What’s the attrition been in the past 6 months? What’s our current revenue to employee cost ratio? How much of the company’s budgeted headcount increase cost has been utilized?

These are some key questions that management could ask you periodically. And if they don’t, they should. Any seasoned HR professional knows that it’s not about simply managing people. It’s really about extracting and understanding numbers that will help key decision makers see where their company is headed. Through these numbers, you as HR will become part of the strategic team.

The answers to these are vital to make business decisions. Not only should they be accurate, but prompt as well. And HR automation can help achieve just that.

To Make Decisions Quickly, You’ll Need to Provide Information Swiftly!

Timing is everything when making decisions. And decisions rely on data, numbers and information for validation and judgment. The time it takes you to retrieve physical folders or use Excel is good time wasted. It’s time you can use to make decisions. HR automation gives you the ability to run queries that are either based on your needs or predefined in order for you to extract information swiftly. Answers are a few clicks away and as quick as being on your fingertips, literally!

What Can You Automate?

Practically everything! Every process and procedure of your HR function can be automated. And here are just a few:

1. Employee Information

Maintaining physical copies of personnel folders requires a lot of space and time and resource to manage, maintain and keep up to date. It’s needlessly tedious and honestly quite a waste of resource. By maintaining employee records in an HR system you’ll be able to retrieve information about your employees faster.

2. Recruitment

Sifting through hundreds of resumes and matching them against a vacancy is a lengthy process. With automation you can:

• advertise vacancies on your own customized job portal,
• allow applicants to fill in their details against specific vacancies, and
• select candidates based on your needs with just a few clicks.

3. On-Boarding

On the day of joining, new recruits usually go through a process of filling out joiner forms. These are Information that they didn’t provide at the time of applying for a position, but now that they are selected, their employer needs specific details about their families, banking information, and so on. Automating this can help you reduce that initial 1 hour spent on the first day.

Not only that but you can also develop orientation videos that’ll be instrumental in familiarizing new recruits with your company’s policies, culture and even your corporate values and objectives.

4. Out-Boarding

Once you’ve automated your on-boarding, it’s only natural to do the same for your exit management process. The system could have your leavers and relevant stakeholders walk through the process just by clicking away. Asset retrievals, exit interviews, final settlements, all can be automated.

5. Analysis

With all this information at your disposal, what good is it if you’re not going to be manipulating it to produce reports and analysis vital to make decisions. Gone are the days of developing Excel based charts and tables. Through the system you can develop queries that’ll produce periodic reports and email them to relevant stakeholders, or even generate customized reports as and when needed.

There’s power in HR automation and there’s no avoiding it. Your HR can be less dependent on paper and human resources. If you take it a step further and back your HR automation on the cloud, you’ll be tapping into mobile computing. This would allow your employees to experience all of the above HR operational aspects, and others, faster and seamlessly. These are just some of the basic HR operational functions you can implement to free your resources from mundane workloads. I’ll be talking about more HR automation in the following weeks.

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