Top 4 Time Wasters In HR

Cycles are speeding up for Human Resources activities. Either improve workflow or drown in the tsunami.

Convinced that HR stands for Hella Repetitive? Damn the petty paperwork and repetitive chores. Manually collecting employee data (again). Answering the same personnel questions till bored to death.

Human Resources is supposed to solve business-critical talent issues. Stop wasting time on trivial tasks. Use smart automation and a bit of boldness to cut down the squandering.

Waster 1: Recruiting Mostly By Hand
Issue: Manually processing job applications is super inefficient.
Solution: Get an affordable Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Don't make a minion read, sort and rank every resume. That's like torture. Software does it faster and more precisely. Set preferences for years of specific experience, skim by types and levels of skills, and lots of other criteria too. You can even pre-screen candidates with online tests. 

The ATS spits out an ordered list of applicants. It could also initiate contact to set up interviews, then track scheduling and results. An HR staffer is freed to do work that matters.

Waster 2: Trial-And-Error Resource Allocation
Problem: Making best guesses about deploying people, or on spending recruiting funds, leads to fixing too many mistakes.
Solution: Tap into the power of Big Data. Predictive analytics for staffing beats rolling dice. Make decisions based on actual statistics, not just hunches. Isolate the best advertising when recruiting specific skills. Measure campaign effectiveness and switch tactics on the fly. Metrics also take the angst out of succession planning.

Waster 3: Repeating Tedious Tasks
Problem: So much HR stuff is administrative. Monotonous to the max, mind-numbingly recurrent.
Solution: Automate where possible. Check out Talent Management Systems. They're like an ATS that eats its Wheaties, covering the employee lifecycle. Talent sourcing and acquisition. Onboarding. Career development and learning schedules. Compensation, performance, and succession management.

They're not Brainiac robots that replace HR staff. All they do is computerize functions that used to be done by a human. Self-serve options let employees do things like fill out necessary forms and updates, choose training and benefits options, get answers to FAQs, or scheduled holidays.
 
Waster 4: Personnel Initiatives That Perish Prematurely
Problem: HR launches an employee program they've slaved over. Management and workers yawn. The program slinks into obscurity. 
Solution: Get buy-in beforehand. Pretty obvious, eh? Not with that sure-winner program you've spent a month of late hours on. Diversity sensitivity. Managing generational divides. Sexual harassment training. Everyone's a slam dunk till it bombs.

Would've been nice to conduct a staff survey first – automated ones make it easy. Determine exact needs, then source the proper program. Build a business case to support it. Have your execu-droids swear on a stack of laptops they'll model the behaviours to line managers.

Except all that effort would've chomped valuable chunks of your days. A shame you were buried under a stack of paperwork and aimless office meetings. Oh well, maybe next time, if they keep you till then.