If HR automation is your top “To-Do”, you have landed at the right place ! We’ve compiled a holistic guide with the features, process and other nitty gritties. Read ahead to get answers to all your questions & more.
Let me tell you about an incident.
So I was having a conversation with one of my LinkedIn connections, Ron, the other day. He is an HR at a mid-sized company. So, while discussing professional lives he said his HR life is like “the oldest version of Internet Explorer with 3620 tabs open all the working hours”..quoting some joke but what surprised me is that he found it ‘relatable’ instead of listen-laugh-and-forget kinda flat humor.
Well, if I ask you where do you see automation in your daily life,
you’ll probably find it easier to answer where you don’t see automation, I bet - because at this point of time it’s everywhere!
Each time you order a pizza online, run your vacuum cleaner around those dusty floors, or just say “Alexa, turn off the lights!” - you’re using an automated system to make your life easier.
But, do there exist HRs like Ron in your company, who are wasting their professional potential in the manual workload doing what HR automation could have done in less time, without human errors? Considering the global HR scenario, where most HR managers and business owners spend an average of 14 hours per week performing manual administrative tasks - it surely makes the need of the hour evident.
So, it’s time to shift HR from being a department full of tedious tasks, piles of paperwork, and endless form filling, to HR process automation for accelerated growth.
Decoding the detailed ‘How’ ahead :
What Is HR Automation?
Human resources automation (HR automation) is basically a process of using a software or tool to automate repetitive & heavily manual effort consuming tasks including (but not limited to) employee recruiting, onboarding, payroll, time and benefit management, assisting in managing human resources more efficiently and thus, adding more value to the company, thereby improving business’s bottom line. Broadly thought, by automating standard HR activities, you can actually reduce the cost and time spent by the HR department on manual HR planning and routined processes, hence optimizing your business processes.
Let’s Plan Your HR Automation Software!
What Are The Benefits Of HR Automation?
The fact that HR automation is all the rage these days shouldn't be the only reason you should go for it. The first step towards working on automating your HR activities should be analyzing the benefits of HR automation in relation to your business's fundamental goals.
So, to make things easier for you, we've pulled up a list of the top benefits of HR automation :
[1] Human err , Automation Helps!
No matter how well organized your business is, without tech help, it will have a troubled run - think about the inevitable human errors resulting in a massive amount of rework. That implies a significant amount of time and money drained to redo the same task over & over again, and takes a tremendous toll on employee efficiency and morale.
Clearly, the major cause for such inaccuracies in HR processes is nothing but manual interference and complexity of workflows. Thus, incorporating HR automation into your business processes can help you optimize the entire workflow by narrowing down its complexity and also eliminating manual reliance and reducing inaccuracies. In addition, the unmatched speed of tools and software also saves a significant amount of time by completing such tasks quickly.
[2] Up-ed Productivity, Down-ed Time!
The HR department is heavily dependent on document-driven processes, and when done manually, this can be time consuming and extremely inefficient, resulting in unnecessary delays in completing a specific task.
But, with HR automation, forget about those hassles.
HR automation digitizes all of such data-dealing tasks, processes the data faster, and shares it centrally with the concerned employees across layers of the organization’s hierarchy. Additionally, automation reduces the storage and printing costs associated with paper-based processes and stores the documents and data in its database, eliminating the possibility of lost or misplaced documents & even redundancy, thereby increasing productivity and efficiency across the business.
[3] Collaboration And Communication Made Convenient Yet Advanced
HR automation improves overall communication and collaboration in your organization by providing a transparent view of all stages and processes involved with the business operations. Furthermore, by integrating collaboration tools such as Workplace by Facebook into your HR automation software, you can keep social communications open regardless of time or location, as well as use it for support training, explanations, and idea sharing in your organization. Besides that, automating HR processes also enables you to collaborate effectively with stakeholders in order to hire, train, and retain skilled labor.
