4 Compelling Reasons to Apply Process Mining in Human Resources in 2024
Is your HR department plagued by inefficient processes that lower employee satisfaction and engagement? Are you looking for ways to optimize your hiring, onboarding, training, and operations?
If so, process mining should be on your radar.
Process mining is an emerging technology that provides powerful new insights into HR processes based on actual data. It enables continuous improvement through bottleneck identification, root cause analysis, and objective process monitoring.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore four compelling reasons your HR team should pilot process mining initiatives in 2024, along with use cases, benefits, challenges, and recommendations.
Why Should HR Consider Process Mining Now?
Before we dive into the key reasons and use cases, let‘s address why 2023 is the right time to evaluate process mining for human resources.
The costs of inefficient processes are rising
According to Deloitte research, nearly $30,000 per employee is spent annually by Fortune 500 companies just dealing with routine HR transactional activities. Multiplied across tens of thousands of employees, the total costs are staggering.
At the same time, the negative impacts of poor processes on employee retention and engagement continue to increase. As per Gallup, companies with a highly engaged workforce have 41% lower absenteeism and 21% higher profitability.
However, only 15% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. Inefficient processes and bureaucracy play a major role in these low engagement levels.
Process inefficiencies also contribute to recruiting costs, which can reach $4,000 per hire according to SHRM.
New technologies enable breakthrough insights
Emerging process mining solutions leverage massive computing power, advanced algorithms, and AI to unlock new process intelligence from digital systems event log data.
These technologies now allow HR teams to "see around corners" and uncover bottlenecks and improvement opportunities that were previously impossible to identify in purely human-driven processes.
For example, one process mining pilot at a Fortune 500 retailer identified over 700 process improvements, enabling labor cost reductions of 4-5% in the first year.
The business case to pilot process mining in HR has never been stronger given the rising costs of inefficiency and new capabilities to address the root causes.
4 Reasons HR Should Prioritize Process Mining
Let‘s now explore the four most compelling reasons your HR team should pilot process mining initiatives in the coming year:
1. Resolve Hiring Process Bottlenecks
One major opportunity for process mining in HR focuses on optimizing recruiting and hiring – one of the most critical business processes.
According to LinkedIn, the average time to fill open roles has increased from 36 days in 2016 to over 40 days by 2020. Speed is critical, with ~50% of candidates lost for every extra hiring day.
Slow hiring also leaves roles vacant. This negatively impacts the workloads of existing employees, and the revenue lost due to unfilled roles is estimated to easily exceed $1 million annually for large enterprises.
By analyzing event log data from your applicant tracking system, process mining can:
- Visualize your end-to-end hiring process with all variants
- Quantify processing and idle times between hiring stages
- Pinpoint applications bottlenecks, like slow interview scheduling
- Identify root causes of candidate drop off
With these insights, you can optimize the hiring process, reduce time to fill, and improve key talent acquisition metrics.
For example, one organization used process mining to decrease time to hire by 15% through streamlining their interview and job offer steps after identifying major delays.
2. Shorten and Improve Onboarding
Process mining is also highly applicable for enhancing employee onboarding processes.
According to the Wynhurst Group, over 33% of new hires consider leaving their job within the first six months due to poor onboarding and organizational fit. Replacing these employees can cost up to five times their salary.
With process mining, you can visualize onboarding processes to identify:
- Execution times for each task
- Common delays in obtaining equipment or access
- Completion rates for training modules
- Paths taken through onboarding systems
Optimizing onboarding processes results in more engaged, productive new hires. It also reduces ramp up time to full performance by up to 30%, saving costs.
One company used process mining to reduce their new hire onboarding process from 25 days down to just 12 days.
3. Manage Offboarding Effectively
While not the most exciting topic, improving employee offboarding processes is crucial for mitigating business risk.
When exits aren‘t handled properly, critical knowledge walks out the door. Valuable equipment and access credentials also need to be returned and reset.
Offboarding process mining provides visibility into:
- Timeliness completing each offboarding step
- Policy compliance – e.g. exit interview done
- Handoff and task coordination between managers and HR
- Cases with delays or skipped steps
With these insights, you can continuously improve the exit process. This reduces business risk, protects IP, and avoids legal issues.
