Reference Story
Hamm Kliniken: Smart applicant management with easy hr
about Hamm Kliniken
With its four locations, around 725 beds and 700 employees, Hamm Kliniken stands for excellence in oncological rehabilitation and follow-up rehabilitation. The aim of all Hamm Kliniken clinics is to support patients after cancer treatment and to alleviate the various functional complaints, which can be both physical and psychological in nature.
This makes it a top priority to have a broad-based and interdisciplinary team. In addition to doctors, nursing staff and therapists, the clinics also have their own staff in the kitchen, service, housekeeping and technical departments. The rest of the staff consists of one administrative department per clinic plus a central management organization for all sites, consisting of departments such as IT management. All together, they make a powerful team, or as they like to say: “Strong as a HAMMer.”
The four sites of Hamm Kliniken are widely dispersed across Germany, and all of them are far from urban centers. One of the key challenges for HR management is to find employees from a wide range of disciplines, some of whom have highly specialized qualifications, and to attract them to these locations. To simplify HR management in this situation, Hamm Kliniken began digitizing HR processes with easy hr back in 2016.
Introduction of the digital personnel file
“The old processes back when we had completely paper-based personnel files were super complicated, very time-consuming and not very transparent,”
ecalls Sarah Grant, who is responsible for digitalization and strategy at the company.
“The problems started with the fact that the different management levels each had to have their own access to the personnel files and had to visit the HR department every time, such as for employee appraisals, to have the relevant parts of the file pulled for them.”
Sarah Grant freely admits that digitalization of the personnel files initially involved a certain amount of extra work because all relevant paper files had to be processed in the HR department first. That meant scanning and importing them into easy hr. Looking back on it, though, she sees no alternative to this step:
“Today, it is no longer conceivable for our HR department to work exclusively with paper files.”
Simpler administration of all personnel matters
But how do the staff of Hamm Kliniken use easy hr in their daily work? On the one hand, the switch to the digital solution has freed the HR departments from the majority of paper files. Particularly in the medical field, where employees frequently obtain further professional training, personnel files quickly become very extensive. Today, only a few documents are still additionally stored in paper form due to legal requirements. Hamm Kliniken now exclusively stores all other documents in digital form, so they can be searched for, displayed and edited via the easy hr browser interface.
Clear assignment of roles and rights
Sarah Grant sees a further advantage of digitalization in their daily work with personnel files:
“We benefit enormously from having a functioning concept of roles and rights.”
Having to manually search for and issue files for certain processes was not the only challenge that HR used to deal with. Such content also requires a very differentiated system for controlling access to sensitive employee data:
“Now we can handle this very precisely with the digital roles and rights concept. If employees change department or function, we can adjust the rights very easily.”
No more forgetting about appointments
Another feature of easy hr that is widely used in personnel management at Hamm Kliniken is the reminder function:
“Employees receive congratulations, gifts or special leave from us on birthdays or anniversaries. We have set up a reminder function for this with easy hr. Our HR staff now receive an e-mail from easy hr four weeks in advance of birthdays and anniversaries, informing them of the event in good time. This task then remains in the system until it is clicked away so that nothing is forgotten.”
An e-mail is also automatically sent to the department head during probationary period interviews or the annual employee appraisals, and a task is created in easy hr at the same time:
“This means that no appraisal interview gets overlooked, and we have a transparent overview of which appraisal interviews are overdue.”
Applicant management pilot project
The success of the digital personnel file inspired Hamm Kliniken to tackle another HR process with easy hr applicant management.
“We are constantly evolving as an employer. This includes flexible working time models as well as modern digital processes. Our applicant management still had potential for improvement: Some applications actually still reach us by post. Even though the majority already come by email via our job advertisements on the website, we wanted to further reduce the hurdles for potential applicants as well as simplify the processes for our HR departments.”
Sarah Grant and her colleague Christina Stein, who works as a management assistant, set up a pilot project in the fall of 2024 to implement this. Their goal: To have the entire applicant management system at Hamm Kliniken designed as an integrated digital process that will bring numerous improvements:
“We start the process directly in easy hr with the creation of the job advertisement text. This is much easier since there are many fields that we simply have to click on to create the text. That alone definitely saves time,” explains Christina Stein.
Faster, better organized and data protection compliant
The same goes for the approval process:
“Now you can just click to indicate that the text has been approved or that something still needs to be changed. Here, too, we are definitely saving resources compared to before, when every document was sent back and forth by email.”
“And this enables greater transparency,” adds Sarah Grant, “because at the end of this process there is an approved document that everyone has agreed on.”
Once the job advertisement has been created, the text is automatically posted on the company website.
“After the job advertisement is on the homepage and someone applies, there are also further improvements that definitely make things a lot easier,”
continues Christina Stein. For example, it is possible to set up an applicant pool that applicants can join just by clicking.
easy hr also makes it easier to meet data protection requirements. This applies both to the consent to the privacy policy, which is an option for the form easy hr generates, and to compliance with the legally prescribed retention and deletion of applicant data.
Already a success within the company
The new applicant management system is initially being introduced at one clinic as part of the pilot project. When asked how it has been received by employees so far, Sarah Grant and Christina Stein have to laugh:
“Our HR staff are really looking forward to applicant management. All four clinics would prefer to have it right away. This is somewhat different from the introduction of the digital personnel file, which required a lot of work to digitize the old files first. But everyone now understands that we needed the digital personnel file in order to introduce digital applicant management.”
The pilot project will focus on gaining further practical experience and optimizing all processes in the near future. Once this has been accomplished and the new applicant management system is up and running at all four clinics, Sarah Grant and Christina Stein already have their sights set on the next project with easy hr: the digitalization of onboarding and offboarding.
“we benefit enormously from having a functioning roles and rights concept that now precisely covers digital Access to sensitive employee data. if employees Change departments or functions, we can very easily adapt the rights.”
Sarah Grant,
Authorized signatory | Hamm Kliniken