[4] Takes Employee Experience From ‘Ermm’ To ‘Excellent’
When HR staff is swamped with paperwork, they frequently don't have time or forget to follow up with new job candidates. This has a negative impact on job candidates & on your brand reputation alike. However, with HR automation, hiring managers can spend more time responding to prospects and enhancing their entire experience. HR automation also improves visibility into work processes by tracking down information, inputs, and approvals that employees require to do their jobs. Alongside, by automating routine tasks, employees can prioritize skills, training, and professional development, which results in enhanced employee experience.
[5] Ready-At-Hand Actionable Insights Straight Out Off Datastream
One of the most common things that automation does better than humans has to be processing data. On that note, HR automation allows you to track, collect, and analyze all types of data, as well as create custom analytical reports on your findings and identify patterns in your business workflows. This assists you in improving business processes, correcting failures, and doing more of what is successful in the business, resulting in higher ROI.
[6] Data So Secured Like The Word Breach Never Existed!
By incorporating a data loss protection module and access control measures into your dedicated HR automation software, you can say "no" to the data leakages, thefts, or damages. With these prevention procedures embedded in, a custom HR automation software can help you in detecting potential data breaches and preventing sensitive information from being transferred outside organizational boundaries.
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What Are The Challenges Faced Without HR Automation & How To Overcome Them?
Now that you’re aware of the benefits that HR automation imparts - the next question might be “But how do I know if my business needs all these?” To answer that & dig deeper into the nitty-gritties of human resources - let's take a close look at the top challenges that (mostly) manually driven HR departments face, and how a bespoke HR automation software can help to resolve them!
[1] Compliance Issues
Organizations have to deal with a lot of federal, state, and local laws & regulations that impact employment. And, to make things worse, these regulations change frequently, making it extremely difficult for the HR professionals who use outdated traditional HR processes and workflows to keep up as these processes do not provide them with timely, on-demand resources or real-time guidance on employment law changes. These processes are also incapable of properly mitigating compliance issues, such as a change in deduction percentage for a specific payroll, resulting in unnecessary stress among employees.
To overcome such compliance risks, incorporate audit trails and retention schedules into the feature list of your dedicated HR automation software, to make tracing financial data or accounting details to their source while also ensuring audit-readiness and compliance with PII, GDPR, EEOC, HIPAA, and other regulatory requirements - easier than ever! Avoiding lengthy investigations, fines, and complaints.
[2] Troubled Scalability
What worked when your business was new or had a customer base countable in tens i.e. manual efforts for employment background verification or even tax management, doesn’t work the same way when the business and its customer base grows. It becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming to manage the trail of tasks simultaneously only with manual efforts as you grow because with increase in your headcount the complexity will go up too, meaning you will have to devote more time to keep your business running - ensuring client communication, employee satisfaction, and your company's bottom line - all are well aligned with the goals.. Looks like a familiar struggle?
To address such issues, HR automation can upscale your processes as per increase in employee base, or your customer base and coping with any specific area of growth - a cakewalk. .
For example, try considering seasonal hiring, which requires hiring and onboarding employees during a specific period of time. Incorporating a digitized workflow into your bespoke HR automation software enables you to handle such situation with ease - performing multiple tasks, such as pre-screening candidates, assessments, scheduling and managing interviews, selecting qualified candidates, document verification, and more, all at once, ensuring a positive employee experience without overloading the HR team.
[3] Unable To Provide Multi-Device Support
Nowadays, only a few people are tethered to their PCs and that’s no secret courtesy - the Covid19 pandemic, which made remote working a trend-turned-consistent mode of working, as most workplaces have now granted permanent remote work or implemented a hybrid model.
As comforting as it may seem, remote working has its own set of challenges, particularly when it comes to accessing documents and data from devices on-the-go instead of the "official device." it becomes extremely inconvenient for employees and stakeholders to continue working.
