Over 30% of HR professionals identify insufficient technology as the reason for their inability to automate and improve their onboarding process, according to a report by Kronos.
There are many areas where automation can streamline your HR processes. Brian Martinek, Senior Program Manager, Corporate Engineering—Business Systems at Checkr, spoke at Workato’s first user conference about his experience with end-to-end employee onboarding and offboarding automation. When it comes to establishing this kind of workflow, Martinek suggests leaning into the power of your identity and access management (IdM) system. Integrating your IdM with your HR systems can increase scalability, eradicate pain points, and mitigate compliance risks.
Here’s how this integration can help your onboarding and offboarding process:
Allows for scalability
Automation in your onboarding and offboarding processes can lead the way to a seamless experience for both new hires and current employees.
Any organization can benefit from the partnership between an IdM system and automation, but this instance is especially powerful in a company that is experiencing high-growth. The need to onboard a large number of new employees and set them up manually with the correct permissions can cause a bottleneck. With the right implementations, HR teams can mass onboard employees without having to worry about allocating appropriate authorizations manually.
The first step is to create a replicable workflow between your IdM system and your onboarding and offboarding processes. Martinek shared that Checkr utilizes a parent/child framework. The framework includes a parent layer where the lifecycle events and business logic sits and a child layer where the actions, individual use cases, and callable recipes exist. Martinek highlights that the framework “keeps the flow of events simple and makes it easier to audit.”
With this framework in place, you can automate the onboarding process by designating new employees into predetermined roles with set permissions and authorization.
This same concept can be applied to your offboarding procedure. When you are transitioning an employee out of your company, it is imperative that you swiftly change their access. Integrating and automating your IdM system permits your HR team to set up events in your workflow to trigger the deprovisioning of accounts and access to your company’s system. Martinek shares that the combination of your IdM solution and an intelligent automation platform is “more powerful than each one of them individually.”
Increases efficiency
Employee onboarding and offboarding procedures can be a tedious process, especially if you are synchronizing your employee data across your systems manually. Relying on a manual process opens your organization up to human error and longer processes. Time is wasted when your HR team has to manually activate and deactivate employee accounts throughout your organization. In addition, utilizing a manual procedure makes your HR team reliant on IT’s help throughout the onboarding process to provision accounts, verify authentication, and provide access to applications.
One way of looking at it is that you can’t afford not to integrate your IdM with your HRIS systems: Without integration, you will cause unnecessary reliance on your IT department, eating up more of your organization’s time and resources.
Strengthens compliance
When dealing with onboarding and offboarding, giving employees the wrong accounts or access to information unrelated to their job can be not only a mess, but also a legal nightmare.
Providing the wrong permissions during onboarding takes time to rectify and reprovision the right controls. Aside from possibly granting improper account or application access, you may be taking a seat from an employee who actually needs access.
Similarly, you can face compliance issues with your offboarding process. If you are manually deprovisioning access and accounts to former employees, it can take days or even weeks. Allowing former employees to still have access to your company’s systems and network poses potential for compliance risks and data breaches.
By integrating your IdM system with your HRIS, you can leverage automation to instantly provision the right access to incoming employees, helping you keep your systems and data secure. Martinek states that integrating their IdM helps by “lowering our risk profile because we’re automating based on the identity management life cycle events rather than a direct connection to our HRIS.”
Interested in learning more about automations in HR? Watch the full session with Brian Martinek here
