How RPA can facilitate onboarding and strengthen company values

Robotic Process Automation or RPA can dramatically reduce manual effort and free up time for value-added activities, as it takes over repetitive tasks. In finance departments, for example, the technology has gained a lot of foothold by automating accounting. HR departments can benefit greatly from RPA as well. Here’s how.

Attracting and retaining new talent is a top-priority in most rapidly-growing organizations. This puts a lot of pressure on the HR department, who is responsible for evaluating candidates, hiring the best possible people for vacant positions, onboarding newcomers and ensuring employee retention.

Successfully recruiting new employees requires large amounts of paperwork and processes. In many cases, these tasks are repetitive and time consuming for the HR department as well as the new employee.

Through RPA technology, companies can dramatically increase the efficiency of the administrative and onboarding processes, by effectively communicating with other software systems. For example, after a new hire, the application track system will be updated automatically, a new employee record will be added to the workforce database, documentation will be automatically generated, and the new hire is added to the payroll system. In this way, the onboarding process can be shortened from up to a month to only a few days.

In an HR environment where regulatory changes are frequent and numerous – GDPR, anyone? – RPA offers important benefits as well. When robots are in charge of doublechecking compliance, the chance of a misstep resulting in a hefty fine diminishes greatly.

But it’s not just the HR department and the company who benefit from RPA. Employees have a lot to gain as well. The facilitation of the onboarding system, for example, allows them to start on their ‘real job’ much faster. What’s more, the process can be customized, which gives new hires the reassuring feeling that the company values their time. In case of sick leave, or a newborn baby, employees can get the documents they need much faster when they are automatically generated by RPA.

But the most important benefit, from the perspective of HR, the company, and employees, is indirect: it’s the ability to use freed-up time to build up valuable relationships between employees and strengthen the culture and values of the organization.

Implementing RPA in your HR department doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t have to either. The beauty of the technology is its ability to implement change gradually. The first step is to identify the tasks that can be outsourced today. A great way to do so is by asking the question “Are we adding value to the company with this task, or should we be doing something else instead?”. As people become familiar with the process overtime, new tasks can be added.