How HR automation can help organisations retain millennial workforce

It’s not an easy task for HR managers to attract and retain the brightest talent among the millennial workforce. India's more than 400 million millennials—people born after 1982—account for a third of the country’s population and 46 percent of its workforce.

This tech-savvy, younger generation does not prefer mundane, manual work. Instead, their prime focus is on jobs that provide them with a sense of purpose and an opportunity to evolve. The high standards set by this younger workforce make it difficult for companies to attract the right talent required to succeed.

This, in turn, is pushing companies to adopt newer ways of recognising and attracting talent as well as keeping them engaged. The uncertainty caused by the pandemic has further propelled companies to become more responsive and flexible by adopting intelligent automation in HR processes to attract, develop and retain talent.

HR automation is not a new thing anymore. Automation is enabling businesses to gain an edge in efficiency, speed, accuracy, and data-based insights. Taking advantage of intelligent automation, businesses are getting the much-needed support for retention of workforce of the future. Here’s how:

With millennials dominating the labour market, the way a candidate is treated during the entire hiring process significantly affects his or her decision to accept or reject an offer. However, with the advent of innovative technological solutions, companies are not only able to accelerate the speed of recruitment process but even nurture better recruiter-candidate relationships.

The success lies in clear, constant communication which can be achieved through text messaging, social media, chat and/or video platforms and instant messaging. Apart from that, AI in sourcing processes is allowing HRs to reach out to a much larger audience and get the best talent that fits the job role.

Candidates ready to join the workforce of today have to go through several rounds of interviews, aptitude tests, skill and even personality assesement. Automation makes it easier to seamlessly move between the phases. Tasks like interview scheduling and reconfirming, post-interview responses, background checks and other tasks can be easily automated with the help of HRMS tools. Automation also makes sure that no important steps are missed because of human error or task fatigue. It also helps track applications and their status. In other words, the entire process can be streamlined to enhance the candidate experience.

Onboarding remains a critical part of the hiring process and a positive experience can go a long way in enhancing a candidate’s attitude towards an organisation and long-term productivity. Personal AI-based assistants, or ‘onboarding chatbots’ can easily integrate with HR management systems and serve as a personal guide for employees to their new workplace.

The millennial employees prefer HR technology and automated/innovative tools that personalise the onboarding process according to their needs, along with customised and engaging content. By automating onboarding tasks, HR can narrow the gap and empower new candidates to manage their experiences by freeing up their time to coordinate and improve offline activities.

Manual performance reviews are a thing of the past. Automated performance management processes are allowing employees to align their performance as per the goals of the organisation. Apart from that, AI-based performance management systems also avoid implicit bias which is often associated with manual performance reviews.

Organisations have experienced a seamless transition from work-from-office model to work-from-home model and recorded ease in planning, monitoring and evaluating employee performance in a remote world as compared to measuring progress manually.

In the present day workplace, assessing employee sentiment has become one of the critical components of HR functions. Tech-enabled interactive chatbot can help understand the moods of employees and goes up to measuring their sentiment towards their team, job, leadership and the organisation, and other aspects of wellness too.

Automated tools can be configured to analyse the feedback of an employee along with different demographics relevant to a purpose - age, tenure, location and gender. The overall score provided by the HR tool gives an idea of how happy an employee is within the organisation and also offers recommendations for action.

Automation is already taking the HR world by storm and businesses are quickly realising that tech-enabled HR processes along with worthy data can not only help organisations create a better-engaged workforce but also help in the overall development of an organisation. Every day, technology is evolving to make this automation process more efficient, so HR managers have to stay on top of solutions to stay competitive.