When studying how hundreds of our clients have shifted their automation strategy during the pandemic, we found that HR teams are automating a variety of their processes now more than ever.
Recruitment automations have seen the biggest rise—at a whopping 547%—, but we’ve also seen automations across a number of other areas more than double.
Our research (which we’ve packaged up as part of our W*ork Automation Index) also yielded another interesting insight: organizations use a collaboration app like Microsoft Teams in 20% of their workflow automations.
Taken together, these insights beg the question—how are HR departments using an application like Microsoft Teams to fuel their growing number of automations?
We’ll tackle this head on by walking through 3 common examples.
1. Surface qualified applicants to key stakeholders faster
Every job opening is likely to bring in hundreds of applications.
This burdens recruiters with the manual task of combing through them one by one, just to find those who have the basic qualifications to perform the job. This time suck also invites another issue: the most qualified applicants might go unnoticed or get discovered when it’s too late.
To help your recruiters manage their high volume of applicants more efficiently and effectively, you can implement the following resume screening automation:
1. Once a candidate applies online, the workflow gets triggered.
2. Based on the desired qualifications established in a workflow within an enterprise automation platform, along with the information candidates provide in their applications, the platform can reject or approve candidates in real time.
3. If they’re rejected, they’re automatically marked as such in an ATS like Greenhouse.
4. If they’re a good fit, the HR bot shares their resume, along with other details in their application, in a specific channel within Microsoft Teams.
2. Enable managers to select & provision apps for new hires directly in Microsoft Teams
As a hiring manager, the process of provisioning applications for incoming team members can be cumbersome when performed manually.
It requires hiring managers to work directly with their IT counterpart on deciding what apps/equipment to provision and what level of access is needed for each app. This can be the definition of drudgery, especially if you’re scaling up hiring.
Automation can simplify and expedite the process for hiring managers, as it allows them to make provisions within the comfort of Microsoft Teams. For new hires, this means receiving access to the apps they need as soon as they join.
With these benefits in mind, let’s breakdown how you can automate app provisioning for incoming team members:
1. Once an HRIS like Workday sends out a new hire notice, the workflow gets triggered.
Note: We define a new hire notice as an email that shares key details on a candidate with various stakeholders. These details include the new hire’s start date, their manager, job title, among other details.
2. The new hire’s manager receives a message from HR bot in Microsoft Teams, which asks them to select the apps they’d like their incoming team member to have.
3. Once the manager finishes making their selections, the HR bot messages a channel in Microsoft Teams where members in IT can find the request.
An employee in IT can then check to see if there are licenses available for the requested apps. Assuming there are, they can go ahead and schedule the requested provisions for the new hire’s first day in Microsoft Teams.
Related: A guide to integrating your HCM platform with other apps
3. Accelerate approvals by enabling employees to make requests and approvers to review them within Microsoft Teams
Employees across departments and job levels often make a similar set of requests, whether it’s seeking access to applications, asking for paid time off, or requesting reimbursements for expenses.
To help employees make requests easily, and to allow approvers to review and approve them in a way that’s equally convenient, you can turn to automation.
In the case of PTO requests, the automation can work as follows:
1. An employee accesses ApprovalsBot HR bot in Microsoft Teams and selects “PTO” (which appears alongside other predefined options).
2. The HRbot looks up the employee’s available PTO balance in your HRIS. It then tells the employee what their balance is and whether they’d still like to request time off.
3. Once the employee selects “Yes,” the HR bot displays a popup that allows the employee to select the specific days they’d like to take off.
4. The requestor’s manager receives a notification of the request in a specific channel in Microsoft Teams. Within the notification, they can view the details of the request as well as approve (or reject) it with the click of a button.
5. Once approved or rejected, the HR bot notifies the requestor. Also, assuming the request gets approved, the HR bot goes on to update the employee’s PTO balance in your HRIS.
Leverage the Workato platform and Workbot to bring these automations to life in Teams
As you review these examples, you might notice a common thread: each uses an HR bot.
This HR bot, an example of what’s possible with Workbot for Microsoft Teams, allows your employees to perform basic tasks, such as making requests, finding information, and receiving alerts—all without leaving Microsoft Teams.
But as you can tell from our app provisioning example, its utility can stretch quite a bit further.
Using Workato, the leader in enterprise automation and the maker of Workbot, you can create custom bots to automate complex workflows for your team; these workflows can work across the rest of your applications, employees, and data, while allowing your team to stay in the business communications platform.
The Workato platform does this by offering:
- More than 1,200 pre-built connectors with applications, databases, and cloud services, allowing you and your colleagues to bring all your data into Microsoft Teams
- Elastic scalability that can handle the volume and velocity of any workload
- A low-code UX that enables your team to scale its integrations and HR automations in a secure, governed environment that’s managed by IT
To learn more about Workbot and Workato, you can schedule a demo with one of our automation experts.
