Have you ever experienced a situation where your company was gearing up for a new software launch, only to be reminded of the shortage of workforce and the right skill set?

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• The HR department has to maintain personal, legislation-specific, and organization-related data for all employees in their HR applications. It is crucial to properly manage and store this data as it will be used for reporting. Furthermore, this data will also be used by other applications like payroll and outbound interfaces.

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  Oracle HCM Cloud offers all such data fields and their values out of the box, which helps customers adhere to the legislative rules and properly maintain the data. Oracle offers its customers the flexibility to manage values for these data fields by using the functionality of lookups.

  Lookups hold a list of values that appear for various fields within an application.

  There are three categories of lookups:

  1. 1. Standard lookups

  2. 2. Common lookups

  3. 3. Set-enabled lookups

  What are the Common Lookups in Oracle HCM?

  Here are some essential details about common lookups.

  Common lookups are predefined lookups that allow users to add new values or enable/disable existing values. These are generally maintained by admin users.

  To enter a value for the fields within the application, a user can select any one of the values from the available list. There are predefined lookup types available for various fields in the application.

  For example, 'Assignment Category' is one of the fields on the employee's assignment screen that contains a list of values. The list of values that appear for this field comes from lookup. The lookup type for this is 'EMP_CAT'.

  Duplicate lookup codes are not allowed in the lookup type.

  Lookup Customization

  Oracle Fusion contains certain predefined lookups that you cannot disable values for or add new values to. However, there are a few lookups that allow you to disable values and also add some new values. So, it all depends on the lookup configuration level, as it helps you check what level of customization is possible for a lookup type.

  There are three different types of common lookups available in Oracle Fusion that decide the customization for the lookup:

  1. 1. User lookup – This is a flexible type of lookup; you can add new values and enable/disable the existing values to it.

  2. 2. Extensible lookup – In this type of lookup, you can add new values but cannot disable the existing values.

  3. 3. System lookup – System lookup does not allow you to add or disable the existing values.

  Lookup Type and Its Components

  Lookup Type – Here, you can add values to the lookup. Note that this field name will appear on the setup screen and not on the application screen, where users usually make an entry into the application.

  Meaning – This is the name of the field that users will see on the screen, where they will add the value.

  Module – This is the name of the module to which this lookup belongs. It might be named as HR or Absence.

  Lookup Configuration level – As explained in the above section, lookup configuration has three values:

  • User

  • Extensible

  • System

  We can add values, known as lookup codes, in each lookup type.

  The lookup codes consist of:

  Lookup Code – This signifies the value of each code that we have added. It is not visible to the users but it is used to uniquely identify values added to the lookup type.

  Display Sequence – This is used to mention the sequence of values they should appear in, for the users to select. It can be 1, 2, 3, etc.

  Enabled – The Checkbox helps you to enable or disable any particular lookup code.

  Start Date and End Date – You can specify a date range for each lookup code to make it available only within that range for users to select. If this is left blank, then it is always available for users.

  Meaning – This term will appear in the list of values on the UI for a specific field, which the user can see and select from the drop-down menu. It is associated with the lookup code.

  Tag – Tag is used for localizing the lookup code. For example, if we put +GB as Tag then this value will appear only for Great Britain localization; and if we put –GB, then it will not appear for Great Britain. If we leave this blank, it will appear for all areas.

  You can create a new lookup type or enable/disable values by using the task under Setup and Maintenance -> Manage Common Lookups

  Here is an example for lookup type 'EMP_CAT':

  
  
  
  

  Business Case

  If any customer based in GB wants to enable the 'Transgender' value for 'Gender', which is already present in the lookup type, they can navigate to the Manage Common lookups task. Since the lookup type for Gender is 'Sex', select the value 'Transgender' in the lookup codes section, and in the tag column enter '+GB'. Click on Save and Close.

  
  
  
  
  

  To get all the details of lookups in the application, simply use the below query:

  Select * from hcm_lookups;

  So, this is how common lookups in Oracle HCM capture information for employees and provide the flexibility to manage value in these data fields.

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In today's competitive landscape, finding the best talent, hiring them, and onboarding them quickly demands time, energy, and resources. Staying ahead of the competition in attracting and retaining top talent, especially in the post-pandemic world, is increasingly becoming more challenging. Therefore, it's no wonder that organizations are leveraging cloud technology to make recruiting not only strategic but agile as well.

HR leaders have been propelled to broaden their approach to Human Capital Management (HCM). Thereby, HR practices have evolved from being a cost centre to becoming a value generator. Their role is equally crucial in providing insights about parameters that boost productivity and improve workforce efficiency.

Taleo, also called Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud (OTAC) was once considered to be an industry leader in the cloud-based talent acquisition software market.

However, in 2018, Oracle Recruiting was launched as a part of the Oracle HCM Cloud suite. Within a short span of 2 years, it matured into the complexity of business processes delivering user-friendly integrations. Therefore, to simplify their HCM landscape, many Taleo customers are making a transition to Oracle Recruiting Cloud.

