What is HR automation? A complete guide to streamlining HR management using Zoho Flow

Human resources is one of the most important aspects of an organization, being responsible for crucial processes like recruitment, onboarding, off-boarding, time-tracking, payroll, benefits administration, and professional development. But HR processes require a lot to do, and when most of the tasks involve repetition, the work can get monotonous.

This is where HR automation can be helpful. HR automation is the process of using software and AI tools to automate and streamline repetitive and time-consuming HR processes and HR-related tasks. By implementing HR process automation automation within your organization, you're able to save a huge amount of time, letting you focus on the more productive and creative aspects of your work.

Why you should implement HR automation at your organization

Let's take a look at how HR automation can help your organization be more efficient:

Data-driven decision-making

HR automation applications can track and collect the data of employees and candidates. This information can be viewed in different formats, generated as reports, and more, helping you spot patterns and analyse data. You're also able to generate valuable insights with this information, which can help you improve your processes and increase the efficiency of your HR team.

Hiring automation

One of the most important jobs for the HR team is hiring. Hiring can involve a lot of repetitive tasks that need to be carried out for every single candidate, making it extremely mundane and time-consuming. With the assistance of HR automation applications like Zoho Recruit, you're able to narrow down candidates easily, offer a better candidate experience, and increase consistency.

Payroll automation

Another important task that the HR team is responsible for is payroll. By integrating your HR management apps and finance apps, you're able to create transparency and data consistency across platforms. You can also link the payroll and finance-related details of every employee with their profile, making the payroll process easier.

Improved employee experience

With the right HR automation tools set up within your organization, you can offer employees a seamless experience, helping them access important data whenever they want to. This can also be helpful for managers to track the performance of their reports.

Increased transparency and security

HR automation ensures transparency between the employee and employer, making sure both parties are aware of employee information like timekeeping, hours worked, sick days, personal time off, and more. HR management applications can also increase security and compliance within the organization by providing safety training, sharing compliance guidelines with employees, and more.

Reduced errors

When manually reporting information about your employees or candidates, mistakes are bound to happen. By using HR automation software tools, you're able to automate the reporting and transfer of information between your applications, ensuring that the employee data is consistent across platforms and there are no reporting errors.

Now that we know how implementing HR automation can be helpful for your business, let's take a look at how to make it happen:

The right Zoho apps for your HR automation

To implement HR automation at your organization, you'll need the help of certain applications. Let's take a look at a few HR automation software from the Zoho suite that can help you streamline and automate your human resource management.

Recommended Zoho apps:Zoho People, Zoho Recruit, Zoho Flow

Zoho People

Zoho People is a human resource management system that helps you review employee performance, track time and attendance, derive insights, offer learning and development sessions, employee onboarding and more, simplifying all your HR operations.

With the help of this HR automation software, you're able to create streamlined HR management workflows, ensuring that your day-to-day HR tasks and operations are less repetitive and time-consuming. You're also able to have all your employee information in the same database, making it simpler for you to view, analyze, and review data when necessary.

Zoho Recruit

Zoho Recruit is a hiring solution that makes recruitment easier for HR teams and staffing agencies. This platform offers you a complete solution, from creating job openings, finding, evaluating, and communicating with candidates, onboarding, signing documents, and more, ensuring every part of the process happens efficiently.

Zoho Recruit offers you a detailed journey for every candidate, letting you analyze their information and performance to choose the right employee for your organization easily. This application can make one of the core aspects of an HR team's job—hiring—simple.

These two HR automation tools can make HR management less complicated, offer you more insights, help you make better decisions, and save time, effort, and money. However, to get the most out of these applications and automate your HR management completely, you'll need the help of an integration platform.

Integration platforms let you integrate these HR tools with other applications, helping you ensure a seamless and instant transfer of data across apps. For example, by integrating Zoho People with contract management applications like Zoho Contracts, when an employee signs a contract, the data will be updated in Zoho People automatically. Similarly, you can initiate contracts for your employees through Zoho People. This will ensure that your HR apps are always up to date and none of your tasks get delayed.

An excellent example of an integration platform that can help you integrate your apps and automate your workflows is Zoho Flow.

Zoho Flow

Zoho Flow is a hybrid integration platform that lets you integrate both cloud and on-premises applications with each other, helping you automate and streamline your HR automation, as well as any other workflows. It provides integrations for more than 900 applications, along with 1,200+ prebuilt connectors that make integrating easy.

Zoho Flow can help you build custom integrations based on your requirements, including adding custom logic to your workflows, so you can build tailor-made HR automation systems and workflows for your organization. And with the additional advantage of being a part of the Zoho ecosystem, Flow can help you seamlessly connect both Zoho and third-party applications.

Now let's take a look at a few integration ideas that you can perform with Zoho People and Zoho Recruit using Zoho Flow.

Create new candidates based on form entries

When a person fills out a form showing interest in being a part of your organization, you have to add them to your recruitment portal and then begin the steps required to conduct an interview and hire them.

However, by integrating Zoho Recruit with form builder applications like Zoho Forms, every time someone fills out a recruitment form, the details of the candidate will automatically be updated in Zoho Recruit instantly, saving you time and removing the manual effort involved.

Instantly create a payroll account

One of the primary things to do when a new employee joins your organization is create a profile for them in your payroll portal. By integrating Zoho People with your payroll application, you can make sure that a payroll account is created for every new employee as soon as they're added to Zoho People.

Similarly, if there are any changes to the designation or salary of any existing employee, it can be updated automatically in your payroll app right after the changes are updated in Zoho People.

Get notified of important HR updates

By integrating Zoho Recruit with communication applications like Zoho Cliq, every time a candidate has been added to Zoho Recruit, or when a candidate finishes a test, the HR team will be notified, letting you instantly start working on the next steps involved in the process.

Another way to integrate Zoho Cliq with HR apps like Zoho People is by connecting these two applications together; when an employee applies for leave or when a person joins or leaves the company, the whole team can be notified through a message in the channel, helping them plan their work accordingly.

Send company policies and other documents to employees easily

When a new employee joins your organization, you'll likely have to share important documents and company policies with them to make sure they familiarize themselves with the company.

This process can be automated by integrating Zoho People with Zoho Mail. With this integration, every time a new employee email address is updated in Zoho People, that address will automatically receive onboarding documents delivered to its inbox.

Automate the signing of employee contracts

Similar to the previous use case, when a candidate is selected and is close to joining your organization, it may be necessary for them to sign certain documents or employee contracts based on their role.

By integrating Zoho Recruit with Zoho Sign, you're able to initiate the sending of contracts to the candidates when the status of their record is updated to selected. You can also initiate emails to candidates when their status is updated to rejected, automating having to send contracts or emails manually.

These are just a few ideas to automate HR management workflows using Zoho Flow. With the available 900+ applications on offer, you're able to integrate Zoho People and Zoho Recruit with a variety of applications, creating customized workflows tailor-made to suit your requirements and making HR management a breeze.