Top 5 Must-have Digital Skills For HRs

In an all-digital world, it’s only normal for company stakeholders to expect the HR department to be highly tech-savvy. After all, when whole companies are rapidly moving towards digitalisation, why should the HR function be left out?

In fact, we can safely say that many people rarely associate the HR function with digitalisation. Human resource management is often the last function to be considered for any kind of digital upgrade, which leads to the entire department still relying on manual labour, which is repetitive in nature and prone to errors.

Unstoppable global pressure is demanding a digital HR revolution. The world of work started to change before the worldwide pandemic, accelerated by necessity during the epidemic and will continue to alter as the ways we work and the places we work to grow.

Many professional occupations will not return to the workplace after COVID, citing the post-pandemic scenario. While some businesses with significant real estate investments foresee a return to the office, the great majority of employees say they prefer remote or hybrid work choices.

Companies that are working hard to digitally modernise HR will profit from this significant shift in talent. Workers have honed their priorities, and they are not hesitant to use their alternatives.

Face-to-face interactions, file cabinets, and paperwork are all used in traditional HR operations. There's a lot of paperwork, from payroll to attendance systems to performance management to applicant management and onboarding.

Moving those procedures to technology-based solutions is part of the HR digital transformation. Technology, on the other hand, isn't the be-all and end-all of transformation. It's also not the best place to begin.

Leadership, culture and the way people work are all important factors in a successful HR digital transformation. This whole workplace change is just supported by technology and better process efficiency.

It's also vital to keep in mind that a business is never truly digitally changed. This is a process that will change the way people live and work in the future, whether it's tomorrow, next year, or decades from now. The objective should be to help your employees get to where they want to go, how they want to be hired, and how they want to work right now.

Improved employee experience, streamlined corporate procedures, better data-driven decision-making, and more are all advantages of digital transformation in HR.

Companies may save time and money by using digital technologies to improve communication, drive efficiency, recruit top talent, allow workers to work from anywhere, provide information that might affect business choices, and more.

HR can guarantee that the chosen technology and procedures put people and culture first and that changes are accepted by all when HR leads the digital transformation effort, incorporating leadership and engaging every employee along the way.

In this article, we take a look at the top 5 must-have digital skills for every HR and how to gain these skills.

Using an HRMS

There is nothing more laborious in the day of an HR than manually compiling employee data to perform a range of functions like calculating compensation, pay-outs, wages, and salaries. This is because each of the aforementioned functions requires HRs to carefully determine and accurately calculate the exact number of leaves taken, jobs completed, overtime worked, and so many more variables performed by an employee before correctly and fairly remunerating each employee on a monthly basis.

Luckily for HRs, manual calculations were a reality before the advent of modern and capable HRMS platforms. In today’s day and age, knowing how to operate an HRMS can quickly cut down an HRs laborious, repeated work cycles into half of what they previously were. A modern HRMS keeps a track of all the variables which affect an employee’s monthly remuneration amount and gives the HR department greater control over managing these monthly cycles.

Typical HR operations such as resource onboarding, recruiting, payroll administration, performance management, and so on can take a long time and require a lot of resources. When done manually, payroll management for a firm with 50+ workers might take up to two days for the full HR team to complete. However, when using an HRMS to automate the process, it just takes a few hours and requires no or very little human participation. This frees up your HR staff to focus on other important activities like improving HR processes, corporate training, increasing employee productivity, and creating a positive organisational culture, among others.

Employee self-service is one of the most important HR duties in an organisation since HR staff is responsible for providing basic services to employees such as procedure explanations, certificate and document preparation, and so on. This is inconvenient and time-consuming, resulting in a decrease in the HR executive's productivity. Employee self-service is enabled by an HRMS, which implies that employees may produce these papers from any place by just entering into the system using their credentials. Both the employee and the HR department save time as a result of this.

Most businesses operate in complicated legal settings that need them to adhere to a variety of laws, including those imposed by the taxes and legal departments. An HRMS enables the execution of compliance checks and the setting of alerts as needed to guarantee that the firm is constantly adhering to regulatory regulations, since not doing so may be highly costly in terms of fines and penalties for non-compliance.

According to a study, organisations might lose up to 5% of their income each year due to employee fraud. However, because it is an integrated solution that makes it hard for people to manipulate the system, a well-implemented HRMS may help you save this cash as well as the time necessary to process these claims. To make the claims process more smooth, processes are marked, formats are specified, and the system is connected with existing finance, accounting, and ERP modules.

