I read a statistic recently that 77 percent of HR professionals say their departments

The life of an HR pro who has the right technology

have gone paperless. And I started thinking about the other 23 percent, having people come in and get a piece of paper and fill out all the boxes—oops, mistake? Scratch it out, or, here, have a fresh piece of paper. Hear how archaic that sounds? In honor of Austin Startup Week I just want to say: It’s the 21st century, y’all!

I know that it used to be that people had to come in and get a piece of paper when they wanted to apply for jobs, change information on their W2s, put in for vacation or overtime pay. Then someone had to dutifully record that change in the appropriate place and file the document with a bunch of other dead trees. Now, the whole thing can be done in seconds, from the employee’s computer. In fact, you can keep complete track of an employee’s journey through your company, from application to exit interview, in a fraction of the time it used to take just to handle one interaction. You can track how much they got paid, what benefits package they chose, whether any insurance was paid out on their behalf, whether they had any disciplinary actions. You can keep track of performance reviews, vacations, sick days, promotions and raises.

And with all this information sitting on a server in a warehouse full of servers, instead of in a room swallowed by file cabinets, you can access it in seconds with a few strokes of the keyboard.

And there are other cool uses for HR technology. For example, candidates can fill out applications from home or from their desks at the job they want to leave to work for your company. They don’t have to stop everything and come get a piece of paper. These applicant-tracking systems keep a searchable record of who has applied, what skills and qualifications they have, where they are in the process, and they ensure you’re not doing anything discriminatory with regard to race, sex, religion, etc. If you choose not to hire someone, these tracking systems send candidates an email. This means that candidates will not be calling your office every day asking about the hiring process and also reduces the chance that a good candidate, who might be perfect for another one of your positions at a different time, won’t hate you for never having gotten back to them.

And what about all those regulations? Need a report for the EEOC, or the ACA or the DOL with specific information about your workforce? HR technology was created to find the bits of data relevant to the report you need to generate and give you the information in seconds…or minutes depending on the size of your employee base and the speed of your system.

Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s fast, efficient, accurate and saves trees. So if you happen to be one of those 23 percent of HR departments that’s still filing things in manila folders, it’s time…. And if you’re not sure where to begin, call us.

We work with companies on a project basis or on retainer, providing a custom level of HR help designed for your business, with offices in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston. Contact me at Caroline@valentinehr.com or call (512) 420-8267