Benefits of Human Resource Digitization and Automation for eCommerce Businesses

The transformation of HR processes in a company is always a response to new market challenges or changes in business strategy. This is exactly what happened in our company. We took the focus on business digitalization 17 years ago. Just recently, we have proceeded to digitization of HR processes. The aim was to:

• Speed up processes to save time and efforts, and ultimately the company budget
• Don’t lose anything and keep all data recorded
• Be able to build predictions and analytics reports

Here we’ll tell you more about our experience and some opportunities you can apply in your business.

When is HR digitization required?

We identified at least 3 factors that indicate the need of HR digitalization.

1. Need to step out to a qualitatively new level of process efficiency.

You can improve traditional processes for a long time, but sooner or later the maximum will be reached – the system will no longer be able to develop. To move to a new level, you need to look for a fundamentally new approach.

2. Increasing struggle for candidates.

Some experts believe that the shortage of personnel in this area today will only increase. This means that supply in the IT market exceeds demand, and it becomes more difficult to attract a candidate.

By 2022, companies are planning to invest in remote and hybrid work setups to support their IT workforce better. Consequently, for 2022, the IT workforce will need to keep up with the demand, especially IT skills. In this regard, HR professionals expect to struggle recruiting full-stack and back-end developers in 2022.

Source

3. Absence of a system.

A cohesive solution for all HR processes done within one platform is just a dream for now. There is still no single solution on the HR-Tech market that would cover absolutely all stages of an employee’s life in an organization and HR processes. Processes need to be automated, not only digitalized and enhanced with “smart” solutions. Therefore, organizations implement the main systems that automate basic HR processes, and then connect additional tools to them. This leads to noncompliance between systems and a negative user experience, because it turns out to be a “zoo” of disparate systems and applications. Therefore, it is important to build seamless integrations. And these are complex technological solutions that require time, budget and knowledge of technology. 

HR automation benefits

Here are some you can envisage.

Onboarding

HR department specialists spend a lot of time on the adaptation of new employees in the company, training, preparation and holding welcome webinars. Creating an application for onboarding will reduce the time of colleagues by transferring routine operations to a digital interactive space. The application allows you to create an engaging digital beginner experience. Within the framework of a Digital Office, it is good practice to describe all processes within HR from an employee hiring to leaving. Then you impose all digitization projects on them: calculate in advance which tasks you close with what solutions, where integrations need to be done, and what the data architecture should be. A systematic approach is the main thing in digital transformation.

HR Automation 

This may include:

• Personnel database. Information about all employees is stored here.
• Recruitment management. A module that allows you to manage vacancies, work with candidates and selection stages.
• Recruitment marketing. Career page with all vacancies of the company.
• Education. Online courses and employee training programs.
• Performance management. Here, employees set their business goals for the year and personal development goals. And here is the assessment of the annual results of work.
• Succession planning. In an interactive format, you can appoint successors to key management positions and assess the situation in terms of the “security” of these positions.Thanks to this tool, it is possible to introduce the principle of self-service, giving managers the ability to manage data and processes on their own teams, and employees will benefit from initiating basic requests to the manager and HR themselves.

The Zero HR approach is an opportunity to focus more on tactical and strategic business and partnership tasks due to the time saved on routine processes.

Apps developed within HR automation system

Let’s find out what can be developed within the Zero Office approach.

Mobile app

A new employee downloads it to a smartphone and sees a personal onboarding plan, information about the company, its staff and their locations. He or she can request or give real-time feedback, play a brand game, and learn more about the company’s history and strategy.

Career Navigator

With its help, employees can view the profiles of all positions in the company with a description of the knowledge and skills required for them, including global ones, build their career path and discuss it with the manager.

Interactive engagement platform

Previously, HR managers manually performed many actions: created a list for a survey, generated reports in different sections and sent them to managers. With the digitization of HR processes, it is possible to introduce an interactive platform where each manager sees the results of the whole team in dynamics and can set up filters. The platform can apply artificial intelligence to understand what to pay attention to, what tools can be used to increase this or that indicator.

Educational platform

The educational platform provides access to online courses. Courses help make the learning experience interesting and personalized. Artificial intelligence and a chatbot can be connected to the platform. By answering a few questions, you can receive individual development recommendations and a personalized set of courses and articles.

