27 Jul, 2020 | Blogs
Robotic process automation (RPA) in HR is becoming popular as companies strive to improve efficiency and focus on more human-centric projects. According to UiPath, RPA in HR can save up to 40% of employees’ time and onboard employees 10 times faster. This is supported by a report from Deloitte, which claims that RPA deployment leads in 10-20% savings not just in HR, but for the overall business processes. In this blog, we’ll explore how RPA can ease the burden of HR professionals by explaining some of the real-world use cases.
Top benefits of using RPA in HR:
- Simpler payroll
- Streamlined employee on-boarding
- Improved learning opportunities
- More efficient talent acquisition
- Enhanced employee experience
- Better performance management
- Bridging legacy systems and ERPs
The benefits of RPA in HR go beyond financial ones. Automation brings out the humanist side of the workplace and takes the bot out of the human. With RPA taking care of the mundane work, HR professionals can make use of their soft skills for proactively recruiting talent and supporting and fostering the company’s culture among other value-added activities.
Top 10 use cases for RPA in HR
1. Shortlist Resumes
RPA bots can sift through several resumes and application forms received for open positions in minutes. These bots compare the information with the description of the job to shortlist the right candidate for further follow ups. This information gathering and comparing can be customized based on predefined rules. The candidates that are the best potential matches are then notified and called for the interview while the ones that don’t match are sent rejection emails.
2. Administer Offer Letters
Offer letters are customized according to the selected candidate and must comply with several regulations. This is a labor-intensive work since the HR professional has to gather information from several systems and databases, often leading to manual errors. Software robots, on the other hand, can quickly gather all the required information, create the offer letter, send it, and eventually monitor the appropriateness of returned documents. In other words, when RPA is deployed, it collects all the relevant data, builds the offer letter, and sends it.
3. New Hire On-boarding
On-boarding new hires is a tedious task since it requires the gathering of data from different systems to create a new user account, email address, IT equipment, access rights, etc. RPA bots allow smooth on-boarding of employees as it streamlines the whole process by activating a template for the on-boarding workflow. The bots are also capable of making rule-guided decisions on the credentials to be assigned and documents to be sent to the new employee. It can also make the process of employee ID creation prompt and swift.
4. Analysis of Company Reviews
Reporting is traditionally a time-consuming process that must be created with the right information and format to help facilitate informed decision making. This can be especially difficult if the data is stored in different systems, which is often the case in most companies. RPA can be deployed to support periodic reporting requirements for HR analysis. It can also be used to screen company reviews and surveys across several internal and external sources.
5. Expense Management
The manual processing of travel and expense involves several issues such as late submissions, missing receipts, and unclear expense claim reasons, all of which have a negative impact on compliance reporting and employee satisfaction. That is why more and more software robots are being deployed to cross-check individual expenses against company rules and external expenditure regulations.
6. Employee Data Management
RPA bots allow HR professionals to effectively manage data of current and former employees, vendors, new hires, and applicants. Since employee data includes payroll and benefits among other critical information, it requires consistent, orchestrated actions across various systems and databases as well as departments. When data is managed by bots, there is data compatibility across multiple systems, minimal risk of incorrect data entries and regular update of data.
7. Attendance Tracking
RPA in HR is used to track the attendance of employees to process their salaries. These bots compare self-reports or time-sheets against time captured in the company’s system and notify HR about any discrepancies. These software bots can also be programmed to recommend the reallocation of employees to prevent any workflow disruptions.
8. Payroll Management
Payroll management is the ideal candidate for RPA in HR since it involves a lot of high-volume, repetitive, monotonous tasks, including data entry. When done manually, there is a high chance of human error, which can eventually compromise data integrity. To avoid such costly errors, bots can be used to have accurate data and avoid any delay in payments of salaries to employees and vendors.
To learn about RPA in Finance, read our blog here
9. Compliance
In most countries, labor laws are subjected to several frequent modifications that can make it difficult for the HR team to adapt and manually prepare compliance reports. That is where RPA bots can be leveraged to comply with the rapidly changing regulations and prepare accurate reports by gathering and entering data from various disjointed systems.
10. Exit Management
Like on-boarding, RPA can be used for a consistent employee exit experience. Most of the manual processes involved in exit management are error-prone and can make the transition a nightmare. RPA in HR can be used for better-organized off-boarding and the de-provisioning process by automating tasks such as generating exit documents, conducting exit surveys, sending notifications to the concerned departments and people, revoking systems access, collecting company assets and processing final payments.
Conclusion
RPA is HR promises more efficient data management, streamlining high-volume, rule-based HR processes. It improves employee satisfaction by allowing them to work on more human tasks like decision making and communication. To conclude, the promise of RPA in HR is beyond cost saving: it is about making a human-centric workplace.
To know more about RPA in HR, contact us today!