So without any doubt, one of the most important digital skills that any HR needs today is the ability to understand and effectively use their HRMS. One way to learn an HRMS is by implementing it within your workspace and getting hands-on experience from using it. However, you may soon realise that the HRMS you implemented may be too difficult to work with. As a result, we recommend you first start with a free trial, test the platform, and then implement it. You can try our Hoshi HRMS here for free!

Automating Workflows

The next important skill in the basket of modern HRs is the ability to automate repetitive time-consuming tasks. For example, automate monthly employee payroll generation, monthly leave reports creation, or even automate the monthly report sending to top management for review. Once again, in order to automate workflows, it’s important for HRs to understand how an HRMS works and all the automation features that it offers. Some HRMS come with semi-automation abilities, while others are fully automated. Based on the level of automation that your HRMS provides, the cost to license that software on a monthly basis can go up or down.

Workflow Automation is the use of digital technologies to replace paper-based and manual processes, usually through a single work platform that connects with current corporate systems and controls. The tactical goal is to make sure that the correct people are working on the right tasks at the right time and that they have everything they need to do their jobs when they need it. Businesses may standardise work, ensuring that established business standards and compliance requirements are followed, reducing or eliminating human error and deviation, and giving visibility and responsibility at every level of the automated process.

Organisations may use a workflow automation platform to lessen their dependency on these communications and tracking technologies by ensuring that all work task information and communications are either done within the platform or kept track of within the appropriate work tasks.

There is far less dependence on human memory or task tracking spreadsheets that may or may not have been shared after being modified by a worker elsewhere in the firm. Instead, the workflow platform stores this data in a centralised repository that can be shared or viewed by anybody with the necessary permissions.

It's recommended that any organisation with more than 100 employees must opt for a fully automated HRMS because such software reduces the manual labour attached to processing various components for a large employee base.

Automating workflows is difficult to learn unless HRs get access to a full-time HRMS with complete automation abilities. It’s with trial and error that HRs master the art of skilfully automating redundant workflows, giving them more time to work on things that matter.

Manage and Conduct Digital Interviews

Work from home brought with it the phenomena of remote interviewing or digital interviewing. And one thing is for sure, both WFH and remote interviews are here to stay. It’s best for modern HR to understand the implications of both these concepts because remote working and interviews are only possible via remote interaction tools.

Learning an interaction tool is easy, and mastering it is life-changing. The possibilities of interviewing the right candidate from across the world make such a tool nothing short of a potent tool in the hands of a skilful recruiter. However, it’s also a tool that is frequently used by candidates to cheat the interviewing system. As a result, it’s an important tool that every HR must know how to operate, and more importantly, it’s an important skill that every HR must possess.

Some aspects of remote interviewing are sending calendar invites, creating meeting links, adding attendees, conducting the online interview, ensuring the candidate is not abusing the system and fairly determining the candidate’s application for the post once the interview ends.

Like the previous skills on this list, managing remote interviews can only be mastered with time. The more time and effort that one spends conducting such events, the more skills one gain for future events.

Sometimes the best talent isn't right around the corner. You can conduct interviews with anyone using Digital Interviewing, even if the candidate lives too far away. Digital interviewing helps to alleviate the anxiety that some candidates have before the interview. Furthermore, it does not put candidates under any pressure to go to the site, nor does it add those costs to their budget. Because of their anxiousness, some candidates do not make it through an interview.

A digital interview serves as an icebreaker for first contact and can help you overcome fear. As a result, as a recruiter, you'll be able to focus more on the skills rather than determining if a candidate's poor performance is due to anxiousness or a lack of adequate talents.

Scheduling a digital interview is a lot easier. Aside from not needing to plan and reserve a location, there are now tools that can handle the scheduling. There will be no more lengthy email chains to arrange a date or location. Furthermore, it allows you to attend the session at a convenient time and reduces the amount of time you spend there.

The option to record a virtual interview is one of the advantages of doing so. Interviewers may forget what the candidate stated during the interview. Inform the candidate that the interview will be videotaped and obtain their approval prior to the interview. Following the interview, the interviewer can review the recording to take notes and make final judgments.

