From recruitment to retention: How intelligent automation is transforming HR

For many businesses, there is now no longer a ‘defined’ workplace. More organizations are offering remote working benefits, allowing employees to experience the working world from all areas of the globe.

Although this may be great for individual employees, it can cause major headaches for HR teams, who will have to battle through paperwork and spreadsheets to ensure they’ve covered all time zones and employment laws. When coupled with recording and cross-checking personal information against company policy, local tax offices, and compliance, are major issues for those with remote employees.

“Businesses can also struggle with onboarding new team members as hiring new employees is both complex and imperfect as almost every decision made is based on personal judgment using sometimes only small amounts of data,” says Jerry Wallis, Director of Strategy and Transformation at SS&C Blue Prism.

“For employees to perform and feel happy in their jobs, they are now more than ever looking for organizations with meaningful roles, access to new technology, and company values similar to their own.”

Wallis uses the example of the first impression an employee has of the company is how well it onboards their team members. In fact, only 12% of employees say that they strongly agree that their organization does well in this task, according to research from Gallup.

How IA is replacing high-volume, low-complexity HR tasks

Although these processes can seem long and arduous, there is one way around it.

Queue: Intelligent automation (IA).

Wallis describes IA as a combination of technologies, including business process management, robotic process automation, no-code development, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, that can help organizations deliver transformational results across the enterprise.

Therefore, IA has the potential to reinvent how HR works, from clustering words and phrases; and indexing personnel records with skillsets, to measuring total revenue and profit against job descriptions, or salary benchmarking against competitors.

“Digital workers are designed to take over the repeatable, mundane work that people really shouldn’t have to do,” Wallis says.

“They can be programmed and trained to perform specific tasks, decisions, and end-to-end processes. Traditionally this was a paper-based process, but now automation can take on most of these tasks whilst also delivering on low costs and productivity gains.”

And, of course, these systems will drastically change the future of work by empowering frontline HR teams. They’ll therefore automate repeatable, mundane tasks, allowing them to put more focus into people-facing tasks needing the human touch.

“When data is used to understand the employee experience, intelligent, data-driven decisions can be made, and HR staff can focus on delivering a better employee experience,” Wallis says.

“Overall, digital workers can significantly reduce the manual work involved in updating and transferring data between systems. Based on market demands, by using automation to help organize find patterns, or predict change, businesses are better able to deliver on their goals.”

IA will therefore lead to a digital transformation, which Wallis states will lead to additional free time provided by digital workers. Future HR teams will also become more strategic with the power to review and deliver flexible, motivated employees while remaining compliant.

He also states that by using IA across human resource functions, IA has the potential to better enable human capital teams to focus on the employee landscape.

“Applying IA in fast-moving markets can assist HR leaders in meeting fast-changing business needs tailored to employment initiatives and goals based on real-world data,” Wallis concludes. “In doing so businesses will be able to meet the ever-increasingly varied expectations of employees.”