HR consultants work with numerous organizations that are growing rapidly. For the HR function, this usually means that hiring is their top priority. Hence, HR executives are working everyday tirelessly, reviewing thousands of resumes, corresponding with candidates, scheduling interviews, interviewing, making offers, creating records and finally onboarding them.
In most cases, this means repetitive tasks involving loads of paperwork, time-consuming processes and potentially a lot of inefficiencies. This is where robotics process automation (RPA) kicks in - automating repetitive, rule-based processes and dramatically reducing human involvement in these tasks. Thereby, freeing up time to focus on more value-added tasks to support the organization's growth. RPA in HR has numerous benefits - reducing process costs by as much as 1/10th, ensuring that compliance risks are dramatically cut, and much faster processing times. A software process robot is not limited by 9-to-6 workday, does not need sleep and does not make mistakes. Well, it does not mean that you will have Bumblebee, Chappie or T-1000 replacing your HR manager. But we are surely predicting a software process robot to replace many of your administrative support roles in HR in the next few years.
RPA vs AI: Many clients ask me about the difference between the application of artificial intelligence (AI) vs RPA.
AI is best suited where an organization is keen to replace slightly more complex human decision-making with a machine. Examples include identifying job fit, succession planning, making hiring decisions, etc. Whereas RPA is best suited for repetitive processes where rules are clearly defined, such as hiring, onboarding, payroll, exit management, etc.
Where to start the HR RPA journey: While RPA can be leveraged to create value across the employee hire-to-retire life cycle, this initial step could be to create an automation index of all HR processes and transactions based on the frequency of execution, degree of complexity and value vs cost ratios.
Once all the activities are segregated in order of precedence, it is important to identify the ones that are ruled and fixed procedure-based.
Estimate the cost incurred on rule-based activities and chances are that for a company operating in a developed market, the cost of automating these would be approximately a tenth of the cost of an onshore, full-time employee, or a third of the cost of an offshore employee.
Hiring offers best return on investment: Let's take the example of a recruitment process (from job posting to hiring candidate) and identify the areas where robotics can be applied:
- creation of job requisition automatically based on arising vacancies (retirement/termination),
- updating job requirements (skills required, education qualification, experience, etc) based on available details,
- receiving/sending mails to the multiple stakeholders,
- uploading job postings to external/internal websites,
- sending notifications to vendors/consultants,
- filtering profiles of candidates based on job requirements,
- interviewing candidates based on adaptive questionnaires, voice-recognition and keyword search in candidate responses, comparison of multiple candidates,
- paperwork and communication for hiring candidates after successful background verifications.
The impact would be across all three aspects of cost, turnaround time and quality, which can lead to a much-improved recruitment process.
Enhancing onboarding experience: Typically, organizations have weekly or biweekly onboarding process for new recruits. The process includes multiple rule-based activities such as form completion, e-verification, opening of bank accounts, background-verification, hardware and software accesses, etc. A study by EY suggests that 52% of organizations do not automate HR processes, leading to potential omissions, errors and inconsistencies. RPA has huge potential to improve a candidate's onboarding experience while also reducing organizational costs.
Organizations must increasingly start viewing RPA as the key element shaping their business and people strategies. While RPA cannot replace human decision-making and non-routine activities with limited past precedent, it provides an unattended, automated solution that works 24/7, without complaints, offers more flexibility and helps eliminate backlogs during demand spikes.
With every automation technology experimentation, the journey along this path will open up new opportunities for scaling up the automation process, finally elevating and transforming the HR back-office support room to a new-age digital business technology center.
About us:
TMA Solutions was established in 1997 to provide quality software outsourcing services to leading companies worldwide. We are one of the largest software outsourcing companies in Vietnam with 2,400 engineers. Our engineering team was selected from a large pool of Vietnam IT resources; they are well-trained and have successfully completed many large and complex projects. Visit us at: https://www.tmasolutions.com/
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