What Is HR Automation?

Human Resources is an essential part of every company, but HR is also a highly-manual process—tons of paperwork, onboarding new employees, payroll, applicant screening, and so much more. What if HR didn’t have to be manual?

According to the Society for Human Resource Management, automation increasingly affects workforce strategy and transforms traditional HR functions such as hiring, training, and benefits administration. Team Engine and other platforms have taken HR automation to a new height, now transforming communication processes as well.

What is HR Automation?

HR automation is the process of enhancing the efficiency of the HR department by freeing employees from tedious manual tasks and allowing them to focus on complex tasks like decision making and strategizing. (source)

HR automation helps you automate time-consuming tasks and supports long-term HR strategy and decision-making by providing analytics and paper trails for humans to study and build new data-based programs.

Automation doesn’t mean that your job is automated, or that the Human Resources department would be replaced, but rather that it takes the menial tasks off your plate so you can focus on the high-skill parts of their jobs..

Why is HR Automation Important?

HR Automation is important because it streamlines hiring, communication, and other document processes. There are different types of automation that can provide different benefits to HR teams, no matter their role:

• Candidate Sourcing: Using platforms like Team Engine can streamline candidate sourcing. You no longer need to manually post individual jobs across multiple job board accounts; with an HR automation platform, you simply create one job post and let the software automatically publish and optimize your job postings across dozens of job boards and hiring channels. As people start to apply, your software will screen applicants based on your specific criteria, allowing you to focus on only the highly-qualified applicants rather than having to sift through the entire stack of resumes.  
• Hiring Automation: Now that you’ve received a ton of applicants by automating your candidate sourcing, you’ll need hiring automation. Hiring automation takes all your candidates and auto-screens, communicates with, and builds out resumes for them. This means you can be working on engaging with your employees, while your software system gathers information on your applicants.
• Onboarding Surveys: You can text your employees, but Team Engine automates communication so you can send messages even when you’re busy. You can even send out onboarding surveys automatically. When an employee reaches their 30 day anniversary, Team Engine will text out a survey asking what your employee liked or would have changed about the onboarding process.  Companies that have great new employee onboarding experiences see higher job satisfaction and higher retention rates past the first 45 days.

How Can HR Automation Help Blue-Collar Companies?

HR automation is essential to blue-collar companies because of their on-the-go teams. Your deskless workforce is on the move, and most likely, so are you. So how can HR automation help you?

• Send out text messages quickly and efficiently:  set up templates to send out automatically while you work on other projects.
• Automate onboarding surveys: set surveys to send out automatically on a new employee’s 30-day work anniversary to ensure you gather feedback in a timely manner.
• Candidate Sourcing: keep all your accounts in one place, hire hourly workers without the stress of the back-and-forth and phone tag
• Auto-Screen Candidates: spend your time ensuring great culture fit instead of sorting through hundreds of unqualified candidates.
• AI Recruiting: leverage machine learning and generative text to provide a better candidate experience.

HR automation is designed to support your HR team—not replace it. And when it’s paired with field service management software, you get a complete operational solution for managing both your people and your processes. Team Engine fills the critical gap left by most field service platforms by helping you hire faster, communicate better, and retain top talent in a deskless workforce. Built specifically for blue-collar industries, Team Engine brings automation to the parts of your business that matter most—people. Try Team Engine risk-free and see how much more your team can accomplish when the right systems are working in the background.