4. Resolve Employee Queries Faster
HR teams handle a range of employee requests daily related to payroll, benefits, policies, and more. It becomes challenging to optimize request handling when done manually.
Applying process mining techniques enables you to:
- Identify seasonal request spikes for better staffing
- See average resolution times by request type
- Improve first-call resolution rates
- Balance workloads between team members
By understanding drivers of HR request bottlenecks, you can systematically improve response times. This leads to greater employee satisfaction and free up HR staff time for more strategic work.
One company used process mining to reduce HR inquiry resolution time by over 40% through better work shift alignment to handle peak inquiry periods.
Beyond these four areas, process mining broadly applies across nearly all HR processes – from performance management to learning.
Key Benefits for HR Teams
Now that we‘ve covered some compelling use cases, what benefits can HR organizations realize from process mining?
Continuous process oversight – Move from periodic evaluations to ongoing monitoring for early issue detection
Data-driven diagnostics – Uncover root causes of process bottlenecks with precision
Early warning of deviations – Detect anomalies as they occur to prevent downstream impacts
Enhanced employee experience – Systematically improve touchpoints like onboarding and queries
Benchmarking process variants – Quantify differences between operating models and business units
Productivity improvements – Optimize processes frees up staff time from manual work
According to research firm Gartner, process mining delivers average cost savings and productivity gains of 20% for transactional processes.
For HR specifically, organizations have achieved 50% faster transaction processing, over 30% reductions in policy exceptions, and 10-15% lower HR labor costs.
Beyond efficiency gains, implementing process mining best practices will elevate your entire workforce and leadership teams by ingraining continuous improvement in your HR DNA.
Overcoming Challenges with Process Mining
While the benefits are too big to ignore, organizations should be aware of some potential pitfalls when launching process mining:
Insufficient data – Transactional systems must have digital data capture. If processes are purely manual, mining is impossible.
Data complexity – Event logs can be challenging to interpret. Visualizations may appear as messy "spaghetti" models initially.
Capability building – Developing expertise in process mining analysis takes investment in tools and training to build competency.
Change management – Transitioning from intuition-led processes changes mindsets. Stakeholder buy-in and executive sponsorship is key.
Data privacy – Personally identifiable data in logs must be anonymized and protected through protocols.
The good news is these hurdles can be overcome through good design, leadership engagement, and piloting process mining on targeted processes first before scaling.
It‘s also important to set expectations that this is a continuous improvement journey. Quick overnight wins are unlikely – plan for 6+ months to show impact.
Which Process Mining Tools Are Best for HR?
Specialized process mining solutions for HR are available from leading technology vendors:
Celonis – The market leader in process mining, with specific HR solutions and capabilities
UiPath – Top robotic process automation platform with process mining for HR built-in
myInvenio – Specialists in process mining tailored for human resources management
QPR ProcessAnalyzer – Flexible process analytics platform with HR process templates
Signavio – Strong process modeling and intelligence able to uncover HR process insights
The choice of solution depends on your use cases, technical expertise, integration needs, and budget.
On-premise vs SaaS options are available – evaluate your IT infrastructure strategy and data security preferences when deciding.
Some tools also provide vertical solutions tailored for HR versus more general-purpose platforms. Do you need HR templates and content packs or a custom-configured solution? These are key considerations.
I advise starting with 1-2 use cases, proving value and then expanding. Some offerings support unlimited free trials to pilot – leverage these to validate capabilities before committing.
Is Your HR Team Ready to Mine for Process Gold?
The organizations that will win in the future are those that embrace technologies like process mining to systematically improve efficiency and experience – before competitors.
As we‘ve covered, the use cases and benefits for HR are too substantial to ignore. Process inefficiencies directly reduce productivity, increase costs, hamper recruiting results, and disengage employees.
By applying process mining techniques outlined in this guide, you can transition to continuous, data-driven HR process excellence.
Just imagine having clear visibility into all your HR processes, with the analytical power to understand exactly why and where they underperform. This enables you to drive systematic improvements across the employee lifecycle.
To learn more about how process mining can help transform your HR operations, request a demo from one of the leading solutions mentioned above. The time to process mine is now.
