What is HR automation? Practical examples

17 de February, 2025

Human resources departments are crucial to the success of companies, as they manage their most valuable asset: people.

Professionals in this area are responsible for processes ranging from recruitment to onboarding, training and development, salary processing, vacation and leave management, among many others.

Some of these processes tend to involve a high administrative burden, as well as manual and repetitive tasks. But it doesn’t always have to be this way. The emergence and consolidation of digital technologies and artificial intelligence means that HR managers are now able to automate much of their recurring work.

Come and discover with us what HR automation is and some practical examples of tasks that can be automated.

What is HR automation?

HR automation is the use of technology to carry out human resources management tasks automatically. The aim is to optimize workflows, reducing the need to manually carry out processes that tend to be repetitive and time-consuming.

Automating processes improves operational efficiency and allows HR professionals to focus on more strategic projects related to people management and business growth.

Benefits of HR automation

Automating human resources processes and tasks brings with it many benefits:

• Greater efficiency: reducing the volume of manual work allows HR managers to be not only more productive, but also more efficient, since there is an increased capacity to produce more with fewer resources;
• Fewer errors: repetitive tasks open the way to human error and, when digital tools are properly parameterized to perform these tasks, the margin for error is smaller;
• Improved experience for candidates and employees: automation makes companies’ internal processes more fluid and agile, which improves the candidate experience during recruitment and preboarding but also the overall employee experience.

Practical examples of HR automation

If you list all your HR team’s processes, from recruiting a candidate to the eventual departure of an employee, it’s likely that many of them are standardized and recurring. It is these processes that can most likely be simplified and automated.

1 – Recruitment

During the process of hiring new professionals, tasks such as:

• Search for potential candidates on online platforms such as LinkedIn, for example;
• Screening CVs and filtering applications that meet the identified requirements;
• Communication flows and reminders to reduce no-shows at interviews and maintain regular communication;
• Generation of proposals to present to the selected candidates;
• Among others.

2 – Onboarding

The phase of integrating new employees is also, par excellence, a period in which many tasks can be automated:

• Creation of email flows explaining company procedures, initial training, etc;
• Providing access to internal tools;
• Sending and receiving signed documentation;
• Automatic monitoring of the completion of mandatory training and sending reminders when it has not yet been completed;
• Among others.

3 – Vacation management

Manually approving and managing employees’ vacation days is prone to human error. On the contrary, HR management software makes it possible:

• Calculate the balance of vacation days for each employee;
• Simplify vacation requests by employees;
• Facilitate approvals by the respective leaders.

4 – Salary processing

Monthly payments are a recurring task – since they have to be made every month – and are typically time-consuming. What’s more, any human errors have a direct impact on employees’ pay (they may be paid less or more, or they may be paid late, for example).

In this sense, there are stages of payroll processing that can – and should – be automated:

• Calculation of the amount to be transferred based on the days worked (taking into account possible absences, sick leave, licenses, etc.);
• Calculation of commissions or overtime;
• Deduction of fees and taxes;
• Generating and sending pay slips;
• Among others.

5 – Employee benefits

Allocating and managing employee benefits can also involve some administrative work, especially if your company has a comprehensive benefits plan, with benefits in various areas – for example, food, health, childhood, education, among others.

It is necessary to validate the eligibility of employees for certain benefits (such as childcare benefits), deal with requests to issue benefits (for example, meal cards), make transfers of the amounts stipulated for each employee, among other processes.

In this context, tools such as Edenred’s Client Portal enable centralized, simple and autonomous management of the multiple benefits granted by the company to its employees.

6 – Ongoing training

The existence of training and skills development opportunities is one of the aspects that employees value most about the companies they work for. As such, it is important to put together a solid training plan that contributes to the growth of professionals, but also to their satisfaction and involvement.

In order to do this, the training program must be based on digital tools that enable it:

• Provide training based on the function, department, but also on the interests of the employees;
• Monitor progress and send reminders to encourage completion of mandatory training;
• Creating relevant, up-to-date and interactive training content that keeps employees interested and motivated.

7 – Offboarding

Just as when an employee arrives at the company, when they leave it involves a number of tasks on the part of the HR department. It is usually necessary to:

• Preparing the transition and the respective handover to the team;
• Ensuring the delivery of company equipment and revoking access to internal tools;
• Settling accounts relating to salary, allowances, unused vacation days, etc;
• Promote an employee exit interview;
• Communicate the departure to the rest of the company and adjust internal resources, such as organization charts.

These processes must be well defined and standardized, so that many of the steps involved can be automated. For example, the exit survey can be sent automatically, by email, with a form that makes it possible to capture and systematize the professionals’ responses. Analyzing this data can provide valuable information on why people are taking on other professional challenges.

As we can see, HR automation can be applied to a large number of processes carried out by human resources departments.

Start by identifying the areas in which manual work is most prevalent and may be generating inefficiencies. Then try to figure out which platforms are best suited to simplifying these tasks and optimizing workflows.

Although implementing some automation processes may involve some initial effort, the balance in terms of productivity and agility will certainly be positive in the medium and long term.