So, to address such issues, consider incorporating a dedicated HR automation software that has mobile capabilities, provides omni-channel access and stores and secures critical HR information in their cloud-based database, regardless of your employees’ or stakeholders’ physical location.
[4] Negative Impact On Workforce Motivation
From onboarding to retirement, every job candidate and employee wants their workplace experience to be seamless, and co-operative. But, if your hiring and onboarding processes are paper-based, time-consuming, and inefficient, you will not be able to make a positive impact on potential job prospects. This implies, if positions are kept available for longer than required, you may lose considerable money, as well as desirable individuals who may become dissatisfied with your procedure and leave. This also holds true for current employees if your payroll and benefit administration management processes are manual, which will eventually result in salary delays or bonus payments, thereby lowering employee retention rates.
To overcome such possibilities of employee grievances, consider incorporating employee lifecycle management software into your HR automation system, which will streamline the various stages that your employee will go through during his or her tenure with the company. This involves managing processes such as recruitment and onboarding, as well as ensuring that each employee receives training and development and creating new opportunities for their growth, resulting in a positive impact on workforce motivation.
What Are The Popular HR Processes That Can Be Automated?
Benefits - checked
Challenges - checked
But what process in HR can be automated ?
Scroll up, next :
[1] Employee Recruiting
Recruitment may sound like a single small word, but it involves a array of interlinked tasks like posting job ads, receiving and screening applications, pre-employment assessments, scheduling interviews, sorting and prioritizing candidates based on their skills and experience and eventually notifying them about their candidature status via email flows etc. But all of these can be done without manual intervention, through :
[a] Automated resume screening, that lowers hiring time by reducing HR’s hours spent manually scanning resumes.
[b] AI-based screening, where chatbots improve the candidate experience by giving consistent, real-time feedback. These bots can also be used to detect fraudulent candidates who use unethical methods to get hired by analyzing their eye and body movements.
[c] Automated interviews that enhance the employment process by evaluating candidates' words, voice patterns, and facial expressions.
Now, let's take a look at how Amazon used HR process automation to improve its hiring process. So, amazon basically uses AI to screen and evaluate resumes before passing them on to HR managers for further review. Qualified candidates are invited to take pre-assessment tests, which are also AI-based. These automated processes greatly improve candidate experience as they're very quick and save HR time and effort.
[2] Employee Onboarding
Employee onboarding is basically a process of introducing new hires to the organization, which requires collecting documents for verification, signing forms, providing new employees with tool access, raising device requests, and so on. However, all of this can be done automatically simply by integrating an employee onboarding software into your HR automation system that provides a simple checklist that all users in the process can refer to. Using this, documents can be collected electronically, official PDF documents can be generated automatically, automatic notifications and approval workflows can be easily triggered, and devices can be delivered to employees quickly without the need for IT support, and much more, similar to how Hubspot used an onboarding solution to ensure that new employees learn everything they need to know about the organization before they begin their first day by automatically sending practical information to them. Not just that, Hubspot's employee onboarding software also has recorded materials for employees and managers to easily understand the work culture and tech stack, improving the entire onboarding experience.
[3] Employee Retention
Knowing your employees is the first step in retaining them because without knowing them, you won't be able to identify and mitigate their pain points, which will reverse your employee retention expectation.
And, this is another crucial aspect where you can take help of a dedicated HR automation software by integrating employee polling and predictive analytics into it.
With polling integrations, you can easily and regularly collect employee satisfaction data and once you’ve got enough data, you can use an HR analytics tool to identify patterns that are affecting employee satisfaction so you can apply your retention efforts in a focused way.
Another way to boost employee satisfaction is by recognizing their efforts. Automating recognition by incorporating custom employee engagement modules into your HR automation software can make it simple to show appreciation towards your employees, thereby increasing employee retention.
