With continuous and large-scale recruitment demands, businesses are facing significant challenges in managing their onboarding processes. According to research by Workable, 52% of companies with plans to hire more than 100 new employees annually experience difficulties in processing applicants and maintaining recruitment quality.
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Challenges in onboarding for large enterprises
As companies scale, the onboarding process for new employees becomes increasingly complex and challenging.
- Recruitment quality: Businesses are under pressure to fill positions quickly while ensuring each candidate is a good fit for the assigned role. This challenge requires a delicate balance between recruitment efficiency and the accuracy of candidate selection.
- Errors and confusion: Managing information, documents, processes, and tasks becomes complicated with a large workforce, leading to potential errors or confusion during onboarding. This can result in wasted time, effort, and disruptions to business operations.
- Information management: Large enterprises often have vast amounts of information to manage, including employee records, policies, processes, and training materials. Efficiently storing, retrieving, and updating this data is a significant challenge.
- Information security: As the workforce grows, ensuring the security of personal information and company data becomes more complex. Risks such as data leaks or unauthorized access need to be carefully managed.
- Lack of personalization: When dealing with large volumes of new employees, businesses often adopt a standardized approach to convey information. This one-size-fits-all method may lack the impactful engagement that a personalized onboarding experience provides.
Traditional methods, such as organizing multiple onboarding sessions, result in significant delays and overload for HR staff. Reliance on outdated systems like spreadsheets, emails, and paper documents exacerbates the issue. So the question is, how can the onboarding process for each employee be streamlined in the context of large-scale hiring?
Automation – The solution to improving the onboarding process
To address these challenges, many companies are turning to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solutions to automate their onboarding processes.
RPA’s automated workflow for onboarding
Step 1: Sending welcome information and instructions
Once a candidate accepts a job offer, the bot automatically triggers a personalized welcome email chain, providing detailed information about the onboarding process. These emails include essential instructions to give new hires an overview of their role and create a welcoming environment.
Step 2: Document collection and verification
RPA bots assist in collecting necessary documents through secure channels, using intelligent document processing technologies like OCR/IDP to scan and verify the documents’ authenticity. After verification, the bots automatically sync the information into the HR system, creating a centralized data system. This not only speeds up the process but also minimizes errors from manual data entry.
Step 3: Scheduling and task assignment
The bots continue to support by scheduling activities for the first day, such as office tours, training, and integration sessions. They automatically coordinate with departments like HR, IT, finance, and administration to ensure all activities are organized seamlessly.
Step 4: Integration and processing in financial systems
After document verification is complete, the bot automatically transfers data into the financial system to process payroll information. All salary-related data for new hires is updated accurately within the banking system, ensuring swift and precise payments. This reduces the workload for finance and administration teams and instills confidence in new hires regarding the company’s professionalism.
Step 5: Continuous support with chatbots
Chatbots provide instant answers to questions about company policies, benefits, and other work-related queries. New employees receive timely and accurate responses, enhancing their onboarding experience.
The outstanding value of automation in onboarding
High accuracy and security
Automation offers significant value in terms of accuracy and consistency in workflows. A report from IBM shows that deploying RPA in HR processes reduces data entry errors by 80%. With RPA, data is entered accurately and synced across all systems, minimizing mistakes and maintaining regulatory compliance. This is particularly important in onboarding processes that require the collection and management of employee data. Automation not only ensures legal compliance but also enhances security to protect employee information.
Reduced administrative burden
Automating repetitive tasks such as data entry, form completion, and document management saves businesses considerable time. With the superior speed and accuracy of RPA, HR teams can focus on more critical tasks that require human interaction. The onboarding process becomes smoother, allowing new hires to quickly integrate into the workflow.
Improved employee experience
According to Gallup, organizations with effective onboarding processes see an 82% improvement in employee retention and a 70% increase in productivity. By automating administrative tasks, HR teams can build stronger relationships with new employees and improve their satisfaction during the onboarding experience.
Read more: Optimizing HR Operations with Automation
Saving time and increasing efficiency in onboarding with automation
Santander, a leading financial services company in Argentina, manages 3.7 million customers with USD 11.6 billion in assets and 8,200 employees. Due to its large scale, Santander required a substantial workforce to meet customer expectations. The company reduced its employee onboarding process from six weeks to just two days by implementing RPA. The bots automatically informed relevant departments, collected necessary information, set up accounts, and performed compliance checks—tasks that previously required significant manual effort. This substantial reduction in onboarding time led to an increase in new employee NPS (Net Promoter Score), helping Santander attract and retain talent.
Automation has proven its effectiveness in optimizing onboarding processes and managing operations for large enterprises, as seen in Santander’s case. For businesses facing challenges in large-scale recruitment, RPA opens up a new potential pathway. In the future, the combination of RPA and artificial intelligence technologies will continue to enhance management capabilities, not only in onboarding but across the entire operational workflow of an organization.
References:
Transforming Employee Onboarding with RPA: A Step-by-Step Guide
Streamline Onboarding with RPA: Best Practices & Tools
The Ultimate Guide to High-Volume Recruiting [2024]
akaBot (FPT) is the operation optimization solution for enterprises based on the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) platform combined with Artificial Intelligence, Process Mining, OCR, Intelligent Document Processing, Machine Learning, Conversational AI, etc. Serving clients in 21+ countries, across 08 domains such as Banking & Finances, Retail, IT Services, Manufacturing, and Logistics…, akaBot is featured in “Voice of the Customer” for Robotics Process Automation” by Gartner Peer Insights, G2, and ranked as Top 6 Global RPA Platform by Software Reviews. akaBot also won the prestigious Stevie Award, The Asian Banker Award 2021, Everest Group’s RPA Products PEAK Matrix® 2023, etc.
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