HR automation, sometimes referred to as HR workflow automation or HR process automation, is the use of technology to optimize and streamline all phases of the human resources process. Automating time-consuming processes like resume screening, time-off requests, and employee onboarding allows HR teams to concentrate on more strategic projects that propel organizational expansion.
HR automation functions through platforms that react to particular business events (triggers) and perform actions (outcomes) in real time within HR processes. For example, the platform can automatically schedule onboarding events and provide access to required resources when an employee is identified as employed in the HR system.
The implementation of HR automation not only increases productivity but also improves employee satisfaction by lowering manual labor and guaranteeing uniformity among HR operations. We’ll go over the significance of HR automation, its many uses, and best practices for smooth adoption in your company in this post.
HR Automation Examples
With this definition of HR automation in mind, let’s review some of the ways you can use it.
Recruiting Automation
Recruitment becomes faster and more effective with automation:
- Automated Compliance Checks: Quickly filter candidates who don’t meet compliance standards, like equal employment opportunity (EEO) regulations.
- Improved Candidate Experience: Use automated reminders to prevent no-shows and enhance communication.
- Data-Driven Insights: Automatically track and evaluate candidates, helping you make informed hiring decisions.
Example: In healthcare recruitment, automation ensures all candidates meet licensing requirements, ensuring compliance with industry regulations.
Onboarding Automation
Automation makes onboarding smoother and ensures compliance:
- Training and Certification Compliance: Track and complete mandatory training automatically, ensuring all new hires are compliant.
- Consistent Onboarding Experience: Automate processes to give every new hire a high-quality, standardized onboarding experience.
Example: A financial firm uses automation to ensure new employees complete required anti-money laundering (AML) training.
Day-to-Day Automation
Automation simplifies daily HR tasks and ensures ongoing compliance:
- PTO and Expense Management: Streamline approval processes, ensuring compliance with company policies and labor laws.
- Health and Safety Compliance: Send automated reminders about workplace safety and health guidelines.
- Employee Engagement: Automatically gather feedback and make data-driven decisions to improve the workplace.
Example: Automated PTO tracking ensures all employees meet legal leave requirements, keeping your company compliant with labor laws.
Offboarding Automation
Proper offboarding secures data and maintains compliance:
- Data Security: Automatically revoke access to sensitive systems as soon as an employee leaves.
- Compliance Reporting: Ensure all offboarding procedures follow legal and company standards.
- Feedback for Improvement: Automatically collect exit feedback to identify trends and improve HR processes.
Example: Automation helps a multinational company comply with GDPR by automatically removing former employees’ access to personal data.
Compliance Management
Automation helps maintain compliance with various regulations:
- Healthcare Compliance: Manage healthcare analytics and ensure ACA compliance by tracking benefits and eligibility.
- Regulatory Adherence: Automate compliance with labor laws at all levels, ensuring your organization meets all legal requirements.
- Audit-Ready Documentation: Automatically generate compliance reports to facilitate audits.
Example: Automation helps companies operating in multiple states comply with varying state-specific labor laws, such as minimum wage regulations.
Data-Driven Decision Making
HR automation enhances decision-making through analytics:
- Performance Analytics: Analyze employee performance data to make informed decisions on promotions and training.
- Predictive Insights: Use automation to predict trends like turnover, allowing proactive management.
- Custom Reports: Generate custom HR reports automatically, providing insights that improve business outcomes.
Example: Automated exit feedback reveals high turnover in a department, prompting management to investigate and address the issue.
Related: How to implement offboarding automation
Benefits of HR Automation
Based on all of its applications, you probably already have a solid grasp of its many benefits. But just to make it all the more clear, here are a few worth singling out.
Improves Your Organization’s Time-to-Hire
You might not have the luxury of casually sifting through applicants until you find one that knocks your socks off. There’s a reason you need to fill a position, and delaying that can come at a cost to your business.
With HR automation, you can fast-track the entire recruitment process, whether it’s screening resumes, coordinating interviews, or sending offer letters. This gives you an easy, scalable way to find the best candidates and bring them on board quickly.
Jessalyn Klein, our Head of People and Culture, explained why it’s so important to recruit quickly during one of our unexpected automation webinars:
“Every minute you lose in the recruitment and referral process only increases the chances that you miss out on a potentially great candidate.”
Empowers Employees to Be Productive Right from the Start
Your new colleagues want to make a strong first impression. You can help them do just that by providing the equipment and applications they need on their first day! This should also leave a positive first impression on these new teammates, as they likely aren’t used to working for a company that’s so organized and proactive with its new hires.
Provides Employees with Delightful Experiences
When employees can do little to get what they need—from getting approval on their PTO request to receiving access to any app—they’re more likely to be content with their employer.Employees across lines of business made this clear in our State of Business Technology Report. Through the study, we found that employees desire approval workflows slightly more than other automation.
Learn more about what lines of business want to automate by reading the full report.
Allows Your HR Department to Allocate More Time Toward High-Value Tasks
By giving your colleagues a significant amount of time back, they’re able to focus more on business-critical activities. These include:
- Speaking to target candidates and persuading them to join the team
- Resolving conflicts between employees
- Planning headcount
- Evaluating employee satisfaction and making decisions based on their findings
- Planning company-wide events
Enabling your colleagues to dedicate more of their time and energy towards these strategic, thoughtful tasks should also go a long way in improving their satisfaction at work.
Now, it’s time to answer some of the most popular questions about HR automation. Let’s dive in.
How Does HR Automation Help with Compliance?
HR automation significantly enhances compliance management by automating critical processes, reducing manual errors, and ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements.
