Robotic Process Automation in the Human Resources Industry
Automate employee onboarding and talent acquisition to focus on human-centric tasks
Over the past few years, RPA has moved from a fringe application to wider adoption. According to the results of the 2019-2020 Sierra-Cedar HR Systems Survey, the use of RPA tools in HR functions increased by 50 percent over the prior year’s study. Industry experts say improvements in the user-friendliness of the technology, as well as a growing desire to free HR staff from manual tasks so they can pursue work that adds more value to the organization, has led more HR groups to evaluate or implement the technology.
Automate On-Boarding
On-boarding processes often require data being added to several different systems and creating things like new user accounts, email addresses, and access rights for applications. All of this can be automated through RPA. Digital bots can automatically activate a template for the onboarding workflow and streamline the whole process. Bots an even know which systems new employees should have access to by following business rules.
Digital bots aren’t just reactive either. They can send documents to new employees or start the on-boarding process by asking for specific documents.
Training Administration
If you have a solid training process that follows business rules and works the same way every time, a digital bot can run it. RPA can be used to aggregate data for performance reviews, pulling information out of various systems, and compiling it into an annual report. Other training areas that digital bots can help? Managing goal setting, calculating incentives, or evaluating rewards – all of these can be automated through RPA.
Automation with RPA makes the performance management process more efficient, free of errors, and less time consuming.
Recruitment
Remember the days of wading through resumes for an open job position? Sure, there is software to track the recruitment process, but software bots can actually run the process for you. Bots can monitor an email inbox for interested candidates or respond to forms from your website. Information from resumes can be scraped and added to tracking software (or even just Excel). Bots can look for certain qualifications and keep applicants on track to the application process.
And you? You can spend more time crafting a unique interview process, and doing one of the things that humans do best – connecting.
Payroll Automation
Payroll is a perfect example of a repetitive, monotonous task that is vital to the operations of the company. Those criteria, along with the fact that payroll almost always follows business rules, makes it a perfect candidate for RPA. Payroll often involves large amounts of data, which rises the risk factor. Using software bots reduces this risk pretty much to zero, as the bots don’t “make mistakes.”
Travel & Expense Management
Often Human Resources specialists are tasked with the manual process of keeping track of travel & other expenses. Using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), digital bots can extract data from employee receipts, and then cross-check individual expenses agains company rules and expenditure regulations. The bots can then communicate with payroll programs to track reimbursements.
With any manual process, there is a high chance of error. When software bots are involved, errors are eliminated.