Between payroll, onboarding, training, compensation changes, reporting, and more, human resource departments are bloated with monotonous, rule-based tasks. The very essence of an HR department is humans, but these boring jobs hinder HR specialists from adding interpersonal, creative, and critical value to their workforce. What’s more, these humdrum assignments can lead to knowledge workers experiencing boredom, burnout, and even the urge to seek a more challenging job. With nearly half of HR tasks having the potential to be automated, it’s time to put the “human” back in human resources with the help of robotic process automation.

Robotic process automation can be applied to several different areas of a human resource department. Wherever there are monotonous and objective duties, RPA can be deployed. A few RPA use cases for human resources include payroll, recruiting, onboarding, reporting, training, and expense reports.

Payroll

The payroll process is tiresome and time-consuming. Assign this task to RPA bots for speedy, error-free compensation distribution. A robot can pull salary data for each employee, automatically transfer funds on a scheduled date, and send a final report once the process is complete.

Recruiting

Spend less time sourcing and assessing candidates and more time engaging them in person with RPA for human resources recruiting. RPA bots can search through data bases and professional listing sites for employees that meet certain pre-determined criteria like education, skills, and experience. They will then automatically pull qualified individuals and add them to your HR/recruiting system or Excel sheet for the recruiter to review.

Training

Training is a time-consuming and repetitive process for human resource representatives. RPA can be implemented to identify the role of the new employee and automatically send appropriate login credentials, training modules, and employee handbooks for that specific position straight to the new employee’s inbox.

Onboarding

Using RPA to administer new employee paperwork can quickly and easily be done by a software bot so the HR rep can spend more face-to-face time with the person. Automatically distribute necessary paperwork, utilize OCR technology to extract the new hire’s information, and input it into the employee database with robotic process automation.

Reporting

Performance reviewing is an important part of human resource departments. Robotic process automation can be utilized to enter queries in your data and analytics applications, extract data, save in a report, and send for your review.

Employee Expense Receipts

Automating the employee expense receipts can significantly improve the time, expense, and accuracy of the manual workflow. RPA bots will receive employee expense receipts via email, download the attachments, create a folder with the employee’s name, and save all the attachments in the corresponding employee’s folder. For an in-depth example, check out this article on automating your employee expense receipts, or watch the video below.

For years, human resource departments have been bogged down with menial tasks that take away from time that could be spent strengthening employee relationships and building company culture. Now, robotic process automation is being introduced to help alleviate knowledge workers of repetitive, boring tasks. From payroll to employee training, RPA is helping HR sectors put their focus back on their workforce by automating these boring jobs. As a result, companies are realizing higher retention rates, more satisfaction, better accuracy, and more. That is the power of RPA for HR.