Employee onboarding is the first step in an employee’s journey with an organization. However, the traditional onboarding process is full of manual and repetitive processes that create poor employee experience and affects overall HR efficiency.

Poor onboarding experience may lead to early exits thereby increasing rehiring cycles and related costs. A study by Click Boarding, an onboarding software company in Eden Prairie says that 69 percent of employees are more likely to stay with a company for three years if they experience great onboarding. It also suggests that organizations with a standard onboarding process experience 50 percent greater new-hire productivity. According to a study by AI Multiple, the global robotic process automation market size is expected to reach $11 billion by 2027, expanding at a CAGR of 34 percent.

Also Read: Robotic Process Automation Use-cases across Organizational Functions

An automated and optimized onboarding experience enables HR managers to improve employee engagement, reduce errors, and retain top talent. Organizations pay a lot of attention to recruiting the best for their ranks. Successful organizations have started taking it seriously and have recognized the need to have excellent onboarding experiences for the new hires.

Automating the Onboarding Process with RPA

Deploying RPA in Human Resource Management can help to reduce the time that employees devote to these tasks, enabling them to focus on more quality tasks like talent development, retention, and compliance. As a result, it leads to increased productivity and efficiency in different activities within the HR Department. This creates a better experience for everyone involved, from the new joinees to hiring managers, HR staff, and subsequently, impacts organization’s business and growth.

The entire onboarding can be broken down into individual processes that can be automated in parallel. For instance, in the documentation process, RPA can help in:

• Accumulating and storing data from resumes of potential candidates for future.
• Accumulating and distributing data from candidate surveys to accelerate future hiring procedures.

RPA can help HR teams to tackle challenges such as:

• Myriad manual paperwork & documentation
• Dedicated teams for employee onboarding
• Lack of visibility in end-to-end processes
• Challenges in inter-departmental co-ordination and tracking
• Difficulties in delivering a consistent, yet personalized experience

RPA Benefits to HR

The potential of RPA technology to business through the human resources division is immense. The benefits of RPA in the HR Department could be:

• Increased productivity: RPA can free up manual workers to focus more on high-value tasks such as employee engagement, retention, and compliance and contribute directly to the organization’s overall strategic goals.
• Accuracy: RPA offers accurate data flow, and precise output which can lead to reduction in human-prone errors.

How RPA Can Help in seamless HR Onboarding

1. Automate Onboarding Process: RPA bots can be programmed to automate the entire onboarding process, from sharing an offer letter reviewed by HR to guiding joinees into orientation. Once the decision is made to hire the candidate, the bot can automatically send an email with an offer letter reviewed by HR, a welcome message and onboarding documents. The RPA bot can then review filled forms, check for missing information, and email the candidate accordingly. RPA bots can also intermittently communicate with the candidate through emails making them feel connected during the whole onboarding process.

2. Reduce Paperwork: The onboarding process involves a lot of paperwork, which may get lost in transition, and the data in it is prone to human error. RPA bots process and store documents digitally. The onboarding process can be made interactive with bots filling repetitive data itself and only asking missing information from the employee, thereby, saving time and paper.

3. Coordinate Across Departments: Many departments are involved in the onboarding process including IT and finance. RPA bots can easily send notifications to other departments on new joinees, or reminders on pending tasks such as email ID creation, salary account creation, etc. It can also give insights into bottlenecks to the management to action out.

4. Induction and Training: Deployed bots can take the employee through a guided induction journey with videos and storyboards that can help the employee with company’s overview. It helps to create a standardized experience across the onboarding layer and helps in achieving brand consistency.

Conclusion

Beyond onboarding, there are ample automation opportunities in HR across retention, engagement, compliance, and exit. HR automation can also create a more positive work climate amongst incumbent employees and therefore, create a positive workforce that is happier and more productive. Finally, HR leaders are leveraging automation capabilities to create seamless and consistent experience of tomorrow.