Temporary appointment search 

With this platform, any employee can place a task and ask for help from colleagues from anywhere in the world. This functionality helps in an uneven distribution of resources. When some employees are underloaded, while others are overloaded, the tool makes it possible to balance the workload of people within the organization, not to lose critical business processes and implement projects maintaining its efficiency. And for employees, this is an opportunity to work on a global project and get cross-functional experience.

Electronic document management

Our company uses the Bitrix system. With its help, we can create documents and endorse all the necessary specialists. An electronic digital signature has been introduced for approving documents by remote employees. As part of the solution, there is a chat with employees and a corporate news feed. The system can be seamlessly integrated with your eCommerce solution to orchestrate all processes in one place and keep the common history.

Our case of digitizing and automating HR processes

In our company, part of the HR processes is automated. By now, we have digitized such processes as:

Recruitment

For this, eStaff is used. The process is automated from submitting an application for a specialist and approving a new position to assigning a task to a responsible recruiter. The application is converted into a vacancy. After a convenient resume is found, it is uploaded to eStaff. Managers comment on the resume, approve the candidate and make an appointment. The head of the HR department can upload all activities and reports or form a recruitment funnel by periods. The software helps cover all candidate selection processes. The disadvantage of CRM is its non-intuitive interface and slow status updates. 

Onboarding new employees

We use the GetCourse platform to automate the process. Here we have recorded and uploaded video tutorials to teach the company’s product and services. There is a mentor who monitors the learning process of a beginner and gives feedback.

Chat bot for a new employee provides an onboarding plan, answers to frequently asked questions, and an office navigator. A new specialist can literally walk around the office, get to know all the employees and find out all the locations.

Certification and assessment of specialists

It is implemented in Confluence. The use of this program is dictated by security considerations and the actual integration with Jira.

HR Roadmap

The roadmap uses Jira for tracking tasks of the HR department, form reports and predictions.

Employee job offers and leaving

They are done with Bitrix. Here it is convenient to program processes. Creating a task for coordination by all managers is automated.

Benefits of automating HR processes

• Acceleration of business processes: we spend less time coordinating and maintaining documents
• Reduced chance to lose or forget something, as with paper documents.
• Forecasts and long-term plans. With new technologies, where all data is digitized, it is possible to build diagrams and clearly understand where the company is and where to grow.
• Increase of eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score or simply put the employee loyalty to your brand). The higher this indicator is, the more employees can manage processes themselves or initiate changes. The growth of eNPS is a sign of satisfaction with the HR service. Solving HR issues online is convenient. All processes are transparent and extremely clear.
• Employees are more likely to respond to positions within the company

Result

As a result of HR processes digitization:

• The time for closing a vacancy has decreased to 2 months. The industry average exceeds 2 months. The HR funnel from an interview to a job offer is 72%.
• The rate of a successful probation period passing increased to 93%.
• The staffing level remains stable at around 92%.
• eNPS is 15%
• The engagement rate (inspiration and willingness to complete tasks) is 78% . The market average is 50%.
• After switching to Online Simtech School, we reduced costs by 10 times. The company’s specialists do not need to spend their working time preparing and delivering lectures. All materials have already been recorded and posted in GetCourse. An online school trains more specialists. It is not tied to a specific location – the place where the company is based. 

Now, instead of 10 people, up to 200 candidates – potential colleagues – are studying in our Online School

Plans

We develop our own brand store based on Laravel. It is planned to sell branded products for virtual currency. Conditional “Simtech” coins can be earned through quality work. For example, an employee can speak at a conference, get points and exchange them for local currency to buy a branded cloth he or she likes. This initiative will motivate employees to become more involved in the company’s processes and grow loyal users – brand ambassadors.

Conclusions

• Digitization and automation improve the efficiency of HR processes qualitatively.
• You need to start by creating a technological map. It is important to see the whole picture at least 2-3 years ahead. Then, connect each system step by step. Estimate the results before proceeding with the next system connection.
• Digital transformation can create resistance among employees. This is fine. You need to prepare and allocate time and resources for quality preparation for change management.
• Automation saves time for HR professionals. They can spend more time on strategic tasks. Freedom from manual routing makes HRs more productive. You can achieve results similar to our Company.
• Digitization is changing the attitude of employees and candidates towards the company. This becomes a significant advantage in the struggle for valuable personnel. Automated onboarding brings more profit to eCommerce businesses. Don’t hesitate to connect an automated system to your platform, to have all HR done on the fly.