For quality control purposes, I strongly advise the hiring staff to capture interview footage as well. Interview recordings provide the recruitment team with a behind-the-scenes look at how the interviewer interacts with the prospect. This useful information will provide feedback to the interviewing team and help your recruitment team discover interviewer training topics.

Understand Analytics

This list and its skills are incomplete without the HR being able to understand the importance of analytics. You see, the HRMS does a lot more than just calculate compensation and remuneration. An HRMS also acts as a performance management system and skill development platform. And the HRMS helps with both these applications by providing learners with content, then testing their learning, and providing actionable data for HRs to understand, analyse, compare, and create an action plan.

Basically, an HRMS is regularly generating Big Data on the activities and behaviour of your employees. It’s up to the HR department to extract the right data and use it to develop an action plan that helps employees perform better.

Data analysis first starts with data extraction, and to extract data, HRs must first implement the correct data collection parameters needed to collect only the most useful data. This skill of being able to collect, analyse, extract, and process correct data is one of the biggest digital skills needed by all modern HRs.

An analysis is a process of thoroughly examining the components of something. By combining the concepts of data and analytics, the contemporary term data analytics was born. As a result, data analytics is a tool or approach for gaining important insights into the inner workings of a certain activity or event. The phrase "data analytics" is usually associated with organisations and their operations.Companies may acquire useful insights from their enormous datasets by undertaking data analytics with a variety of technologies.

They will be able to deliver replies and services that are specially tailored to the demands of their clients' thanks to the analysis. In recent years, the value of data analytics has been more apparent. The phrase "data analytics" is sometimes shortened as "analytics," and it is critical not just for major corporations but also for small firms.

Though data analytics may appear to be a product of current technology born from the exponential rate at which we collect data every day, the earliest corporate usage of data analytics dates back to the early nineteenth century. Computers quickly evolved into decision-making support systems as the era of computers and other digital technologies progressed.

As a result, the amount of generated data increased significantly and data analytics began to attract increased worldwide attention. Since then, the quantity of data we produce on a daily basis has grown at an exponential rate. With the introduction of Big Data, Data Warehouses, and the Cloud, the usage of data analytics grew at a rapid pace. These new technologies not only aided in the greater use of data analytics, but they also aided in the evolution of data analytics and its development into what it is today.

The study of data linkages might possibly lead firms to come up with inventive new approaches and commercial strategies if the interdependencies between individuals, institutions, entities, and technology processes are made more evident.

Exploratory data analysis, business intelligence, and data management are examples of techniques that organisations may employ to acquire a better understanding of how changes in one function influence other processes.

Market leaders in every business demand shorter decision cycles and less delays in the process of exploring and adopting innovative techniques. However, most businesses' main concern is that as they progress toward becoming more data-driven, their intuition or gut feelings are becoming less important.

Setting Up Online Training

Finally, the human resource department is responsible for managing and upgrading the human resource at every organisation. This means that HRs are responsible for training and upskilling the human resource to a point where old employees are more skilled than they were when they first joined the organisation.

This means, HRs must learn to build and deploy remote training that can be accessed by all employees on a single platform. Normally, companies implement a full-blown LMS to train employees, which is ideally the right thing to do. However, some HRMS also come with an inbuilt LMS that allows HRs to set up training workflows using the same HRMS they use to manage employee performance and compensation. This ties every aspect of human resource management neatly using one single HRMS solution. From management to training, everything is done on one software!

Needless to say, managing training workflows, and more importantly, remote training workflows are not easy. An HR responsible for training their employees must first learn to determine the type of learning to deploy, then learn how to build one, then learn to deploy and attract learners, and finally assess the outcomes and improve further iterations of their training event.

As evident, all of this is easier said that done. However, if you have a good software to assist you along all paths of this process, the task becomes a lot simpler. Try our Hoshi HRMS with an inbuilt LMS and training repository. Hoshi’s one-stop to all HR problem is built into its very architecture making it the perfect HRMS for modern HRs looking to reduce the stress of repeated activities while having access to many other features like training and automation.

To know more about Hoshi, it’s best for you to book a slot with one of our product experts who will take you through the software, giving you a detailed breakdown of Hoshi’s abilities and features. Book a demo here.

Hoshi by Neural IT a cloud-based software helping simplify daily HR tasks. Digitise your HR function & let Hoshi empower HRs to easily onboard new hires, track employee progress, and analyse data to support employee development and organisation.

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