Oracle Recruiting Cloud is a complete solution for sourcing, recruiting, and onboarding candidates. It is an ideal Oracle Taleo alternative for enterprises that have already been using Oracle HCM Suite.

It delivers distinct benefits, upgrades, and returns as compared to the standalone Taleo. What's more, it can cater to the needs of the present times allowing businesses to monitor, track, and measure talent information across the HR spectrum.

One of the main reasons why we see clients migrating from Taleo to Oracle Recruiting Cloud is because of the central focus on candidate experience. Across various facets of HR and during the recruitment process, Oracle Recruiting Cloud is intended to address the modern-day challenges of recruitment by using a data-driven, responsive, and mobile-first user experience. It is self-intuitive to source and connect with candidates.

At the same time, it empowers recruiters with Artificial Intelligence (AI) based matching to make data-driven recruiting decisions.

Evosys, as an Oracle Cloud system integrator, has worked with 650+ Taleo customers for more than 15 years. We have helped customers from medium to large-scale enterprises adopt Oracle Taleo for their businesses.

However, recently, based on our interactions and feedback from them, we have observed the following:

• An increasing number of Taleo users have already migrated to Oracle Recruiting Cloud.

• An equally large number of existing Taleo customers are actively considering the migration to Oracle Recruiting Cloud.

To further understand this trend, we came across the below 6 reasons why more and more enterprises are considering Taleo to Oracle Recruiting Cloud migration:

• 1. Better Data Quality

  The major drawback of Taleo is that it needs an interface to Oracle HCM Cloud. Plus, data from the Oracle Recruiting Cloud is not actively available and requires a separate reporting tool.

  On the contrary, with Oracle Recruiting, the number of integrations required to maintain the system decreases drastically. Foundational data such as organization, location, job function, requisition templates, job details, employees, internal candidates, and new hires are no longer required.

  Oracle Recruiting Cloud helps you reduce the number of costly data errors that arise with legacy systems during sourcing, hiring, and onboarding processes. The reasons:

  • All the data from the HCM modules including organizations, jobs, positions, work locations, and geographies are available on a single platform.

  • Also, it has the ability to leverage configuration from other HCM modules making the latest data available immediately for the recruitment process.

  • Elimination or minimization of risks involved in integration management overhead and data integrity.

• 2. Integrated Reporting

  Oracle Recruiting Cloud equips organizations to store all their HR data within a single reporting tool. After implementation, you can eliminate the need to export information to a data warehouse or any additional cloud solutions. Reports can integrate data from across different HR domains.

  With integrated reporting, your business solves numerous challenges such as – combining recruiting data with performance records for making more strategic business decisions. The result is identifying top talent, linking job openings to talent profiles, and identifying internal talent around key competencies.

• 3. A Comprehensive HR Platform

  Oracle HCM Cloud enables employees to have one location for all HR-related self-service activities. Employees can search for open jobs and review a job offer on the same platform. When it comes to identifying high-quality new hires, managers can use the self-service interface to drive adoption, and satisfaction, and enhance decision-making. Moreover, using data-driven processes and AI technologies provides quick and accurate identification of the top talent.

• 4. Seamless Onboarding

  Oracle Onboarding, a part of Oracle HCM Cloud, offers organizations an opportunity to provide a meaningful and enriching experience to the new hire. Effective onboarding covers a comprehensive set of features from pre-boarding to onboarding, offboarding, and guidance-based task management.

  The benefits of such effective onboarding are, for example, that it improves pre-hire and post-hire interactions, empowering the new hires with critical workplace connections. At the same time, it augments operational awareness, efficiency, and ensures compliance, along with verifying, managing, and consolidating both data and information.

  Here, the HR function also has the liberty to automate the overall candidate experience starting from the initial engagement to hiring with personalized conversations using chatbots. Using these interactive interfaces, they can provide a comprehensive view of talent management and career progression to both the candidates and the management.

• 5. HCM Suite Experience

  Leveraging the power of Oracle HCM, Oracle Recruiting Cloud is accompanied by a host of features that are not present in Taleo. They include delivering deeper insights and easy access to information regarding the hiring status at all stages of employment.

  It provides a unified single platform for superior user experience, work structures, position information, security profiles, and configuration tools.

• 6. Intelligent, Adaptive, and Data-Driven Outcomes

  Oracle Recruiting takes advantage of technologies consumers frequently use including chatbots, adaptive intelligence, and mobile-first user interface to provide a competitive advantage for hiring and retaining talent while reducing the operating cost of the HR department.

  Imagine the affordability when a chatbot does the work of a help desk! Even the candidate experience is elevated with dynamic conversation-based interactions instead of a monotonous form-driven process.

  To facilitate smart and quicker hiring, the system has an in-built intelligence feature that is powerful and easy to use.

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