Robotic process automation for human resource professionals

When you think about human resource professionals, you tend to think of people who’re constantly tasked with working with other people.

That’s their core responsibility — to keep executives within the company happy, no matter their cadre or designation. In order to do that job, it would be logical to expect them to spend quite a lot of their time interacting and engaging with employees. Unfortunately, they don’t.

Human resource professionals in most companies are tied up in processing paperwork. From screening applications to managing appraisals, there’s a lot of manual, repetitive tasks that these executives perform regularly.

Automating these could not only allow them to be more productive but also help improve the overall experience of employees. Robotic process automation (RPA), therefore, is a great solution, and quite affordable too. Here are some of the tasks that RPA can help automate:

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 RPA bot 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.

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.

All of these are perfect use cases for RPA — in fact, many of these the ‘bots’ required to perform these tasks would be readily available “off the shelf” from vendors providing these solutions.

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.

RPA can also be used to identify the training needs of employees based on their current role, interests, aspirations and skill gaps that exist. The data for these are available in spreadsheets and forms on different platforms. All that the RPA bot needs to do is compile, calculate, and report.

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 RPA bot could make appraisals infinitely easier — from being a painful chore to being a genuinely useful tool for tracking KPIs and performance across the company.

RPA applied to appraisals can also help continuous evaluation for hundreds of thousands of employees.

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 — all using an army of RPA bots.

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

However, RPA can help provide great insights about how employees feel and what can be done to better engage with them.