Have you been implementing HR automation? Or you are unaware that it is being the future of human resources that most HR have been doing?

Human resources management (HRM) is a critical function of any organization, responsible for recruiting, hiring, and developing employees. As technology continues to advance, the field of HRM is increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI). The objective is to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

According to report by Oracle, most HR practitioners welcome the integration of AI into their HR processes. The report stated that AI is changing the relationship between people and technology at work. This will support more areas where HR can implement AI technologies. One of many is AI-powered automation, or also known as intelligent automation or cognitive automation. Based on Gartner, 47% of businesses will use some sort of AI in their HR processes in the upcoming years.

AI-powered recruitment tools, for example, can help HR professionals identify the best candidates for open positions by analyzing resumes and conducting initial interviews. These tools can also help to reduce bias in the hiring process by eliminating the need for human judgment in certain stages of the process.

How AI can Change The Game with HR Automation

Additionally, AI can assist with onboarding and training new employees by providing personalized learning experiences. This can help to ensure that new hires are able to quickly become productive members of the organization.

As employees progress in their careers, AI can also be used to help identify potential leaders and high-potential employees. This can help organizations to identify and groom future leaders, ensuring continuity and success in the long-term.

Another area where AI can be beneficial is in the management of employee performance. By analyzing data on employee performance, AI can help managers to identify areas where employees may need additional training or support. This can lead to improved employee engagement and productivity.

AI can also be used to manage employee benefits and compensation. By analyzing data on employee compensation and benefits, AI can help organizations to ensure that they are providing competitive packages that will help to attract and retain top talent.

In addition to these benefits, AI can also help organizations to improve their compliance with labor laws and regulations. By automating certain processes and monitoring employee data, AI can help companies to ensure that they are in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.

Automation and AI: A Perfect Partner for HR Automation

However, it’s important to note that AI is not a replacement for human HR professionals. While AI can assist with certain tasks and processes, HR professionals are still needed to provide strategic direction and make important decisions.

As such, organizations need to strike a balance between using AI to improve efficiency and effectiveness, while also ensuring that human expertise and judgment are still present in the process.

Overall, the integration of AI in human resources management can bring about many benefits for the organizations, from recruitment, onboarding, employee development, compliance, and even performance management. It’s important for organizations to consider how they can best utilize AI to improve their HR processes and achieve their overall business goals.

Read about how to use Artificial Intelligence solutions for Human Resources

The Benefits of HR Automation

We always talk about increasing productivity, streamlining current workflow that is too time-consuming, improving efficiency – as main objectives when we want to implement AI-automation. Yes, it is correct – but how can these automation impact specifically on each process?

1. Eliminating time-consuming administrative tasks

According to HR University, HR staff whose core tasks are administrative, ensure that HR department is inputting their data records and preparing (handling) HR documents correctly. They will need to do record-keeping, do analytics and reporting, documentation, updating and integrating data between various sources.

Administrative tasks are the example of “recurring” tasks. Recurring tasks, or often called repetitive tasks, are activities that you have to do over and over again. These tasks are mainly the core activities within your job description that comes repeatedly, and you have to deal with them in regular time intervals – can be daily, weekly, or monthly basis. These recurring tasks are monotonous and low-level, that you can actually improve to save more time, cost, and energy.

According to Gartner, 56% of companies using AI for HR are trying to automate repetitive tasks. Incorporating AI cognitive functions with robotic process automation can improve HR processes, as this technology can eliminate time-consuming administrative tasks. For example, the smart robots can help to automate recruitment process – and only need HR staff intervention on interviewing potential candidates, or in verification of validation step. The smart robots, with the help of AI, can have document “understanding” that they can process documents – which HR would have been having trouble with, considering there must be employee-related documents to process and record-keeping each day.

With the robots being focus in automating these administrative tasks, this leaves opportunity for HR to focus more on tasks that can bring more value to the company and employees – or any tasks that are more strategic.

2. Improved recruitment process, better talent acquisition

It’s just not candidates who are in competition to get a job, but it’s also a competition between companies to acquire best potential candidates as their employees. This will burden HR, in a way that HR needs to invest a huge time and effort in finding the best potential candidates that fit what the company needs. If HR is being too overwhelmed with never-ending administrative tasks, they can not be entirely focus on finding the best talent. Taking too long to find best candidate means HR is losing its potential ones to the other companies that could be their competitors.

Accelerating Recruitment Process with HR Automation

According to IQ Partners, 57% of companies plan to accelerate the recruitment process. On their report, they stated that traditional recruitment is no longer effective for HR to implement. On the survey they have done, companies who participated in the survey said that they have identified a number of ways to help improve the talent acquisition process:

• 75% plan to adopt new technologies to attract highly skilled employees
• 57% plan to speed up the talent acquisition process
• 62% plan to recruit talent that can work faster and more efficiently

With 75% plan to adopt new technologies, we can take example from how AI-automation can transform recruitment process in HR. The smart robot can help HR to spread the word about the open recruitment, filter applicants based on criteria set by end-users, monitor assignments given by end-users to the candidates and become the bridge between candidates and HR recruiter, and do reporting.

According to G2, 80% of job seekers said they would be dissuaded from considering other job openings at a company that did not give them any status on their application. The smart robots will not just help HR by automating recruitment process, but also in providing feedback or status to the rejected applicants.

