Think about the main services performed by a human resources professional: recruiting, selecting, terminating, and compensating employees; implementing training and evaluating its results; running organizational climate and 360º surveys; and building charts and spreadsheets to track HR metrics by employee and department. Of all these activities, how many do you think could already be carried out by smart, automated tools that compile information and take action based on past behavior?
What does HR software do? Automation and cloud-based tools are transforming the way HR departments work. The value of automated software lies in its ability to cut costs, increase productivity, and optimize results. In this respect, it can calculate and process employees’ monthly payroll, improve hiring processes by analyzing and creating documents, run employee surveys and compile the data automatically, among many other tasks. When you are able to make effective decisions based on data from an automated system, productivity increases considerably, it becomes easier to save money on equipment and on company initiatives, and to assess which departments need to change. How can you be an HR professional of the future? There is a lot of talk about how artificial intelligence and automation will wipe out certain jobs. When it comes to HR, however, that’s not quite the case. In no scenario is it possible to eliminate human mediation from a human resources department. Even with software that performs tasks automatically and well, we will still need sensitivity, closeness, and human contact to assess which information matters and to think carefully about how these processes will affect each person in the organization. Since HR work is largely made up of paperwork, these solutions are very useful for reducing manual work, organizing files, and, above all, making strategic thinking easier for new HR professionals. Managing structured information for each specific process eliminates redundant tasks, but it will never eliminate the human potential behind each action. What will certainly change is the need for HR professionals to adapt more and more to tools, become more comfortable with technology, and know how to work with it as if it were an extension of their own thinking. When these tools are adopted in a positive way, it becomes much easier to identify and retain talent in the company, generating incredible results.
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