The growing role of technology in human resources

For a long time now, large businesses have used a variety of applications, software tools and technology systems within their HR departments. Their reason for doing this is simple: there are more people, as well as infrastructure and paperwork required to support them, than these companies’ HR teams can handle manually. So, they use technology to automate routine tasks, streamline processes, ensure compliance and more. As a result, they increase efficiency and minimize their need to spend valuable resources on additional staff.

The game has been a bit different for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). These companies have a similar percentage of total head count devoted specifically to HR (usually between 1 to 5 percent), but they don’t have the total employee base or infrastructure needs of larger organizations. Even with the smaller HR staff, they’ve typically been able to handle everything on their own.

But recently, the game has changed. There’s more work for HR to do than ever before. More effort is needed to support increasing numbers of employees working remotely. There are more compliance mandates to follow and keep track of — more keep coming all the time. Better benefits and compensation packages are needed to attract and retain talent in today’s competitive landscape. 

It all takes additional time and effort and there’s only so much of both available with the team you have. So SMBs have a choice: either hire more people to keep up with the increased workload or find and implement more efficient ways of getting things done. 

Common use cases of technology in HR

Because the latter can be more cost-effective and is often simpler, we’re seeing SMBs turn to technology to help their HR departments operate more efficiently. They’re using new systems to drive efficiencies in three basic HR functions:

• Payroll. In today’s HR departments, paying people goes beyond just issuing checks. Other activities like skill development, performance management, benefits administration and more have been incorporated into payroll processes. Accordingly, some of today’s technology tools offer the ability to coordinate and manage all of this together.
  
• Recruiting. It used to be the norm that companies would post their job openings to real and online bulletin boards or job aggregators, and candidates would apply if interested. Today, that model has flipped around; companies are increasingly building communities that people join based on their affinities and interests, and then sourcing from those groups first when openings arise. Today’s HR technology helps organizations build and maintain these communities and create talent pools full of people with active interest in what they’re doing.
  
• Onboarding. There’s never been more to do from the time companies extend a job offer to the completion of that employee’s first month. There are many forms both sides must complete, training regimens to carry out, policies and regulations to comply with, tax frameworks to set up and more. Today’s technology can help organizations simplify the execution and management of the entire onboarding process. This is important to help make sure everything that’s required gets done and to help new employees get off to a good start.

There’s a lot of technology on the market today to choose from — probably two to three times more than there was five years ago. Organizations should be able to find a good fit for them based on their size, industry, budget and unique business requirements. If you’d like help along the way, there also are consultants available to help you find the best tools and implement and configure them to maximize your return on investment. 

Benefits of incorporating HR technology

By implementing the right applications, systems and tools, organizations have realized several important benefits:

We’ve seen the average SMB human resources department that integrates technology become anywhere from 10 to 30 percent more efficient — a truly sizable difference.

Those added efficiencies enable organizations to postpone or cancel hiring additional HR staff, allowing management to save on those expenses and improve the bottom line or reinvest those resources in other areas of the business.

Current HR employees also can minimize paperwork and refocus their time on more strategic and interesting work that furthers their careers, makes them happier and adds more value to the business. 

The way business is done has changed so much in the last few years and all that evolution is here to stay. We aren’t going back to the way things were done before. Thankfully, there are plenty of new systems and tools that can help our organizations adapt to all that change without requiring major investments or expense increases. Let’s take advantage of them and work smarter — not harder.