How to Get Back Your Time With HR Automation
We often discuss the importance of strategic HR. But it can be hard to carve out the time and space needed for high-level thinking when your to-do list keeps growing. This blog post is Part 1 of a four-part series on how to get back your time. In this article, we’re focusing on HR automation and how to effectively use it to improve your processes.
Watch Today’s Topic on HR Automation
Four Key Strategies for Getting Back Your Time
When we work with clients and with HR professionals, we systematically walk through four methods for decreasing their workload and increasing their organizational impact.
- Automating
- Delegating
- Tailgating
- Eliminating
Many Core HR functions can’t be delegated, tailgated, or eliminated. But with today’s technology, automation offers an opportunity to streamline must-do transactional HR tasks.
3 HR Processes To Consider Automating Today
The list of HR software is continually growing, but not every workflow or task should be automated. Technology costs are a key consideration and so is the impact on candidate and employee experiences.
When looking at potential HR responsibilities to automate, start with the administrative tasks in these three areas:
- Onboarding
- Evaluations
- Recruitment
What to Automate During Onboarding?
Onboarding requires a lot of paperwork collection and management. Automation can dramatically decrease your time spent managing that workflow by handling the record-keeping for you.
There are now a variety of tools that can automate the process by providing an online platform for new hires to submit their paperwork, automatically reminding them to fill critical documents, and notifying you when all of their paperwork is complete.
Many tools are free or already built into software you already use. For example, often payroll software can handle onboarding record collection; you just need to turn on a few additional modules.
By automating the tracking and inputting of onboarding documents, HR can spend more time with new hires and less time on their paperwork.
What to Automate During Evaluations?
Similar to onboarding, the manual administration of performance evaluations is time-consuming, and human coordination adds little to the process.
In fact, it can reduce the overall value of a performance evaluation. Employees, supervisors, and HR can easily become bogged down in managing reminders, documentation, and follow-up.
Evaluation automation can free up everyone’s time, which allows them to focus on the content of the evaluation instead of its administration.
Evaluation automation especially shines in managing follow-ups. Many tools can provide nudges to employees and supervisors ahead of meetings to think through key discussion points. It can also ensure conversations are held and even document what was said.
Reducing time spent on follow-up during evaluations allows both employees and supervisors to think more strategically about performance improvements.
What to Automate During Recruitment?
Recruiting automation tools are relatively new in the marketplace, but their use cases are growing.
Like onboarding and evaluations, recruitment automation can significantly decrease the time spent on record-keeping.
They can improve the process for candidates and hiring teams by centralizing candidate information and communication. This centralization reduces manual transferring of data (what candidate enjoys uploading a resume and manually inputting their work history?). It also ensures candidate communication is timely and consistent.
Additionally, recruitment tools can speed up the interviewing process by allowing communication outside of regular working hours. Whether through asynchronous video interviewing or chatbot tools like Mya or Arya, recruiters and candidates can move the process forward off-cycle, including nights and weekends.
These savings can reduce time-to-fill up to 50% without losing a high-touch candidate experience.
Wrapping Up
If you haven’t already, start exploring ways to automate your onboarding, evaluations, and recruitment process. And as you look, focus on opportunities to improve the experience for both you and your customers (whether candidates, new hires, or employees).
Here’s to working on the business instead of in it.
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