HR’s Worst Nightmare: Manual Document Processing

For HR departments, manual document processing can drain precious time and resources. IDP can help you get more done. 

Spooky Season has arrived, and ghouls and goblins are around every corner — especially for your human resources department. It’s a classic Halloween ghost story: HR organizations large and small are haunted by manual document processing. 

With many forms to fill out, sort, and distribute — from enrollment forms to CVs and onboarding documents — document processing is HR’s worst nightmare. 

Even in today’s age of the digital revolution, many HR departments still sort documents manually. There are plenty of understandable reasons for this — many businesses have doubts about the accuracy of automated HR tools, and plenty of traditional digital solutions are barely more efficient than manual processing.

But document processing doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s take a look at how Rossum is helping HR departments across industries to defeat manual document processing — the HR Time Killer. 

The hidden time killer in your HR department

Anyone with extensive human resources experience has met the HR Time Killer. As your HR team intakes, reviews, and distributes hundreds or thousands of documents, manual processing can become a liability. 

Still, traditional approaches to automated document processing (like optical character recognition) can be difficult to manage, and barely more efficient than manual analysis. 

There are plenty of documents that pass through HR departments that require a human touch. No matter how high-tech your business is, your HR team will probably need an actual live human to finalize hiring, process applications, and review cover letters. 

Still, manual document processing wreaks havoc on HR departments in entirely preventable ways. By requiring employees to sort, extract, and read highly repetitive HR documents, the HR Time Killer slashes productivity.

Manual document processing can also lead to employee burnout and dissatisfaction, as valuable team members become bogged down with repetitive tasks. How can HR departments defeat the HR Time Killer once and for all? 

The answer: intelligent document processing (IDP). 

With IDP, HR managers can automate tasks that are rote and repetitive, while keeping an eye on the jobs that still need a human touch. 

HR departments are full of high-skilled, insightful employees who can bring their expertise to screening job applicants, crafting onboarding documents, answering employee questions, and addressing all the issues an HR team handles. 

Your star employees do not need to spend hours extracting data from benefits or insurance forms, scanning employee invoices, or entering data.

With minimal human supervision, IDP allows you to extract data from documents — not just perfectly-structured invoice forms, but also semi-structured and unstructured documents. 

In other words, IDP helps your business to automate tasks when possible while keeping your employees focused on what matters.

How IDPs can help transform your HR department

The solution to the HR Time Killer could be hiding right under your nose. As IDP brings added efficiency to HR departments globally, employee satisfaction can increase by shifting employees’ focus to more enriching types of work.

So, IDP isn’t just a great way to save time and money — it can reduce employee turnover, too.

There are plenty of use cases for IDP, which uses machine learning to improve accuracy over time. For HR departments, some of the most common uses of IDP include: 

• Extracting data from applications. Applications aren’t all created equal. During the hiring process, some applications require a highly skilled eye to determine whether an employee meets the requirements. But with hundreds of applications to process, IDP allows you to extract critical information and sort applications in your HR database. 
• Screening resumes. There are plenty of resumes to screen, but the variety in formatting can pose difficulty for HR professionals in a time crunch. Traditional OCR document processing requires all documents to use a uniform template, meaning any resumes with a variation in formatting (read: all of them) would need to be processed by hand using an OCR method. With IDP, you can extract relevant data from semi-structured and unstructured documents without compromising accuracy or privacy. 

• Processing employee benefits. Employee benefits fall under the HR umbrella, and managing benefits always requires plenty of work. IDP technology allows your HR team to identify key data points from benefits documents, whether they’re on paper or in an electronic format. You can quickly process and sort employee benefits with over 98% accuracy — and avoid human error. 
• Sending mass emails. Any HR professional knows that not every email can be automated — but some can. For emails that don’t need the nuance of a handwritten message, you can use IDP (in combination with robotic process automation) to determine the recipients of mass emails and to send onboarding emails when necessary. 

Evaluating performance: Is it time to switch to a new IDP?  

With intelligent document processing, the goal isn’t to fully automate HR document processing. Instead, IDP allows you to identify the tasks that can and should be automated, and which ones should be left to manual supervision. 

As an HR manager, it’s time to check in and assess whether you are spending your employees’ time and energy as effectively as possible.

A strong HR team builds the foundation for a successful business. Employees need to understand that they have an HR team that works for them, that operates with their personal data safely and effectively. 

In addition to high-security data management, your employees need to understand that the HR team is made up of real people — not robots — who are here to help. 

With Rossum, IDP helps you to fulfill all the goals of a successful HR department. To protect sensitive employee data, Rossum offers industry compliance with high-security standards — and recordkeeping for industry audits. 

You can improve efficiency by automating rote tasks while continuing to assess which tasks should be handled manually. As a bonus, HR document processing helps you to save money with faster data extraction, fewer mistakes, and less paper. 

Escaping the HR Time Killer with Rossum 

Trust is at the core of every HR department. With intelligent document processing, HR departments can maintain a high degree of security while improving productivity. 

Across the globe, Rossum is a secure cloud-native provider that can help your HR department to process documents with pinpoint accuracy thanks to our highly adaptable AI neural engine. 

Don’t let the HR Time Killer get you this year. To see how Rossum can help your HR department, contact us for a free trial and learn how Rossum differs from other IDP solutions.