Here’s what modern HR teams must automate first

Do you think some of your tasks can be automated? For the HR team,  it’s a loud “yes” because quite a few of the tasks that take up their valuable time are things that can be “outsourced” to “smart” systems.

According to a new report by Wipro, here are the top 5 areas in HR that businesses can quickly automate to reap the quickest and most profound rewards:

Recruitments

Reviewing CVs take hours and is a really tedious process – especially when you’re a company that looks at the “whole picture” when looking for new hires.

However, using intelligent screening software, you can automate quite a bit of the process. Simply train the algorithm or “system” to learn job requirements and what qualified candidates look like based on previous hiring decisions.

The system also learns how to gather insights about prospective candidates to determine their likelihood of accepting an offer.

Automation can also help recruiters mine public social media profiles of potential hires and fill in the gaps left by traditional CVs.

Finally, the organization can use chatbots to seek answers to routine questions they ask and also provide basic answers to general questions candidates often ask.

Employee support

Smart solutions can help HR staff save time by automating month-end tasks like finalizing leaves, calculating benefits, and making last minute adjustments to employee compensations.

These solutions can also help make calculation and deduction of monthly taxes a breeze, generating payslips on demand, distributing them appropriately along with bank payment slips and compensation + adjustment clarifications.

Month-end reporting of all sorts can also be automated- almost completely, save for ad-hoc reporting to senior management every once in a while.

Further, companies can deploy chatbots to answer employee’s questions about their benefits eligibility, revised compensation structure for relocation, and a myriad other queries that are general enough for AI to be able to help with but personal enough to need the algorithm to piece together information appropriately.

Learning and development

Automation in the field of learning and development (L&D) can introduce a layer of gamification tools such as competitions, badges, and social sharing that makes training modules more engaging.

One of the top enterprise level “free” L&D programs that use gamification effectively is Salesforce Trailhead. In fact, they’ve built a brilliant community around it with thousands of employees, administrators, and end-users.

Just earned the 🆕 Unlocked Packages badge on Trailhead! 🍁 Learn about #SalesforceDX features & much more at the Future of @salesforce App Dev keynote with @parkerharris on Thurs @ 10AM at #TDX18. Bookmark now: https://t.co/0e8NwkkdwS pic.twitter.com/qeA8XlfQHd

— Jacob Lehrbaum (@jlehrbaum) March 27, 2018

Automation can also be used to identify the training needs of an employee based on the current role, interests, aspirations and skill gaps that exist.

Although some argue that automation makes L&D seem impersonal, when done right, it is a way to open up course material to a larger audience, achieving better results across the organization.

Performance evaluation

Across organizations, the process of evaluating performance remains a time-consuming and tedious task.

Appraisals tend to tie-up line managers and HR staff alike in a mountain of paperwork and bureaucracy.

However, an automated process takes appraisals from being a painful chore to being a genuinely useful tool for tracking KPIs and performance across the company.

AI applied to appraisals can include social integration and big data analytics for continuous evaluation of the employee.

It can go from being a two-way process between an employee and supervisor to a more holistic evaluation by peers, interests, and non-standard contributions towards personal and organizational KPIs.

Employee engagement

Employee engagement and satisfaction surveys hardly gauge the real sentiment in the work environment for several reasons.

However, with current technology, it is possible to analyze texts and social media posts on emotion and sentiment using messages on internal social media.

Of course, with technology that is still emerging, there are issues on ethics and privacy that need to be addressed.

However, AI can help provide real-time insights about how employees feel and what can be done to better engage with them.