Overstock.com’s new employees hit the ground running with ServiceNow and Workday

Creating an efficient new hire process    

Successful company growth means Overstock.com hires more than 300 new employees each year
A leading online retailer, Overstock.com sells more than two million products on its website, offering discounted prices on furniture, rugs, bedding, electronics, clothing, jewelry, and other goods. Due to its robust growth, Overstock.com continues to hire more than 300 professional associates every year.

When these new associates come on board, they need to hit the ground running—with somewhere to work, a laptop, an email account, and access to various corporate systems. Human resources, IT, and facilities all need to work together to be ready for each hire’s first day on the job.

Like many organizations, Overstock.com onboarded its new associates manually, but this process was incredibly time consuming and error prone. For each new associate, it took between 60 and 80 interactions before new employees could actually do the job they were hired to do.

“On average, new hires wasted three days waiting for everything they needed,” explains Brian Wagstaff, Overstock.com’s director of technology services. “With the number of people we hire, we were losing 1,000 days of productivity every year.”

An enterprise onboarding strategy powered by ServiceNow and Workday unites departments into a single workflow, creating an efficient new hire process
Overstock.com was already a ServiceNow^® IT Service Management customer. So, when the company decided to use Workday to manage its HR processes, it immediately saw the benefits of integrating the two platforms.

“Workday is great at driving HR workflows, and ServiceNow is great at automating IT and other enterprise processes,” says Brian. “By bringing the two together, we could completely transform how we onboarded new associates.”

Now, when a new associate is hired, Workday handles all of the HR activities and ServiceNow handles the rest. Workday simply sends data to ServiceNow, identifying the associate’s name, department, and title, along with other key information. Based on this data, a role is identified and ServiceNow knows exactly what the new associate needs.

For example, it tells the facilities manager which type of workspace to allocate, tells the IT department which hardware bundle the new associate needs, and automatically creates employee accounts and application access. ServiceNow tracks all of these activities, so they are completed before the associate’s first day.

Automation improves HR and new hire productivity and makes it easier for Overstock.com to scale as opportunities arise
The integration between ServiceNow and Workday has yielded huge benefits. Using ServiceNow, Overstock.com has automated 115 tasks, improving accuracy and efficiency. In addition, there are now fewer than eight onboarding interactions for service technicians to deal with, allowing them to focus on areas that give the company a strategic advantage. It also enables new employees to hit the ground running on their first day.

“Associates have what they need from day one,” says Brian. “And because everything is automated, we’re not afraid to hire 400 or more people if we have to.”

When HR creates new job profiles—whether that’s for new, permanent hires or contractors—Workday simply sends the new role to ServiceNow, and ServiceNow gives the new associate a default set of entitlements. ServiceNow then asks the associate’s manager what should be added or changed, and updates the role’s entitlements automatically. HR doesn’t have to get involved in the entitlement details for each new job profile, and the next time HR hires for the same role, all of the entitlements are already there. If employees request something new, ServiceNow asks their managers if it should be added as an entitlement.

Overstock.com also supports the offboarding process with this integrated solution. ServiceNow keeps a full list of each associate’s assigned assets so that HR knows exactly which equipment an associate has to return when leaving the company. The next step is to tackle the internal transfer process, making sure that associates receive additional entitlements when they move into a new role. Managers will also be able to decide which entitlements associates should retain from their previous role.

“For Overstock, integrating ServiceNow and Workday was a no-brainer,” says Brian. “HR benefits, IT benefits, and—most importantly—our associates benefit.”

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