If you're a business owner, HR manager, or simply someone interested in streamlining and improving...
These days, it seems like there’s an AI to replace human labor in almost every area of business. But is it possible to take the "human" out of "human resources"? With HR workflow automation, the answer is yes, kind of. And it’s a good thing!
By introducing automation into routine processes like recruitment, onboarding, training, and even offboarding, businesses can make fewer mistakes, become more efficient, and save a ton of time.
In fact, 25% of companies use HR automation, mainly for recruitment and hiring. And 69% of HR professionals that do use automation in hiring said that it helped them save a significant amount of time.
Curious to learn how HR workflow automation might help your business? And how tools like PixieBrix make it easy? Keep reading.
What is HR workflow automation?
HR workflow automation is the use of software to streamline and automate the manual, repetitive tasks involved in Human Resources processes, such as hiring, onboarding, performance management, and offboarding.
This can improve efficiency, accuracy, and compliance while freeing HR staff to focus on higher-value activities, like strategic planning, employee engagement, talent management, leadership development, and culture-building. These tasks require human expertise, creativity, and critical thinking, significantly impacting an organization’s success.
4 benefits of HR workflow automation
If you need to convince your boss to put down her company credit card for some HR automation software, this section of the blog post is for you. There are many benefits to HR workflow automation, all of which can greatly impact your business’s bottom line. The following are a few of the most important ones.
- Improved accuracy: automation reduces the risk of human error, which helps to avoid costly mistakes and ensure compliance with regulations and policies. For example, automation software can replace manual data entry in the payroll department, ensuring every employee is paid correctly and on time.
- Increased efficiency: By automating routine tasks, HR workflows can be streamlined and completed faster, reducing the time and effort required to complete them manually. For example, the Health Service Executive of Ireland’s essential income reporting for all national acute hospitals typically takes 22 human hours a month. But their software robot, Bertie, could complete the same work in just two.
- Enhanced compliance: Automation can ensure that HR processes comply with legal and regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of non-compliance or penalties. For example, according to UK regulations, employers must maintain employee records for seven years after they leave — and then immediately delete them. Central England Co-operative used HR automation software to clear 10,000 employee records from their database, keeping their business compliant with the law.
- Cost savings: HR workflow automation saves your company money by reducing labor, and paperwork, minimizing errors and reducing turnover through improved employee experience. But don’t just take it from me. Banque Internationale à Luxembourg uses automation across its entire business, including HR, and estimates that for every Euro they spend on automation, they get two back in savings.
Key HR workflows that can be automated
Talent acquisition
Recruitment is one of the most common HR processes that rely on automation. HR departments often use software to help them automate job posting, resume screening, interview scheduling, candidate communications, and more to keep their pipeline brimming with top talent.
We might be biased, but we think an RPA tool like PixieBrix has a lot to offer HR professionals in this arena too. For example, take our “Get Email from LinkedIn” mod. It adds a button to every user's LinkedIn profile that, when clicked, automatically searches for that person's email address on Hunter.io and returns their email—no need to open a new tab and do a manual search.
If there’s an annoying part of the recruitment process you dream of automating, you can probably design a workflow for it with PixieBrix (try one of our free tutorials to get started). But first, check out some of our other pre-built, talent acquisition-focused mods.
Onboarding
Automating the onboarding process can involve completing paperwork, compliance tracking, training, benefits enrollment, and more. (Psst: we wrote a whole blog post about why you should automate your employee onboarding process here.)
But, the TL;DR is that workflow automation can help create a consistently high-quality experience for every employee who walks through your door, leading to a quicker return on investment for your business and an improved reputation in the job market.
And automations don’t have to be big either. Sometimes they can just make one small part of a larger process slightly faster and less annoying.
With PixieBrix, for example, IT pros can invoke a bot to order equipment for new employees without leaving their project management dashboard, notifying appropriate stakeholders in Slack or Microsoft teams for approval — all with one button click. The hiring manager can also be notified and track the equipment’s progress as it makes its way to their employee.
This workflow helps avoid many Slack messages, extra tabs, the manual filling out of procurement forms, plus the possibility that employees might receive incorrect or delayed equipment.
Training
Businesses can use HR workflow automation for training in several ways, all of which reduce the administrative burden on HR staff and help employees reach their full potential.
- Scheduling training sessions, sending reminders to employees, tracking attendance, and recording the completion of sessions
- Creating personalized training programs for employees based on their jobs, performance, and career goals
- Tracking employee performance and effectiveness of training programs. Identifying areas where employees may need more training.
These are high-level examples. For something more specific, check out this PixieBrix mod that lets you embed training videos and quizzes into web apps.
For instance, you could display a training video in employees’ Gmail accounts that teaches them how to spot email-based phishing attacks. If the employees answer the quiz corrections correctly, PixieBrix will log this in the database you created in onboarding, and they will no longer see the training video in Gmail.
This mod would be convenient for businesses that are legally obliged to keep their employees up-to-date on privacy or security best practices.
Employee experience
It might seem counterintuitive, but HR workflow automation can be used to personalize the employee experience and give employees more independence. Here are some examples:
- Sending managers reminders about employee birthdays and work anniversaries
- Sending personalized updates on benefits
- Enabling employees to complete tasks and access information through self-service portals, including updating personal information, submitting time-off requests, and signing up for in-office training
- Reminding employees to request timely performance evaluations, and helping them track progress toward their objectives
One of the many annoying things that happens to HR professionals is that they are asked the same questions often. Where can I find my health insurance details? Is Boxing Day a stat holiday? What is our company’s legal address? The list goes on.
PixieBrix has a mod to help with that. Using our Quick Bar (through our Chrome Extension), search a list of FAQs you have pre-defined in a Google Sheet. You can add, modify, and delete FAQs in the Google Sheet, and it will automatically update what you see in the PixieBrix sidebar. Whenever someone messages you with a common question in Slack, you can open your FAQ list in Quick Bar and copy and paste a response in just a couple of clicks.
See it in action here.
FAQs about HR workflow automation
What is an example of HR workflow automation?
Traditionally, the employee onboarding process involves a lot of manual work, including filling out paperwork, scheduling orientations, and sending reminders to new hires and HR staff. With workflow automation, this process could go something like this:
- A new hire is added to the HR system and automatically triggers the onboarding workflow.
- An email is sent to the new hire with a link to an online onboarding portal, where they can complete all necessary forms and review relevant policies and procedures.
- The portal automatically validates that all required fields have been completed and flags any errors or missing information.
- Once the onboarding forms are completed, the workflow automatically triggers the scheduling of an orientation meeting, including notifying the new hire of the time, date, and location.
- The workflow also automatically generates reminders for HR staff involved in the orientation process, ensuring that everyone is prepared and on schedule.
How do I automate my HR department?
To automate your HR department, you should first identify the HR workflows that can be automated and evaluate the automation solutions available. Then, develop an implementation plan, configure the automation software, and conduct thorough testing before rolling out the system. You also need to train HR staff and managers on how to use the system effectively and monitor its effectiveness to ensure that you are getting a return on your investment.
An awesome HR workflow automation tool to help you save time and money
Have we convinced you to automate your HR processes yet? If so, we hope you’ll consider PixieBrix as your first step towards a tedium-free workweek.
Why? PixieBrix is a low-code extension builder that you can use to easily automate the web tools your HR teams already use. As we mentioned above, you can use it to streamline the processes of recruiting, onboarding, training, and employee experience, but the possibilities are really endless, especially if you have an RPA developer on your team.
Don’t have access to an RPA developer? No problem. We’d be happy to chat about helping you build custom automated workflows ourselves.