3. Faster and more efficient in onboarding employee

How HR onboards their new employees will certainly leave first-impression to those employees on how efficient HR works. Thus, onboarding process plays a crucial part for not just HR, but also how they contribute to employee’s satisfaction.

Based on Nucleus Research, companies that do use HR automation said their onboarding process was 67% faster. However, according to G2, the lack of onboarding automation tools hinder HR for their onboarding processes. Arising as HR automation tool, AI-powered automation has all it takes to be considered as the perfect tool to improve onboarding process.

HR automation with AI offers faster and more efficient employee onboarding process:

• Verifying employment documentation: contracts, ID cards, resume/CV, etc.
• Manage access hand-over for software, hardware, accounts, etc. that employees might need for their work
• Deliver company policies and procedures in compliance
• Help HR admin to enter new employee data on HR system (e.g. payroll system)

4. Employee-driven insights & better employee retention

A.I Machine Learning has the ability to give us recommendations and help us to do cognitive decision-making, despite being done by the robots. This capability allows us to generate employee-driven insights, that we can use to engage employees better to prevent the high turnover – or, in nutshell, improve employee retention.

A.I Natural Language Processing can also help to do sentiment analysis when HR is doing survey on employee satisfaction. Statistics show that 20% of new hires leave the company to get better opportunities within the first 45 days of work. Therefore, collecting employee feedback on their satisfaction with the onboarding process and new jobs can help identify potential problems.

Artificial intelligence (AI) makes this process much easier and more efficient. Cognitive Automation software may send out surveys after the first week, first month, or first quarter of a job. In addition, Machine Learning (ML) can reveal latent dissatisfaction with survey results to prevent employee attrition.

AI analytics tools have the ability to examine collected and processed data in ways no human administrator could ever do. Human resources and wage management cover a constantly changing regulatory landscape worldwide. AI technology has the potential to address many of the human resources challenges such as payroll management, attrition management, and so on. This allows the company to calculate turnover before it happens. If the robot detects a risk of escape, it will send alerts to the hiring manager or staff to help them solve the problem.

5. Higher chance for employee engagement and upskilling

Having a thorough employee-driven insights, such as areas HR can improve to increase employees’ satisfaction, will not just boost employee retention but HR can also engage their employees better. HR can also find out areas employees are looking forward for upskilling themselves.

HR can also use AI-powered automation to track employees’ KPI. This option involves providing an automated checklist of all the tasks and goals that a new employee needs to complete upon onboarding, such as reading and signing certain documents, taking tests, or creating collaboration projects. HR can also set deadlines on the system and send a notification when the date is approaching. HR can also get some important indicators of the work done.

Examples of HR Automation

According to the report by Forbes, AI adopters are 19% more effective in reducing the time HR spends on administrative tasks.

Here are some use-cases where HR can leverage on AI-powered automation to automate some of their processes:

1. Extracting Data from Resume/CV

According to a study by G&A Partners, human resources departments spend 73 percent of their time on administrative tasks. While the HR department wants to focus on programs to improve work performance and productivity, much remains to be done. There are still documents that are missing or out of date, forms that need to be filled in.

In below video, cognitive bot can handle resume/CV received by the hiring team. The smart robot can ‘read’ the resumes despite the complexity of its template or form of document, thus can also intelligently identify and extract key data points. After extracting the resumes of potential candidates, the robot will put the data in a spreadsheet. Furthermore, the robot will send the spreadsheet by email to the rest of hiring team for a review.

Save to Your Reading List: What Is Intelligent Document Processing (IDP)?

2. Automating Recruitment Process

Recruitment is core activity in HR department – which is a long complicated process that is so consuming both of effort, cost, and time. But if HR staff can find a right tool to automate this complicated process and eliminate its complexity, it can really bring benefits to the company in terms of productivity and efficiency.

In this video, the smart robotcan automate the recruitment process. The robot can access job or recruitment portal to check candidates who apply to the position, collect their data to the internal document, and shortlist candidates based on recruiter’s criteria. Cognitive bots proceed to process initial assessment of candidates by sending them email and gradually checks if they have completed the assessment phase. Human staff in HR department only has to review assessment document completed by potential candidates.

3. Data Integration on Payroll System

Imagine having to do recurring tasks every time there’s an employee to onboard. Extracting data from documents for their personal data verification and authentication is one of the painful task, but what’s more painful is having to enter and update their data on payroll system.

In this video, the smart robot can help to automate one of core processes that HR department has: updating employee details on the payroll system. There will always be changes in data and the data stored in the system needs to be updated accordingly. If this process is done manually, it can be painful to the human-staff considering how time consuming it is.

4. Recruitment Reporting

In this video, the smart robot can get data from multiple job application forms in a Microsoft Excel file, and enter all of the data into a different Microsoft Excel file. The robot can copy all the data from multiple sheets in an Excel file, and paste it into another Excel file. This function will be useful in making HR recruitment report for the HR manager to review.

5. Predict HR Attrition Rate

Empowered by A.I. Machine Learning, cognitive bots can perform predictive analysis to prevent employee attrition. With predictive analysis, the robot can accurately predict the attrition rate of employees based on their employment records. Moreover, the robot can also predict who will likely to leave, why employees tend to leave, and analyze the key-risk factors affecting the high employee turn-over. With this capability, the robot can enlighten the human resource department to improve the way they engage loyal employees to stay in the company/organization.

Read how to boost employee retention by 300% with employee onboarding automation

Written by : Fauzul Fahmi & Kezia Nadira