HR Automation: What It Is and Why It Will Change the Future of Human Resources

Like it or not, HR process automation is here to stay. This is a “adapt or sink” revolution, and the benefits are immense. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand what you’re dealing with.

Here’s some good news: While HR automation tools will make even more of an impact in the future, many of them available today can boost your business without breaking the budget.

In this article, we will focus on the key concepts of automation and how it will change the dynamics of the game. First, we will address the question “what is HR automation?” before exploring its future and discovering how to automate HR processes.

If you are looking to reduce stress and increase productivity in your HR department, keep reading.

What is HR Automation?
For a quick definition, HR automation is a process that enhances the efforts of human resources…

using algorithms to take care of repetitive manual tasks. As a result, your HR team can focus on the human side of their work and improve overall performance.

Automation has gained popularity over the last decade, with platforms becoming increasingly accurate and reliable. With HR automation software, you can reinvent the way your department operates, avoiding overwhelming the team during recruitment and improving staff retention. Similarly, you can provide more autonomy to employees during onboarding and training. In daily routines, automations can handle smaller tasks, such as approving vacation days or expenses.

This doesn’t mean there is no oversight. One of the main benefits of HR automation is that every movement is automatically tracked by your software. This means you can get instant reports and have all the necessary information at your fingertips.

The result is that your company saves valuable time, money, and effort on less important tasks, allowing you to focus on decisions that can truly make a difference.

Will HR automation eliminate the need for human intervention?
One of the biggest concerns with HR automation is that it might eliminate the need for human involvement. In fact, it’s often said that anything that can be automated will eventually be.

It’s certainly hard to predict the extent to which algorithms will replace humans in the distant future. However, current trends suggest that instead of removing human intervention, automation simplifies HR work by eliminating tedious and monotonous tasks.

This indicates that HR roles will change drastically as we progress into the 21st century. As processes become more complex, tasks will shift from data entry to roles that are more emotion and intuition-based. But, at least in the foreseeable future, humans will still play an important role.

Now, let’s discuss how automation is currently standing out, with a few predictions for the future.

Refine your recruitment process fairly and efficiently
When advertising jobs online, especially when recruiting remote teams, you’re speaking to the entire world. The advantage is that your reach is so broad that you can attract talents you may not find in your local area. However, the downside is that you could end up with an overwhelming number of candidates that even a team of five would struggle to turn into a shortlist.

Algorithms come into play by analyzing all your applications for keywords that reflect essential requirements. With just a few clicks, you get a qualified list of candidates who meet all your requirements. This way, your team can be sure to cover all the necessary technical skills and focus on social skills and cultural fit.

Another advantage during the hiring process is that HR automation eliminates recruitment biases. It’s a fact of life that we all have subconscious biases, whether gender, race, or location-based, which humans simply cannot avoid. Add to that the possibility that someone on your team may be having a bad day, and you’ve got a problem.

This way, you can ensure fairness by narrowing your open field, as the filters depend solely on the technical skills required. When choosing from your shortlist, your team will have more time to cross-reference and find the ideal candidate.

Looking ahead, we can expect recruitment automation to become even more precise, possibly extending from technical suitability to cultural fit.

Make onboarding easy and engaging
Organizations already reaping the benefits of HR process automation would laugh at the thought of returning to paper data collection and the tedious data entry for every new hire.

Instead, send your employees a series of customizable forms that automatically populate your company’s intranet. With the right HR automation software, your fields link directly to your organizational contact sheet. By keeping the form accessible, team members can update their own information. So, if someone gets promoted, they can update it themselves so everyone else can see.

Go further with HR workflow templates that you can launch once the contract is signed, receiving notifications when each step is completed. Without needing to track every tiny detail and avoiding the potential for errors in data transfer, your HR team will be less stressed and more productive.

Track employee work hours
Chasing after employees’ manual timesheets is one of the worst ways for managers to spend their time. With time management tools, you reduce that lost time to zero. Instead of checking each employee one by one, you can set up alerts to notify you if someone is late and focus only on what you need.

Your internal system logs the check-in and check-out times for everyone in an organized way so you have a record for as long as you need. If your HR automation software is available on both desktop and mobile devices, your traveling teams can clock in with the touch of a button, so there are no discrepancies later.

