If you are a human resources manager, your job is obsolete — you are no longer needed. It is only a matter of time before you are shown the door. Automation in human resources — the process of enhancing the efficiency of the HR departments by freeing employees from tedious manual tasks — is already here.
The shock doctrine
Human resources management — or rather, human-managed hiring and onboarding — is dead. I don’t know the exact date; but what I am sure about is that one day they dragged it out of its cubicle; took it the back of the building, near the loading docks, and put a metaphorical bullet in its skull.
They then dumped its body in a recycling bin, along with decommissioned 80386-based PCs, daisy wheel printers and boxes of un-opened DynaTAC 8000X “mobile” phones. After years of faithful service, it met its end by being unceremoniously dumped like yesterday’s coffee.
My apologies for by bedside manners, but Automation in human resources — the process of enhancing the efficiency of the HR department by freeing employees from tedious manual tasks — is already here.
“Kitty couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. Her nerves were strained as two tight strings, and even a glass of hot wine, that Vronsky made her drink, did not help her. Lying in bed she kept going over and over that monstrous scene at the meadow.”²,³
How it all began
If you are a human resources manager, your job is obsolete — you are no longer needed. It is only a matter of time before you are shown the door, that is, if you have not been fired already. Do not be shocked. This was a long time coming and you saw the first signs long ago — you just refused to believe you were next.
Allow me to explain: a recent study¹ on the changing roles of the Human Resources professional found that 50% of respondents believed that traditional Human Resources functions would, “…continue to grow into a more strategic function as administrative responsibilities are automated or outsourced to others…”
In early 2008, newspapers around published a story that created a minor buzz. It claimed that a Russian publishing house — Astrel SPb — was releasing a book completely written by a computer.
The book was to be called True Love and was a variation of the classic novel Anna Karenina⁴ written in the style of Haruki Murakami⁵. It was widely reported the publisher claimed a group of Russian developers and philologists collaborated to create a computer program that generated the manuscript.
In early 2016, Nishad Nawaz, a researcher at The Kingdom University in Bahrain published a paper⁶ titled, Automation of the HR functions enhance the professional efficiency of the HR Professionals-A Review. In the abstract, Mr. Nawaz states,
“…In many organizations, the human resource department is responsible for many strategic tasks from managing the hiring to [the] termination of employee[s], for example monitoring of employees’ at all the levels, handling payroll, managing employee[s’] benefits and so on. To make this work easier[,] organizations across the world are investing in HR automation [to] [carry] out the best human capital decision[s]…”
#human-resources #machine-learning #automation #jobs #employment #hr-by-spreadsheet #hr-by-algorithm #hackernoon-top-story
