Enrich Employee Onboarding Process with Automated Email Data Extraction and Entry

Humanize the Employee Onboarding Process by Automating New Hire Documentation Process.

Problem

When a new employee joins an organization, the Human Resources department must gather several different types of information from them. For example, W-4 forms and direct deposit documents are distributed so they can collect data like name, address, the account and routing numbers of the bank account in which they want their funds deposited, and how much of their paycheck the employee wants withheld for federal income taxes. These files are usually sent to new hires via email and then returned back to the HR specialists inbox when completed. All of this data must then be entered into the company’s accounting software.

Boring, repetitive, time-consuming: all terms HR specialists would use to describe this process. They must toggle back and forth between applications, leaving room for error. And the time knowledge workers spend on this takes away from face-to-face opportunities with the new hire. There’s definitely an opportunity for improvement here.

Solution

Extracting and saving new employee data from documents that are emailed to HR is a perfect job for process automation. Software bots can be programmed to monitor an inbox where new hires send their completed onboarding documents. Bots can open the emails and download the attachments. Using OCR technology, RPA bots can extract the new hire’s information including bank account numbers and fields from their W-4 form. And just like the knowledge worker would, the bot can log into the organization’s accounting software to create a new profile with all the extracted data.

Impact

By automating the process of downloading email attachments and saving the data in a company database, this workflow can be completed more quickly and with fewer errors. This helps the organization achieve more efficiency. More accuracy means there are no problems with a new hire’s compensation or taxes, so higher compliance. And rather than spending 12 minutes on the manual process, HR specialists can use that time to engage with the new hire in-person to make sure their first day is positive. This experience will be more fulfilling for employees and worthwhile for the new hire.

Conclusion

Process automation has a way of allowing humans to work smarter, not harder. In the case of HR department, injecting digital workers into the processes actually allows humans to provide better experiences in the workforce. This creates happier employees, specifically new hires in this case. Also, errors are mitigated, processing speeds increase, and higher compliance is achieved.

This is just one example of how process automation can be applied to human resource workflows. Other RPA use cases in HR include payroll, recruiting, reporting, employee expense reports and more. Put the “human” back in human resources with RPA for HR. Learn more about RPA services.