top talent.   Listen to Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Cloud Delivery Lead Nigel Wiltshire, as they deep dive into the first life cycle, the Applicant Life Cycle, within Oracle HCM business processes. They discuss how you can leverage the life cycle to optimize your recruitment and onboarding initiatives.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Nikita: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Product Innovation and Go to Market Programs. Lois: Hi there! In our last episode, we were introduced to Human Capital Management business processes by our HCM guru and Cloud Delivery Lead Nigel Wiltshire. That was a great overall introduction and you should give it a listen if you’re new to HCM. Nigel’s back with us today to talk about the first of the HCM business process life cycles – the Applicant Life Cycle. 01:01 Nikita: Hi Nigel, thanks for joining us today. So first of all, what is the Applicant Life Cycle? Nigel: Hi Niki, Hi Lois. It’s great to be back. Thank you for having me. The Applicant Life Cycle is the initial part of the HCM business processes. In a nutshell, it’s all about identifying vacancies within an organization and taking appropriate steps to fill those vacancies.  Lois: That sounds simple enough! So, how many processes make up this life cycle? 01:27 Nigel: Unlike the three other life cycles that we will be discussing in upcoming episodes, there is just one business process in the Applicant Life Cycle. But within this process, there are many activities. Lois: So one process, but lots going on. OK. Nigel: Right. The business process is called “Recruit to Onboard” and covers the whole process from when the vacancy is identified to the onboarding of the successful candidate to the business. Nikita: And what are the activities within this process, Nigel? 01:52 Nigel: Within Recruit to Onboard, there are six main activities. The first is called “Determine Workforce Need.” Lois: So identifying the need to recruit new employees… Nigel: That’s right, and this can be as a result of existing employee terminations, or it could stem from a workforce planning exercise, which resulted in the need for additional staff based on company growth and change of operations. Next we have “Drive Candidate Engagement.” This activity is where the whole recruitment campaign really starts. It includes the creation of the Job Requisition, where we add all the necessary details to attract the candidate and encourage them to apply to the position. Of course, you want to also attract the best candidates, and so creating an engaging Career Page on your company’s website is paramount,  making it easy to search for and apply for the relevant job. 02:38 Nigel: The third activity is called “Manage Sourcing” and this is all about making the job requisitions visible to candidates, through various medium. I already alluded to one of them as the organization’s own career web pages, something we call the Career Site. Again, configuring that to be vibrant and easy to navigate is key to the success of that medium. Then we have Job Boards, where you can pos