Employee onboarding is the first and most important step in an employee’s journey with an organization. An optimized onboarding experience enables HR managers to improve employee-organization engagement and retain top talent. However, the traditional onboarding process is full of manual and repetitive processes that create poor employee experience and affects overall HR efficiency. To streamline and update the onboarding process, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is one the best solutions. RPA automates and streamlines many onboarding processes to deliver an excellent experience for new hires and eliminate excessive HR workload.
As a part of HR automation, an RPA bot can be programmed to automate the entire onboarding process, from issuing an offer letter to guiding orientation. When the decision is made to hire the candidate, the bot can automatically send an email with an offer letter, a welcome message and onboarding and policy documents. After the candidate has accepted the offer and provided the required information, the RPA bot can review the forms, check for missing information, and email the candidate accordingly. Usually there is a waiting period between the acceptance of the offer and the actual hire date. During this period, RPA bots can intermittently communicate with the candidate making them feel connected and gather information to help HR managers create a comfortable and welcoming environment before the new hire's first day.
The onboarding process involves lot of paperwork, which is inefficient and prone to human error. RPA bots process documents, extract information, and stores everything digitally. To make the onboarding process interactive, bots can prompt employees to fill out any missing information. All employee data is then stored in an organized and central to avoid data duplication.
Many departments are involved in the onboarding process including IT and finance. RPA bots can easily be connected with other department systems. They can send notifications or data like payroll info to the finance department. Similarly, the IT department has an important role to play which may include creating email accounts, providing equipment such as laptop, installing required software on the system. RPA bots can do a lot of the heavy lifting by providing access to the company’s internal network, applications and data depending upon the authorization level they are cleared for.
When done manually, these tasks between departments take additional time and could be subject to miscommunication resulting in delays. With RPA inter-departmental coordination can be quick, seamless, and error-free.
During the HR onboarding process, company policy and regulations must be followed meticulously. Furthermore, these regulations and policies change frequently, adding additional burden to the HR staff. With regulatory and compliance checks built in and updated with every change, chances of negligence or oversight are minimal.
Delegating mundane and repetitive work to RPA bots allows HR staff to complete more meaningful work. During the onboarding process, RPA can provide personalized experiences to new employees and lay the foundation for a great employee experience.