[4] Expense Claims
With HR automation you can digitize the entire expense claiming process, by allowing your employees to easily upload a receipt photo from their phone, and with expense management software integrated into your HR automation software you can automatically extract the required information from the uploaded photo. Once the employee submits this, the relevant manager is notified immediately and has the option to approve or reject it. If the claim is approved, a controller double-checks the details, and if they are correct, it processes them with a single click. This saves employees time, reduces human error, as well as provides organizations with an overall spending overview.
[5] Payroll Management
Manually calculating time or days worked, as well as sick leaves or vacation days, leaves a lot of room for error, resulting in employees being under or overpaid. However, HR automation software can simplify this process by calculating employees' salaries, deductions (think of provident funds and insurances), bonuses, income tax, and generating pay-slips, via a integrated payroll management system. Adding a trusted payroll management software reduces the risk of unauthorized access and ensures compliance with data protection regulations are adhered to, which is critical for maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of employee records.
Having said that, the above opportunity was well recognized by FuelCell Energy when most of its employees got paid incorrectly due to some spreadsheet compilation error and was swift enough to invest into a HR automation software to cut down on such scopes of human error, save time, and give employees more insight into how their pay was being calculated.
[6] Performance Management
Tracking, measuring, and analyzing an employee's performance in relation to business goals are all a part of the performance management process and having an employee monitoring & performance management software integrated into your HR automation software makes it easier to streamline the entire process just by automatically monitoring employees' activities during work hours and reviewing their performance, thereby ensuring bias-free decision making.
[7] Time Management
Using a manual timesheet to track your employees' time and then assigning a team or person to evaluate the tracked time and prepare reports from it is extremely inefficient as it requires a massive amount of time and scrupulous attention. However, an HR automation system with an automated timesheet app can enable you to record and monitor employees' daily, weekly, and monthly time logs, store employee profiles, and even bill clients by tracking the amount of time spent on a specific project, as well as generate insightful reports on task progress and save it on the cloud, improving the entire time management process.
[8] Leave Request Management
Checking, calculating and approving leaves is a difficult task to perform especially when done manually as HR employees have to check employees leave balance, get manager’s approval, record the leave for payroll calculation and provide employees with updates on their leave status within a few days. But, with an automated HR system that includes a leave management software, you won't have to deal with any of those headaches as with it your employees can view their leave balance and check their co-workers day off while applying for a leave. A leave management system also automatically updates the leave balance, after tracking the leave history for all employees and displays it both to the employees and the managers.
Key Features To Include In Your HR Automation Software
When it comes to implementing HR automation software into your business, choosing features that serve every other business will kill its potential right at the roots. So, in order to select the features that will fit with your business goals and will work around your unique business workflow, you’ll need to first set a clear goal in mind.
Thus, to help you with the process and determine which features will do the justice to your needs, we have compiled the following list :
[1] Applicant Management
Long and complicated application procedures can be tedious for job candidates to complete, and they may leave the process halfway through, resulting in a bad candidate experience. So, to have effective applicant management, incorporate an applicant tracking system (ATS) into your HR automation software that will manage your end-to-end recruitment process by creating stronger job descriptions, user-friendly application forms, scanning and sorting resumes through keywords that best match the specific job role, and speeding up the recruitment cycle. It also helps with collaborative hiring, as HR teams can immediately share comments and ratings on each prospect and drive a joint decision-making process in which each recruiter has a say, enabling for more diverse and successful teams to be assembled.
[2] Flexible Employee Portals
Employees nowadays expect on-demand access to the systems they use, and with a customized HR automation software, that offers a flexible employee portal you can give your employees freedom to access their PTO, employment information, tax documents, and so on from anywhere with an internet connection, while also reviewing benefits, tracking training, and requesting time off - all in a matter of few clicks.
[3] Employee Benefit Management
With benefit administration software integrated into your HR automation software, you can easily manage employee benefits such as health insurance and retirement plans, as well as set up eligibility criteria for workplace benefits, and can send out automated alerts to eligible employees. This feature also aids in the management of compensation, promotions, and the distribution of timely payments or deposits to employees, hence increasing employee satisfaction.
