Labor shortages and layoffs: Solving the talent crisis with Dayforce innovation
Dayforce Alumni Management and other exciting innovations are here to help you balance competing priorities like building a great employee experience, driving productivity, and managing compliance. Here’s why you no longer need to choose.
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One of the biggest challenges facing today’s leaders is how to build a workforce that can propel their organizations forward. Talent shortages abound globally, with many businesses struggling to find skilled workers from traditional sourcing methods. A recent study by Korn Ferry shows the scale of the problem: It predicts we'll see a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people that could result in $8.5 trillion in unrealized revenue by 2030.[1]
At Dayforce, we think about this as a talent complexity crisis, because the reasons behind these talent shortages are complicated. Roles are evolving and organizations can’t always find people with the skills to match. In our latest Executive Survey, 88% of respondents said labor shortages are likely in their companies over the next year. Yet nearly the same number (81%) expect to also see layoffs in that same period.
We're also seeing an explosion of different types of work and workers, adding further intricacy to an already ever-changing compliance landscape. And talent acquisition is growing more expensive, both due to the effort needed to find the right people with the right skills, and also because candidates want more money to offset inflation. Meanwhile, leaders are being asked to manage both the top and bottom line as the cost of talent soars. All of this paints a picture where the traditional path to hiring won't help organizations close the talent gap.
At Dayforce, our latest innovations were designed to solve this talent complexity crisis by pulling multiple levers for our customers. One is re-discovering the hidden and untapped potential of your own employee alumni and nurturing long-term employee relationships. Another is doubling down on building a great employee experience for every type of worker to inspire loyalty and performance. The last is improving how you manage compliance so that it takes less effort and creates less risk. And woven throughout these levers is our collaboration with our partners, providing strategic value with incremental investments.
Here is an overview of how these new Dayforce capabilities can help your organization overcome labor shortages, strategically drive value, and more easily manage compliance in today’s complex economy.
Conquer the talent complexity crisis by tapping into a hidden workforce and delivering enhanced experiences
Gone are the days where simply posting a role, interviewing, and making an offer is enough to build the workforce you need. With the evolution of roles and the pace of change, many organizations can benefit from an untapped workforce to help fill talent gaps.
Organizations looking for top talent need to expand the scope of their search to include more than external job board applicants sending easy applications. Then, when candidates start coming through your talent pipeline, you need a way to grab their attention with an enriched recruiting experience.
Enter Dayforce Alumni Management and a renewed candidate portal, our talent innovation that better connects you to top job seekers and manage the overall experience.
Boomerang your way to top talent with Dayforce Alumni Management
Finding new talent from scratch is costly: It’s estimated that the total cost to hire a new employee could be three to four times the position’s salary.[2]
Just like the advice to “shop your closet” for unexpected treasures instead of buying something new, smart leaders will look to the talent they’ve already found to solve these long-term labor challenges.
Enter Dayforce Alumni Management, a new capability within Dayforce HR that helps organizations build and maintain strong relationships with past employees who could become boomerang talent or refer new candidates. Users can create a customized Dayforce People Experience page for their alumni, providing relevant and engaging content and insights.
Alumni already know your company, leading to a shorter ramp up time to adding value than the average new hire. Dayforce Alumni Management helps customers capture the benefits of boomerang talent by re-igniting their interest in the employer’s brand. They can draw alumni back into their community through interesting content and open roles delivered through text and email. Even better, the network works in tandem with Ideal Talent Marketplace, so you can engage alumni on a casual basis, when you need them the most.
Close the talent gap with a better candidate — and recruiter — experience
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the number of people not in the labor force who currently want a job stands at 5.8 million as of January 2024.[3] If you’re looking to strategically hire workers from this highly saturated labor market, a strong candidate experience helps you attract the talent you need and get them in the door faster. It also helps you realize the full potential of your workforce, keeping your talent engaged and performing at their best — and loyal to your organization. Gartner reports that largely satisfied employees are 69% more likely to be high performers, and 52% more likely to report high discretionary effort — meaning they go above and beyond their normal duties.[4] In short, a great candidate experience is the start of a great employee experience, and gaining employee satisfaction leads to increased productivity.
Workers with in-demand skills also have the power to hold out for the best options, so HR teams should prioritize improving their candidate experience. A fast and efficient recruitment process is everything when you're competing for the best talent. Building on the momentum of our improved candidate portal (launched in 2023), we're making the application process even faster and easier with QR codes for job requisitions. In industries like retail, hospitality, and manufacturing, where hiring speed is especially critical, QR codes can help hiring managers find candidates walking past with a placard displayed in their businesses.
But it's not enough to make applying for jobs easier for candidates. We're also making key changes to the recruiter experience to make it the best in the industry. We've optimized candidate sourcing with search and advanced features to streamline the process of getting the right candidates in front of recruiters, so they’re not searching for a needle in a haystack.
Our single system approach to talent in Dayforce, combined with our focus on aligning skills to work and driving powerful, intelligent experiences, helps to set organizations up for the future.
