Automating HR processes is a crucial part of modern HR. It can help to bring down the overall costs and improve HR efficiency, helping focus HR efforts on creating better employee support programs, stronger recruitment efforts, and better HR strategies. So what are the most important HR areas to automate to get the best results for your business?
1. Recruiting
Recruitment is one of the top automation areas for HR. Screening resumes can take hours and automation can help reduce the time it takes to find applicants, plus it can help businesses find even better matches for their open positions. Automated recruitment software can be trained on what to look for in candidates and helps businesses screen resumes for the right qualifications, moving those resumes to the front of the line for review and interviews. This means more high-quality matches for your recruiters. Some automated software can interface with certain social media platforms and profiles to help your HR team fill in the blanks on a candidate.
2. Employee administration
Tasks like benefits enrollment and administration, payroll, timekeeping, and paid-time-off requests can all be automated and managed from a central HR program. It makes sense to automate these administration related tasks, as many of them are interrelated – benefits deductions and PTO can affect payroll, for instance. It’s also helpful for running regular reporting, and in the event of any mistakes or oversights, an automated, digital process helps tremendously in helping your business make corrections or adjustments.
3. Training and development
Another important automation area is employee training. Automation helps employers organize their training material and give employees a path for development. It can help employees understand expectation and improve not just the initial onboarding process that helps new employees get settled in, but also improve the development process for employees. Having a good development plan in place is key for ensuring employee success and satisfaction – which leads to better overall success for your business.
4. Employee performance:
Performance reviews are often viewed by most employers as a tedious chore or a stressful hassle. Employees tend to dread them because the appraisals tend to be disconnected from the employee’s day to day work and expectations. Automation can help align the expectations between employer and employee – it can also help ensure that employees are getting regular formal input from employers and the potential promotions, raises, and other merits that go along with reviews. An automated review process program can help businesses raise their review game by establishing goals that are truly relevant to both the individual and the business. It can also help a business take the review from a supervisor-only discussion to a more holistic, helpful review that includes feedback and evaluation from peers and people in other departments.
5. Employee engagement
With everything else going on in a business, engagement is often an afterthought for many businesses, but it remains crucial for businesses to pay attention to. Automating your employee engagement efforts – through things like satisfaction surveys and soliciting feedback and conversations – your employees will feel more rooted in your business and more invested in by your organization, leading to a higher likelihood they’ll stay on for the long-term.
The most important automation areas are the ones that are the most helpful for your business. Automation is meant to help businesses improve their processes and allow them to redirect energy, time, and sometimes even money into other areas of the business. When working on your HR automation efforts, it’s important to have a plan. A plan can help you not just give you a focus and also help you gauge the success of your automation systems down the line.