How can HR automation tools help in managing healthcare analytics and compliance with regulations such as the Affordable Care Act?
HR automation solutions guarantee compliance with laws such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and simplify the administration of healthcare analytics. For example, they can automatically monitor worker hours, assess a worker’s eligibility for benefits, and produce the records required to meet ACA requirements.
Examples of Automating Compliance Management
By automating the recording and reporting of labor laws, safety rules, and tax filings, HR automation helps manage compliance with local, state, federal, and international standards. When compliance deadlines draw near, tools can send out notifications to make sure that accurate and timely filings are made.
How Does HR Automation Aid in Data-Driven Decision-Making?
HR automation solutions give businesses the real-time analytics and insights they need to make data-driven choices. HR professionals may make well-informed strategic decisions by analyzing workforce trends, productivity measures, and employee engagement levels thanks to automated data gathering and reporting.
Notable Insights Gained Through HR Automation Analytics
Analytics from HR automation has shown trends like the relationship between employee engagement and retention rates. Furthermore, automated insights can track diversity metrics to support the creation of more inclusive workplace policies and identify skills gaps to inform targeted training programs.
Challenges of Implementing HR Automation
- Data Security Considerations: To safeguard sensitive employee data, implementing HR automation calls for stringent data security procedures. Crucial elements in the procedure include making sure that data protection laws are followed and protecting against possible breaches.
- Integration with Existing Systems: It can be difficult to integrate HR automation tools with current systems; careful preparation is necessary to prevent interruptions.
- Resistance to Change: When switching to automated procedures, employees could object. This calls for the use of strong change management techniques.
- Cost of Implementation: Since HR automation systems can need a sizable initial investment, it’s crucial to carefully consider ROI.
- Maintaining Compliance: It could take more time and money to modify automation systems to meet specific organizational requirements.
HR Automation Tools
Software solutions to improve and expedite HR procedures are provided by several reputable HR automation companies. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the top products in this field:
- Workday: An all-inclusive platform well known for its extensive integration capabilities and easy-to-use interface, especially when it comes to managing payroll and employee data.
- BambooHR: With an easy-to-use interface, BambooHR is perfect for small to mid-sized organizations. It excels at automating HR chores like administering benefits and keeping track of personnel information.
- SAP SuccessFactors: A cloud-based program designed specifically for large businesses that provide a wide range of HR functions, from workforce analytics to talent management.
- ADP Workforce Now: A well-liked solution that makes payroll, benefits administration, and compliance management easier. Companies of all sizes use it.
- Zoho People: Well known for its adaptability and customization, Zoho People automates leave scheduling, performance reviews, and attendance for expanding companies.
- Namely: Payroll, benefits, and HR automation are provided, with a focus on mid-sized businesses and a heavy emphasis on compliance and reporting.
- Gusto: Designed specifically for small enterprises, Gusto helps organizations handle HR duties more effectively by automating payroll, benefits, and tax filings.
Best Practices for Implementing HR Automation
Now that you know what HR automation is, the different forms it can take, and why it’s important, you’re ready to dig into our guidance on implementation. Below are four tips worth considering.
1. Make it easy on your colleagues in IT.
You can make their lives easier and help them build valuable automation for your team by giving them concrete asks. For example, tell them which applications you want to integrate, and how you want the data to flow between those systems.
At the same time, it’s worth keeping an open mind to their ideas. Their rich experience in building automation across the organization can be enormously valuable to your team. For instance, they might identify ways to automate a given process further, or automate something else that you hadn’t even thought of!
2. Leverage a diverse set of automations and keep an eye out for new opportunities.
You can get the most out of HR automation by leveraging several together across the candidate and employee journey.
This might involve prioritizing a few automations first, like onboarding and recruiting. But once you showcase their value with your executives and IT, they’ll likely provide the resources you need to build more.
It’s also worth noting that your candidates’ and employees’ experiences are fluid. Certain bottlenecks or unpleasant experiences might arise for each group over time, and when they do, don’t shy away from using automation to address them.
3. See what others have done.
You shouldn’t feel alone while ideating your automation.
If other teams in your organization use automation, ask them about it. If your peers at other organizations automate certain workflows, try to understand how they’ve built them. And if you use a platform that shares other automations users have built, take the time to explore them.
You may not want to copy the automations you learn about, but simply exploring them should help you brainstorm powerful ones faster.
You can browse through our community library to see the thousands of workflows our users have built!
4. Use an enterprise automation platform.
An enterprise automation (EA) platform enables you to use triggers and actions by “listening” to business events in your applications. This ability allows you to transform workflows end-to-end, make use of bots, and largely avoid coding.
Enterprise Automation Example
Say you decide to use an EA platform to increase employee referrals. You set the trigger for when a new job is created in Greenhouse. Once that condition is met, you use a bot to post that job to a platform like Slack. Your employees can then easily find the job postings, and they can submit referrals without leaving the chat platform (once they submit a referral in Slack, the bot automatically adds it to Greenhouse).
Related: 5 HR automation examples that can help transform your employee experience
Workato Is the Only EA Platform on the Market
Workato is a low-to-no-code enterprise automation platform that lets you take your automation to market in just days. It also offers a built-in bot framework with Workbot (its enterprise platform bot), allowing you to use bots effectively when building any HR workflow.
Beyond the platform, Workato’s leadership team differentiates the company from its peers. The leadership group includes individuals who helped kickstart the integration revolution at companies like TIBCO, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Salesforce. This puts the company in a unique position to address the current and future integration and automation needs of an enterprise.
Learn more about how Workato can automate your HR processes by speaking with one of our automation experts today.
