From the moment a potential new employee fills out a job application to the day they leave the company, they create a lot of work for HR. Often, this work is done manually. Recently Richard Schoen hosted a webinar to show you how you can streamline onboarding and other HR processes with automation.
Richard talked about two solutions—document management and business process automation with Automate Plus—that work together to make HR onboarding easy.
Why Automate HR?
Throughout the employee lifecycle, both HR and IT teams are under pressure to deliver. When the employee is new, there are forms to be filled out, new equipment to set up, and applications to be provisioned. Once the employee is settled in, HR might have to handle appraisals, reviews, and benefit changes while IT is dealing with ongoing user account management.
Throughout it all, a flurry of emails is exchanged between departments to keep the processes on track.
If you’re lucky, you won’t have to offboard the employee until retirement, but statistics show that you’ll probably be dealing with offboarding processes much sooner than that.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you had software to take on all that manual work?
Top HR Processes to Automate
It starts with the job application. Some companies still have employees fill out paper forms while others have moved to online applications. HR employees usually have to manually enter the information from the paper form into a database, and in some cases they even have to re-key the data from online forms.
Next, we have the employee’s first day. It’s always a hectic time! There are I9s, W4s, and other forms to complete. User profiles need to be created and a workstation set up—processes that generally require some kind of help desk ticket.
Eventually the employee settles in, but that doesn’t mean the HR work settles down. New information gets accumulated for the employee and added to their file. Employees undertake training, achieve certifications, and go through performance reviews. All of it means more forms and more work.
When the employee leaves the company, there are yet more forms. Plus, equipment needs to be returned and accounts disabled.
Your talented HR team was hired to recruit and retain top talent, not re-enter data into multiple systems or file paper documents. HR automation lets HR employees get back to what they do best—work with people.
See how easy automation can be!
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How to Automate HR
Richard starts by talking about user onboarding and how that could be automated with the right software. He recommends beginning by determining the trigger point for the process. It could be an incoming email or a file arriving on the website with the new employee data. After that, figure out where the data needs to be stored—just in the HR system, or is there a spreadsheet or another database that also needs to be populated?
This data can be automatically used to provision users in Active Directory or any other applications, set up email accounts, create a user log for compliance purposes, and even generate an ID badge. Basically, whatever repeated processes you are completing manually now can be converted to automated workflows.
Richard suggests creating a checklist of which systems a user needs to get onboarded to for each department. This will help as you build your automated workflow.
Learn more about designing efficient automated workflows
Richard also presented a use case of a Fortra customer implementing document management software for HR. This company receives a PDF packet by email as part of their onboarding process. They wanted to be able to break the packet apart based on document type. The company set up an inbox monitor to capture the documents, split them apart, and file them into the appropriate location.
Since this company has locations around the country that are hiring on a regular basis, automating the process saved the HR team a lot of time and trouble.
Quick Wins with Document Management and Automation Software
Fortra offers document management and business process automation software that works seamlessly together for comprehensive HR process automation. Automating HR with Fortra solutions makes it quick and intuitive to:
- Capture scanned and electronic documents
- Manage employee forms online
- Provision new users
- Track document changes and approvals
- Secure information based on department or user group
- And much more!
To see a few of these processes demonstrated with Fortra software, jump to 14:13 in the video. Or schedule a personalized demonstration.