Human Resources Pros Embrace Technology as the Great Enabler
From analytics and HRMSs to recruiting and employee engagement, technology is helping HR get the job done more quickly and effectively.
Technology is playing an increasingly important role in the human resources profession, with more than 87% of respondents to a recent survey saying technology has strengthened their contribution to corporate success.
For its 2019 Pulse of HR Survey, the payroll and HR services firm Paychex surveyed 300 HR decision-makers at U.S. firms with 50 to 500 employees. The resulting report is chock full of data that proves what most intuitively know: that HR professionals are increasingly making effective use of technology to improve their own efficiency as well as the efficiency and productivity of employees company-wide.
In this post, we’ll look at some of the technologies making the biggest impact in HR circles.
Analytics is All the Rage
First up is analytics tools, which 100% of the respondents to the Paychex survey say they rely on, up from 95% in the 2018 survey and 90% in 2017. These HR pros use analytics for a variety of reasons, including to:
- Make more informed decisions: 90%
- Defend their decisions to senior management: 89%
- Understand how to communicate with employees: 89%
- Track employee benefits, time off and training: 88%
- Benchmark data against other organizations: 84%
Analytics tools may be part of a larger Human Resources Management System (HRMS), which is used for a variety of functions. They act as the central HR platform, providing functions including tracking data on benefits coverage and costs, employee profiles, attendance records, legal documentation, and more. HRMSs may be premises-based software or, increasingly, a software-as-a-service offering. Offerings from vendors such as Paychex and Workday can be integrated with other software modules or services, including payroll and performance evaluations.
Streamlining the Recruiting Process
Recruiting software is a tech must-have for HR departments. It streamlines the hiring process, helping to automate tasks including creating and publishing job postings to multiple sites, including social media, with a single click. It also helps you accept applications, track workflows through the hiring process, and onboard new employees.
A guide to buying recruiting software at Business News Daily advises: “Your recruiting software should allow you to accept résumés and applications online and populate data automatically. It should have the option of creating pre-screening questionnaires to weed out unqualified candidates, then let you quickly search for qualified candidates based on specific criteria, such as experience, school attended, and required skills.”
Some recruiting software has tools including applicant tracking systems and video interviewing, a topic covered in this previous post.
Measuring Employee Engagement
Among the two-thirds of HR professionals surveyed whose department budgets are increasing, 49% listed “employee engagement” among their top two choices for how to spend the additional funds, second only to “technology,” at 50%.
The two are intertwined because there’s plenty of technology involved in employee engagement these days. Tools such as Kazoo and Workhuman enable employees to recognize each other for a job well done or simply for lending a hand. Employees can earn rewards over time, with the idea being to get all employees pulling in the same direction and to increase job satisfaction.
Employee engagement measurements can also be incorporated into collaboration tools. Workfront, for example, offers a work management platform that periodically asks employees questions intended to gauge their level of enthusiasm and engagement.
The last word, which sums up the direction in which HR is headed, goes to this unnamed respondent to the Paychex survey, who said: “My single biggest strategic contribution to my company was helping it automate its HR processes. Before, everything was manual. Now, we have all our work online.”