That said, this isn’t an opportunity to monitor your employees like a hawk. For example, you can set flexible hours policies and take an average at the end of the month. It’s also a benefit for your remote workers and external contractors. They can track their own hours and quickly generate invoices based on pre-agreed hours.

Keep your payroll compliant
One of the most error-prone areas in HR is payroll. It’s a mad rush at the end of the month, always risking paying late or not complying with labor laws and tax requirements. What’s worse, non-compliance isn’t just a small mistake. You could risk your company’s reputation by falling into legal trouble as a result.

However, with HR automation, you can calculate everything in an instant. Also, instead of sweating through paper after paper of rules and regulations, you can enter a few details and be ready to go. The best HR software will take into account the country of work, ensuring compliance even across borders.

This type of automation is essential if you want to scale quickly. Instead of sending your team to law school to study Brazilian income tax, you can easily do it with the help of algorithms.

Standardize and streamline employee processes
Traditionally, some of the most time-consuming tasks for HR teams are organizing and approving small processes that almost always get accepted in the end. The amount of time wasted chasing after managers could be much better used, and we’re about to tell you how.

A key example is vacation requests. HR automation allows employees to check their own calendar, choose dates, and submit a request. If they don’t have available days off, the process simply doesn’t work. When it reaches the approval stage, instead of filling inboxes with requests, it shows up as a notification to which you can respond with a simple yes or no.

For all of this, if your HR platform also works on mobile devices, your manager can even approve or deny requests on the go.

Automate employee performance monitoring and training sessions
Performance analysis is another key HR responsibility that consumes a lot of time and effort. By now, you must be thinking — how can I automate this process?

At the beginning of each year or quarter, set ambitious but achievable KPIs for each individual. This sets the bar against which you can measure relevant tasks completed in your project management tool. As with recruitment, using HR automation to monitor performance also eliminates potential biases — everything is based on the numbers.

But what happens when individuals fail to meet their targets?

HR teams can set up training workflows that identify underperforming individuals and encourage them to improve their skills in a certain area. Of course, you don’t want a cold, robotic system that makes employees feel alienated. To avoid that, schedule an informal face-to-face meeting to explain the situation and reassure them.

Enhance your approach with analytics and reporting
With analytics, you can make your onboarding and other projects more efficient by seeing which parts consistently take longer than expected to complete. Similarly, if you’re receiving more questions than usual for a particular section, it’s time to ask why and improve it for the future.

Analytics are one of the most important parts of HR automation because, while algorithms do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, you need to ensure that these “legs” are going in the right direction.

One smart way to use your analytics is to run A/B tests, for example, on HR training workflows. Your team can carefully monitor the performance of each strategy before selecting the best solution backed by data. With more complex tools, you can also connect the dots to uncover the factors behind your best employees’ decisions to leave the company.

With such complex systems already available, future HR teams will likely leverage analytics to reliably maintain morale within the organization.

Take the stress out of the offboarding process
Offboarding can be a complex procedure, and many errors are only noticed when it’s too late.

You need to comply with privacy laws, such as deleting contact details after a certain period. With HR automation, you can set a timer on your ex-employee’s details, so you don’t have to rely on human memory to ensure compliance with legal requirements.

Of course, some physical tasks still need to be performed. For example, you may need to check if all devices and materials have been returned. These tasks can become quite tense if emotions run high, but an offboarding HR workflow can take the emotion out of the situation and ensure nothing is forgotten.

However, offboarding is not just about clearing things up. It’s also an opportunity for your organization to improve. With the freedom of having already left the company, you can automate an email to your current ex-colleagues to get a detailed report of their satisfaction. With customizable forms, you can focus on specific aspects of your own company and generate quarterly reports to identify areas for action.

Now you have a clear idea of the key concepts, how to automate HR processes today, and some predictions for the future. Ultimately, the best time to adopt automation was when it started, and the next best time is now.

Although there are many HR automation tools on the market, with MASTERINSOFT, you can automate processes across your entire company. From sales workflows and automated email campaigns to event organization and, of course, a variety of HR tools, it’s the ideal platform for small businesses to perform tasks like large companies.

FAQ

How does automation affect HR?
When implemented with a strategy, automation reduces the workload of an HR department without sacrificing quality.

What can we automate in HR?

• Creation of quality candidate lists.
• Removal of human bias in selection.
• Onboarding and offboarding processes.
• Payments and compliance.
• Performance tracking and training.