Ten years ago, HR departments’ biggest challenges included attracting and retaining high-quality talent, employee retention, onboarding processes, absenteeism, compensation, and work benefits. While these are still relevant, today’s challenges are far more complex, and HR is far removed from yesteryear’s paper-pushers.
We’re not only talking about dealing with a fluctuating economy, companies going global, and the impact of Covid-19 on organizations and employees, but the importance of incorporating technology into traditional HR processes. Harnessing automation, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), in particular, can have a huge impact on overall organizational success.
RPA and HR to-date
HR is responsible for an abundance of tasks aimed to help workers get the job done. However, many of these tasks are high-volume, time-consuming, repetitive, and still reliant on labor-intensive manual processes. This reliance is not only inefficient and costly but opens the door to high rates of human error and even a lack of compliance with legal standards.
While many companies claim to have automated their HR processes already, a 2016 study by The Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) shows otherwise. These are the percentages of paper usage for specific HR processes:
- Employee file management (53%)
- Onboarding (48%)
- Employee separation (48%)
- Recruitment and selection (35%)
- Policy and procedure administration (32%)
This data indicates that while some data processing might be automated, solutions for information and content are lagging and open to inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Thus, there is a disconnect between data and tasks. The answer lies in harnessing RPA to handle all burdensome, repetitive, and mundane tasks and interact with current systems and applications in a controlled and precise manner. RPA enables HR to focus resources and time on more strategic tasks like introducing career development and training programs to ensure that star employees are always satisfied and one step ahead of the game.
RPA for HR
Here are some critical HR tasks that can easily be enhanced by using RPA:
1. Screening & Shortlisting
Screening CVs and online applications and creating a shortlist of potential candidates to interview can take days. RPA tools can instantly gather and screen resumes, do background checks, compare info against job requirements, make a shortlist, notify potentials, provide feedback, and send rejections.
2. Onboarding automation
After processing a new candidate’s offer letter and their job acceptance, a slew of onboarding procedures ensue. These range from completing paperwork to creating a new user account and everything in between to make sure they are 100% equipped on day one. RPA can automate most of these processes from the moment the user account is created, including sending newbies all required documents.
3. RPA and training
Even if your new employee is a star, they still need to be brought up to speed on company standards, business processes, and their exact role. Doing so ensures compliance with standards and avoids wrong or missing data. The need for individual training should be structured and ongoing, not something discovered by chance. RPA is rooted in training, performance support, skills development, and eLearning and can be used accordingly.
4. Other tasks
RPA can proficiently alleviate the burden and improve the accuracy of expense and travel management; monthly payroll execution; employee data management; attendance and time management; exit management; and reporting and analyzing surveys and company reviews.
HR departments are turning to technological solutions to deal with increasing demands, and Kryon’s RPA for human resources is tailored to handle all current and future challenges. From implementation, it takes just a few months to improve ROI and save money.