Operate with confidence amid growing compliance complexity
Whether you’re moving fast or taking it slow with your talent acquisition, all this complexity around building the right workforce means you’re still working with different types of workers across multiple jurisdictions with their own regulations, which can increase compliance risk. In an effort to offset these challenges, Dayforce has professionals monitoring key labor laws in over 200 countries and territories. We also have a built-in rules engine to calculate pay and taxes, ensuring our customers are powerfully equipped to manage compliance.
Ensure a more secure payroll and compliance environment
We acknowledge the paramount importance of security and fraud protection for all organizations. To instill confidence in our customers, Dayforce is committed to investing in features that mitigate risks, including enhancements to direct deposit diversion fraud protection — the payroll diversion scam that targets employees’ paychecks and reroutes them to unauthorized bank accounts. As these fraudulent activities evolve, Dayforce proactively introduces measures to minimize vulnerability, including enhancements like these:
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You can set Dayforce to alert users to changes in their access patterns, enabling users to take preventative action.
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Dayforce now provides increased visibility and quicker triage of security incidents.
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You can also enable clients to generate reports themselves, reducing concerns about time delays. This, in turn, reduces dependencies and eliminates potential security gaps.
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We also have new systems that help Dayforce become aware of fraudulent activity, like discovering that bad actors are copying login user interfaces (UIs) to create phishing sites.
Stay up to date with over 160 global compliance updates
We deliver continuous compliance innovation to help our customers operate anywhere with confidence, a focus that has led us to be recognized as a leader in compliance. And to maintain our depth of knowledge in local compliance, we are constantly bolstering our global capabilities with ongoing efforts across the Americas, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), and APJ (Australia, Pacific, Japan) regions. In our February 2024 release, we are rolling out over 160 global compliance updates, encompassing various compliance aspects like addressing year-end requirements, enhancing reporting functionalities, expanding data import fields, updating tax rates, and refining the user experience. Here’s a brief overview of those changes, country by country:
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U.S.: Elections management, tax engine compliance updates, and initial user experience updates
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Canada: Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) metadata changes, customer banking updates, initial user experience updates, and tax, compliance, and garnishment updates
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Australia and New Zealand: State tax enhancements, general ledger (GL) splits, and New Zealand payroll year-end updates
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UK and Ireland: Start of year changes, compliance maintenance, faster payments for phase two, and multi-source payments
Experience compliance efficiencies with AI
While localized, security-focused compliance updates can significantly help reduce complexity for your organization, we didn’t stop there. Today’s economic pressures have led to layoffs and organizational restructuring, creating more payroll and compliance complexity. Organizations need critical, actionable information at their fingertips, so we’ve deepened our compliance capabilities by introducing artificial intelligence into how you manage payroll compliance.
Dayforce Co-Pilot — our newly launched artificial intelligence tool — helps support your compliance efforts by helping employees navigate their policies around time away from work, flexible work, information security, and more. Dayforce Co-Pilot points your people in the right direction through AI-powered conversational assistance.
Unlock even more value from your Dayforce experience
Every moment counts when you’re dealing with compliance complexity, labor shortages, and tight budgets, so opportunities to create more cost efficiency are vital. We’re launching a series of integrated partner solutions to help customers work more efficiently and generate even more value.
AdminaHealth, a company that delivers the most complete cloud-based invoice consolidation, reconciliation, and payment management solution in the benefits industry, is partnering with Dayforce. AdminaHealth will provide a comprehensive benefits billing software solution that streamlines premium bill reconciliation and consolidation for Dayforce Benefits, helping you manage total compensation packages for new and current talent.
Today’s employees want relevant, up-to-date content and a personalized learning journey, while employers want to build adaptable, future-ready workforces. To this end, we’re partnering with Go1, an organization committed to providing the best learning opportunities to improve lives through education and training. In an economic environment marked by labor shortages, it’s vital to upskill and reskill the talent you retain.
Now our customers can now access packaged bundles of compliance and soft-skill training content through Dayforce Learning. Go1 is an add-on library of pre-curated learning and development (L&D) content that can be seamlessly delivered through Dayforce Learning to help corporate L&D teams unlock workforce potential. ​It includes expertly curated skilling and compliance content from 250 diverse, industry-leading learning providers, delivered seamlessly through Dayforce.​
Organizations are tightening budgets, and streamlining the recruiting process is one way to create cost efficiencies. In addition to the Dayforce Recruiting updates already mentioned, we’re partnering with VidCruiter, a company that helps empower employers and job applicants find the perfect fit. Our VidCruiter integration allows customers to access pre-recorded video interviews inside our platform. This will help enhance users’ ability to screen candidates, alongside Vidcruiter’s automated reference check services. Today’s leaders certainly have a lot to balance. The right technology can help close the gap between competing priorities to reduce complexity for organizations. Dayforce is leading this rebalancing with innovative products and capabilities that help you realize the potential of your people, operate with confidence, and unlock more value.
Learn more about Dayforce, your global people platform, can help you solve complex challenges
[1] Michael Franzino, Alan Guarino, & Jean-Marc Laouchez, “The $8.5 Trillion Talent Shortage,” Korn Ferry, July 2021.
[2] Katie Navarra, “The Real Costs of Recruitment,” SHRM, April 2022.
[3] “The Employment Situation — January 2024,” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, February 2024.
[4] Matthias Graf, “The Impact of Cost Cutting on Employee Experience and Talent Outcomes,” Gartner, March 2020.