[4] Training Management
The advancement of technology has motivated employees to upgrade their skills, and implementing a dedicated HR automation software with a training management system integrated in it you can easily determine skill gaps within your employees and better manage employees' training requirements, as well as monitor training and development costs. This way, you can have highly skilled employees that will enhance your business’s success to a great extent.
HR Automation Software - How To Choose The Best?
Now that you know how an HR automation software can help you boost your business growth, you must have already begun planning one. But hang in there! Before you choose any HR automation software, it's critical to make sure it's the right tool for your specific business needs.
So to figure out which software can benefit you the most, consider the following :
[1] Scalability
As your business grows in size, you will have more employees, clients, projects and so on, necessitating the addition of new features to your HR automation software to facilitate such changes. However, with an OTS, it will be difficult to do so because an OTS is designed to suit the needs of the majority of businesses, hence emphasizing a common need. A custom made software, on the other hand, is built to support your business goals and can easily accommodate any future incorporations, thereby up-scaling with time and your business demands.
[2] Adaptability
Thinking of incorporating an upcoming tech trend into your HR automation software that will enhance your business growth? An OTS will once again disappoint you since it will not deploy such trends if it does not satisfy the demands of its community members, leaving you back at square one where you will be unable to make your software adapt to technological advancements. However, a custom software implements all those digital trends that are of interest to you and are not impacted by what other businesses are doing, making your software responsive to digital trends.
[3] Quality
Off-the-shelf HR automation softwares may be less expensive than a custom-built software since they are designed to serve a vast number and types of businesses and hence will not be able to meet your business's individual demands effectively. Whereas, a custom built software will take more time, effort and money to be developed as it comes as a packed software containing all the features that you require and offers a much higher performance by optimizing the necessary functionalities which makes it a smarter choice for your business in the long run.
[4] Ease Of Use
Like any other system, you'll want your HR automation software to be as simple to use as possible. However, with an OTS, you may have to deal with undesired features and functionalities that your business may never use, implying degraded efficiency and the hassle of accustoming your employees to such junk features. A custom made software, on the other hand, is where you can pick and choose features that are important for your organization and are easy for your employees to handle without any hassle, thereby enhancing efficiency.
[5] Integrations
While HR automation software has its own set of advantages, it does not necessarily prevent you from continuing to use your existing tools and solutions. That being stated, the goal is to tell you that you do not have to abandon your old tools in order to begin utilizing a new custom HR automation software; you can always make use of those existing tools by integrating them into your custom HR automation software to make your work and business simpler. However, you will have difficulties integrating your existing solutions into an OTS since that might not be compatible with your previous tools and will only provide integrations with a few pre-selected software solutions that will not be ideal for your organization in the long run.
Why Does Developing Your HR Automation Software With BinaryFolks Make For A Wise choice?
If you are in search of an experienced HR automation software development team to pace up your business, BinaryFolks can help you out. Our skilled & experienced software developers have hands-on expertise in delivering a wide range of projects for clients from various industries. Unleash every inch of potential your HR automation software could possibly have and let BinaryFolks uplift the growth graph for your business. Here's what to expect if developing your HR automation software with BinaryFolks :
Driven by ex-engineers from Google, Amazon & Salesforce
101% Value For Money (+1 for Our Complimentary Consultation before You Spend Your 1st Dollar!)
Reviews That You Can Verify!
Safeguarded Business With An NDA
Out-Of-The-Box Innovations
Eye For Details
Questions Galore (Until Your Requirement & Our Understanding are mirror copies!)
Insight-Rich Scope Enhancement
Intense Domain Expertise
Close-knit feedback loop
Conclusion
Now that you are well-aware of how HR automation can skyrocket your business’s growth, it’s time to put your plan into action and choose the right HR automation software that best fits your business needs.
And, if you are still unable to choose the right software or have doubts in mind.
Worry not
