Is it time to automate your company’s HR?

While implementation of automated HR can be daunting, it’s not as challenging as expected.

A good indicator that it’s time to turn to automation is if HR employees are spending more time on paperwork than they are utilizing their skills on providing meaningful and effective hands-on support. (Photo: Shutterstock)

One of the most crucial parts of a company is its Human Resource management. HR is responsible for several critical tasks that allow the company to operate efficiently, including recruiting and training employees, onboarding and offboarding, payroll, managing employees’ vacation and days off, and the general welfare of employees within the company.

With a slew of paperwork being sent and received daily, HR is quickly drowning in a deluge of important, but overwhelming data. A good indicator for a company to turn to automation is if its HR employees are spending more time on paperwork than they are utilizing their skills on providing meaningful and effective hands-on support to employees. In addition to this, HR automation gets paperwork done faster, and more accurately, and a HR department running at its most efficient will always be a positive for the company and its employees.

Related: 5 ways to build a successful global HR strategy

Out of seven major functions of human resource management, at least five of them can be completely automated with little to no intervention, saving over 50% of time spent on paperwork. In recruitment, automation can be leveraged to post job ads and the responses, screen resumes, and sort candidates. For onboarding, forms for tool access, verification, NDAs, and confidentiality agreements can be sent, received, and then stored securely within the automated process. Likewise, with offboarding, forms can be completed and uploaded electronically, exit interviews scheduled, and access to sensitive company data removed, all with an automatic workflow.

Leave management can also be processed with automation, including checking the leave balance of an employee, getting approval for requests, and recording the leave with payroll. Doing this in an automated way will save time and avoid human error, effectively making it a smoother request and approval for each employee. Payroll can be automated, with a reduction in errors compared to manually processing payroll and completed much faster. The number of days worked, along with vacation or days on leave, can be automated. People are paid on time, with the correct amounts.

While implementation of automated HR can be daunting, it’s not as challenging as expected. There are many options now for software an application that can automate your workflow, and the payoff of an elevated employee experience, and time and money saved, makes implementation worth it.

As with most automated workflows, it is critical that the information the company puts into the workflow is accurate. While the automated workflow saves time and money, it works with the information it is given. If it is given biased, or incorrect data, it will work with that bad data, and the output will not be accurate. This shines a light on the HR’s manual procedures and policies. If they are not efficient, or have biases, and are not corrected before being automated, the automated workflow will not fix them.

There are even more ways that HR can be automated, but it’s clear that an automated workflow would benefit the employees, HR, and the company itself, by saving time and money. The employee experience will be better, as their needs are being met faster and more accurately. HR has more time for human-to-human experiences, and less time on redundant paperwork. The automated workflow also allows HR to have a secure, organized set of data, that they can leverage to improve employee experiences.

If the company has solid procedures and policies in place, an automated workflow will help tremendously. There are applications and software available for a range of sizes of companies, and HR can control which processes are automated. Not only will the company improve, but HR can get back to managing human-to-human experiences.

Sergio Suarez Jr. is the founder and CEO of TackleAI, a leading AI-powered dynamic data processing platform. TackleAI utilizes a built-from-scratch AI program to instantly analyze, extract and file unstructured document data for clients in health care, government, business and finance.

Read more: