The Secrets of HR Automation
Thanks to the endless efforts of the HR department, the events and inner workings of any company seem to function smoothly. The human resources team aims to ensure a company works efficiently without distracting the employees’ attention from their tasks. The HR team encounters many repetitive tasks daily, from the interview process and new hires to expense claims, payroll taxes, and trying to develop employee benefits.
HR staff, managers, and recruiters use HR automation software to improve their systems, streamlining specific tasks and ensuring flawless hr workflows. Today we shed light on their secrets as we answer the question of what is HR workflow Automation?, and look at some HR automation examples.
How HR Automation Software Enhances Recruitment And Other Processes
The automation of HR processes has become a widespread practice, and there are many benefits to be had from incorporating HR automation software into HR departments. Also, there is a list of the essential tasks that should be automated first, and with thoughtful HR process automation, these can make a difference. As an example, you will find the expertise of Go Wombat, and how we created the assessment software for hiring sales managers.
What Is HR Automation?
Human Resources Automation refers to the use of software development to replace the more manual processes expected of hr teams. Many HR functions are perfect for digitalisation and can increase the speed of HR operations such as creating and editing employee data, collecting statistics, data analysis, and improving general time management.
However despite the popularity of this aspect of business technology, there is no uniform standard for using HR automation software — each company has its own approach to digitalisation, and HR professionals choose a best-fit option.
The primary goal of automation is to reduce the workload by removing the more manual tasks of HR specialists to help them focus on tasks that require more human elements, while the software does the rest that can be automated. This could be seen as improving the process efficiency and reducing the potential human error.
Automation is appropriate when software can do the work that doesn’t need high intellectual capabilities or empathy. For example, it is possible to automate payroll processes, reporting, or personnel records, while software cannot train employees, conduct motivational courses, or other interactive events.
ERP and CRM systems are some examples of software that can help automate HR processes. If you want to find out more about these systems, check our article about reasons to use a CRM system and our article about the effects of an ERP system.
Contact us if you need advice on HR automation systems!
Benefits Of HR Automation
It is always important to consider the pros and cons of any new investment, especially software. Here are some advantages and other benefits, for both a business and HR employees, of incorporating HR automation systems into your business.
Work enhancement
Automated systems in the HR department help employees perform their duties more efficiently since software reduces possible errors. As a result, employees don’t need to worry about details and spend their time looking for mistakes in hr data or other sensitive documents and fixing them.
Higher recruitment level
Apart from initially posting job ads, there are situations in recruiting when a Human Resources specialist finds a suitable candidate and sets an interview with a specific department manager, but the manager doesn’t accept this candidacy. Or a HR manager rejects a specialist who would be suitable for a position. Using specific hr automated processes, it is possible to create a questionnaire to assess the hard skill level and soft skills, enabling managers to make an informed decision based on the results.
Go Wombat worked on a human resource management project of this type, and you can find the details below.
Transparency
Automated HR processes and systems allow for storing all current tasks in one place, and employees can show what they did, do, and plan to do. Through precise records of employee training and employee performance tracking, hr personnel can show clear tracking and information. As a result, managers always see the status of each task and up-to-date performances. With the transparency provided by automated hr workflows, managers can assess the workload of each employee and set the tasks with realistic deadlines.
Elimination of routine tasks
While the software takes control of the more laborious tasks, HR teams can focus on more complex tasks. For example, suppose a company needs to hire three new sales team members. In that case, HR managers can create the vacancy description using software, publish it on job sites, and prepare documents for employment in a few clicks. This method of records management and form of Business Process Automation (BPA), helps improve overall efficiency, giving more time for interviews and feedback collection.
Statistics
By delegating more complex tasks such as data analysis to HR automation, the HR manager can add information about the candidate and decisions to the system based on the interview results. The system can show data as a diagram and charts so that a specialist can identify some issues if they arise during the hiring process. For example, the number of questions posed by candidates could show the need to add more details to the vacancy description. Feedback from the entire hiring process serves to inform and improve the HR workflow.
HR Tasks That Should Be Automated
Each company decides what tasks it needs to automate first, and most HR automation software enables the customisation of specific tasks and the company’s approach. However, there is a list of tasks that almost all HR teams will strive to automate by default. There are a number of HR automation examples from initial strategic tasks to employee onboarding to ensuring employee satisfaction.
Recruitment
HR automation software can use AI-based algorithms to screen CVs and find the best candidates for interviews. As a manual process, this is time-consuming and open to human error. AI-based assessment will help HR managers focus on other tasks and ensure that a potential employee will meet almost all requirements.
Employee Onboarding
Employee onboarding typically requires paperwork, document signing, and many other related activities. The simplification of the onboarding process will benefit both the HR department and new hires. For example, HR automated software makes it possible to speed up the onboarding process to a few hours instead of a few days at least. Internal regulations or requirements guide the software set up, and once installed, it can provide the required documentation and insights for a new employee to help him or her onboard faster.
Time Tracking
HR automation also contributes to monitoring each employee's schedule, so HR specialists don’t need to do all these time-consuming tasks. The HR automated timesheet app is perfect for notifying about overtime hours, and acceleration of payroll process management approvals. Simply put, people do not track other people's time — machines do. Within this specific tracking app, as with almost all aspects of automated processes, there is the facility to create automatic notification texts or messages.
Performance Monitoring
The more satisfied employees are, the higher the quality of their job and productivity. That is why it is crucial to monitor the performance of each employee to assess their KPIs. However, this process also takes a lot of time, and HR automation tools can track the activity of each employee. It may notify a manager about low productivity or high levels of performance. Here, managers can take action and identify the details.
Payroll
In another show of HR skills, the HR managers and accountants work together to calculate each employee's payroll based on their timesheet and hours spent. The automation process makes it easier to enrol new employees into the payroll system. In addition, it automates the entire payroll system, avoiding duplication of manual data entry, leading to higher security and accuracy level.
Notifications
Finally, HR managers shouldn’t forget about their personal HR tasks, and reminders with notifications help them keep everything on schedule. With so many potential tasks like performance reviews, new employees, and interviews occurring on any day, the HR automation tool sends notifications to the assigned HR manager and employee. All participants in the meeting will stay updated in case of any changes.
The development of HR automation software requires experts in this field. Contact us to build your project!
A Case Study of The Automation Of HR Processes
Go Wombat has been working on another exciting project for HR — a SaaS solution directed at B2B tech startups who need to hire sales staff.
Project Goal
The project aims to allow users (HR managers or companies) to sign up for the service and have a unique link sent to any person, like a Google Doc link. The link contains the assessment for potential salespersons, so all candidates receive the same assessment.
The candidate assessment is a questionnaire devised by the HR team and placed on the server. The questions cover all skills required for sales managers, according to the company requirements. This form of automation software has proved beneficial for the hiring process for those companies involved.
With the link, a candidate answers questions, and points are calculated using a unique algorithm. Managers can see the level of skills and overall indicators of the candidate. All results are then sent to the dashboard of the user.
The hiring campaign can be active during a specific period while all candidates answer questions, and their data is analysed and sorted in a table.
When all questions have been responded to, the hiring campaign is complete, and the system chooses the most suitable candidates out of all applicants. This way the employers already know which candidates are skilled, and they can make their decisions faster.
Challenges We Faced
Our development team had to figure out how to build an accurate calculation formula. The client provided information where it was possible to input data and see all indicators. Still, we had to understand how to implement it in Python code to ensure precise calculation. Implementing a calculation algorithm with Python was a challenging but exciting task.
Tech Stack
The team comprises three back-end and three front-end developers. We implemented the algorithm using Python (calculations and indicators) and Django framework (web).
We deployed the project with AWS infrastructure, using Elasticsearch API (search and analytics engine) and Load Balancer (it distributes your incoming traffic across multiple targets, such as EC2 instances, containers, and IP addresses). We used PostgreSQL as a database.
Risks Of HR Automation
Although the automation of HR processes has multiple benefits, some risks remain.
Wrong assessment
Regardless of how efficient HR automation software may appear, there are some issues regarding the human aspect. Although the automated system can take care of the more mundane tasks, it is missing the human touch. It may return an accurate analysis of data, but it cannot assess a person's mood. People prefer interacting with humans with sensitive issues.
HR soft skills are important and some questions need a more delicate understanding of human behaviour.
Privacy and security
Automated HR tools collect a vast amount of a company’s data, and part of it can be sensitive. Insufficiently protected tools that are not secured could become the reason for sensitive data leakage. Therefore, Go Wombat pays careful attention to software security, and our staff includes a CSO (Chief Security Officer) who ensures the cybersecurity high protection standards of all apps we create. There is also the consideration of European guidelines with GDPR. These regulations oversee the safety and use of personal data collected by organisations within Europe.
Complexities with integration
Integrating AI-based solutions into an existing HR automated system is pretty challenging regarding the time-consuming processes. Even with the efforts of an experienced development team, perfect functionality is difficult to guarantee. This depends on the previous automated system and its ability to integrate. We recommend building an automated HR solution from scratch, where native AI algorithms are generated.
Conclusion
When attempting to rid HR departments of the daily manual HR processes, it is important to consider a suitable automation tool. Despite all the risks mentioned above, HR automation will have many more benefits than drawbacks for a business.
When considering HR software, a full strategic analysis of the complete HR process will highlight any poor HR procedures and enable a company to target these. The only thing you need is to hire a trustworthy development team to make your product engaging and fully functional.
Go Wombat provides full-stack development services to create your product from scratch. We adhere to the Python/Django tech stack to build projects of any complexity.
Are you looking to improve your HR processes, or planning to launch new software? Then talk to Go Wombat to cooperate with us!
