HR is one of the departments that is still overwhelmed with a lot of paperwork. When handling sensitive data routinely, there is little space for errors. Everything must be signed, dated and securely filed. Any error can have serious repercussions for both the employees as well as the company.

In the last couple of years, HR departments are accelerating the adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions, particularly intelligent automation. According to the results of the 2019-2020 Sierra-Cedar HR Systems Survey, the use of RPA in HR rose to 50% over the last few years.

Businesses are finally acknowledging that HR professionals must be free from tedious manual tasks both to reduce errors and avoid high turnover.

A recent survey by Deloitte found that 60% of HR departments were using AI-boosted automation tools to assist workers. Gartner states that by 2021, one in four employees will have a virtual assistant. And most organizations believe that the number of HR jobs will stay the same or increase as a result of intelligent automation, according to Deloitte.

Let’s look at 6 HR processes that are ready to be automated today, for fast, valuable results and high ROI.

Table of Contents

1. Screening resumes and candidates

One of the most time-consuming activities for an HR professional is screening resumes and shortlisting candidates. To streamline this task, you can create intelligent software “bots” to process data contained on resumes and CVs. They can be aligned to extract specific keywords from the list of job requirements such as type of degree, office skills or technical know-how. You can also create rules that these bots would follow including sending request-for-interview emails to candidates as well as emails informing applicants that you’re moving forward with other candidates. The bots are often programmed to store an applicant’s credentials and skills in database so that they are searchable should another job opening arise with different requirements.

2. Onboarding

Multiple people and departments are involved in onboarding— from the hiring manager, IT, security to admin and others. With RPA, bots are trained to follow rules and send the right documents in the right order. They also automatically notify specific people within the organization who must approve or sign off on documents. Errors are reduced, as the process is stalled unless requirements are adequately fulfilled. Automatic timely notifications are also sent to stakeholders to avoid unnecessary delays. All this makes onboarding seamless and painless.

3. Induction and training

Once a job offer is accepted by a candidate, the new hires soon need digital credentials for access to appropriate systems and data or inclusion in business processes. This is to be done keeping in mind the compliance, security regulations and best practices. Intelligent RPA can automatically carry out this task by going in and out of various systems and assigning permissions based on job templates that you create.

4. Employee data

Managing employee data is perhaps the most error-prone job. Data silos resulting in HR workers having to navigate multiple systems. Moreover, data is constantly changing as new employees are hired and others quit. HR can have a bot to take care of updating all systems consistently and ease the burden of constantly keying and rekeying data off the shoulders of your staff.

5. Payroll

Processing payroll manually is fraught with risk of errors. RPA makes this easy by acting as a “connector” between legacy systems such as employee management, time-tracking, payroll and general ledger. Your HR team can program bots to confirm employee hours entered into the system and identify discrepancies with other sources of data. Bots can also aggregate and analyze data from different sources and send reports to the concerned people. Since everything is documented, compliance is a given and errors are a thing of the past.

6. Employee exits

Just as employee onboarding requires a fair amount of paperwork and processes, the same is also true when handling employee exits. Exit documents need to be generated and signed, email and system access needs to be revoked, final payroll needs to be issued based and so on. All of this must be completed with a high degree of accuracy because of regulatory issues. This is the sort of thing that RPA excels at. With intelligent bots checking that all exit requirements have been fulfilled and forms signed on the dotted line, your HR professionals don’t have to worry about what an audit might find.

Is your HR department overburdened?

It is about time we automate archaic manual processes. RPA can offer tremendous relief to your workers. Research shows that when employees reach out to HR, they prefer to deal with humans whenever possible. Using bots as digital assistants to do the manual repetitive tasks saves HR the time for important interactions for face-to-face encounters. This in turn will decrease overall turnover and costs for your business.