The HR department of any organization is responsible for a plethora of tasks along the hire-to-retire (H2R) process – many of which are repetitive, time consuming and require high degree of reliance on labor intensive processes. These processes are often expensive and inefficient and can lead to high error rates or even compromise compliance levels. And even though HR departments are made by people for people, comprising of manual-driven processes to help employees get work done, what if we told you that robots can help HR become more human?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has taken the corporate world by a storm. Think of robots as a virtual workforce or a back-office processing center without humans. Any interaction between a human and a computer can be automated. However, processes with repeatable, predictable interactions with IT applications are best suited for RPA. Automation tools allow ‘robots’ to perform routine business processes by reproducing the way that a human interacts with an application through a user interface while following a set of rules. Automation can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of these processes without changing the underlining systems. The cost savings of this are obvious, the cost of a robot license is lower than that of a typical salary. In a human resources department, the benefits of automation go far beyond that. If we automate all the admin-related interactions between an HR manager and a computer, we free up time that could be spent in more human actions, such as solving people’s problems or face-to-face time with your employees. Companies worldwide have been adapting and implementing robotic process automation in their HR departments to save up to 40% of time, and allow employees to focus on more valuable, human-centric tasks. According to Gartner by 2022, 65% of organizations that deployed robotic process automation will introduce artificial intelligence, including machine learning and natural language processing algorithms. Another survey conducted by Deloitte reveals that over 100 Shared Services leaders agreed that RPA is a viable, proven solution, with 74% of them planning to investigate the technology in the next year and 22% having piloted or fully implemented RPA. In fact, Deloitte identified more than 50% standard HR processes that could be automated through an RPA tool.