7 HR Workflows You Can Automate with Make.com This Week
In today’s fast-paced business environment, Human Resources departments are constantly striving to balance strategic initiatives with the demands of daily operational tasks. The reality for many HR and recruiting professionals is that a significant portion of their valuable time is consumed by repetitive, manual processes – everything from data entry and email follow-ups to scheduling and document generation. This isn’t just inefficient; it’s a bottleneck that prevents HR from truly becoming a strategic partner in business growth. High-value employees are bogged down by low-value work, leading to frustration, errors, and missed opportunities to focus on what truly matters: people and strategy.
The good news? The solution isn’t about working harder, but smarter. Low-code automation platforms like Make.com offer a powerful, accessible way to reclaim countless hours and transform HR operations. Make.com acts as the central nervous system for your tech stack, connecting disparate systems and automating complex multi-step workflows without requiring extensive coding knowledge. For HR leaders, this means moving beyond theoretical efficiency to tangible, measurable time savings and accuracy improvements, often achievable within a single week of focused effort. This isn’t about replacing human judgment; it’s about offloading the mundane to empower your team to focus on the human element of human resources. Let’s explore seven critical HR workflows that are ripe for automation with Make.com, delivering immediate and impactful benefits to your organization.
1. Streamlining New Hire Onboarding & Pre-boarding
The journey for a new employee begins long before their first day, and an efficient pre-boarding and onboarding process is crucial for engagement and retention. Manually orchestrating this often involves a dizzying array of tasks: sending welcome emails, collecting documents, setting up access, ordering equipment, and scheduling initial meetings across multiple departments. Each step is critical, but the manual coordination can be a significant time sink and prone to error, leading to a less-than-ideal first impression for your new talent. A disjointed onboarding experience can leave new hires feeling unprepared and less connected, impacting their productivity and long-term commitment to the company.
With Make.com, you can automate this entire sequence from the moment an offer is accepted. Imagine a scenario where, upon a candidate’s status changing to “Hired” in your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), Make.com instantly triggers a cascade of actions. It can automatically send a personalized welcome email with pre-boarding materials, generate and send necessary HR forms via DocuSign or PandaDoc, create an employee profile in your HRIS (Human Resources Information System), alert IT to set up accounts and order equipment, notify the hiring manager to schedule their initial check-ins, and even add the new hire to relevant internal communication channels like Slack or Microsoft Teams. This comprehensive automation not only drastically reduces manual administrative load for your HR team but also ensures consistency, accuracy, and a seamless, professional experience for every new employee. The benefits extend beyond time savings; a well-executed automated onboarding process sets the stage for a positive employee experience, contributing directly to higher retention rates and faster time-to-productivity.
2. Automating Candidate Screening & Communication
In a competitive hiring landscape, efficient candidate screening and communication are paramount. HR and recruiting teams often spend hours manually reviewing resumes, sending initial screening questionnaires, scheduling interviews, and sending standardized follow-up communications. This repetitive cycle, while necessary, can quickly overwhelm recruiters, leading to delays in the hiring process, missed opportunities for top talent, and a degraded candidate experience due to slow or inconsistent responses. The sheer volume of applications can make it challenging to maintain timely, personalized communication, which is a critical factor in how candidates perceive your organization.
Make.com provides the infrastructure to automate much of this labor-intensive process, allowing your recruiters to focus on high-value interactions. For instance, when a new application is submitted to your ATS, Make.com can extract key information and, using AI tools like OpenAI, summarize resumes or identify specific keywords to help pre-screen candidates against job requirements. Qualified candidates can then automatically receive a link to a tailored screening questionnaire (e.g., via Google Forms or Typeform). Based on their responses, Make.com can trigger different pathways: scheduling an initial interview directly into the recruiter’s calendar (via Calendly or Chili Piper), sending personalized rejection emails to unqualified candidates, or even initiating skills assessments. Furthermore, automated reminders can be sent to candidates about upcoming interviews or to prompt them for missing information. This holistic automation ensures that every applicant receives timely communication, streamlines the evaluation process, and significantly reduces the administrative burden on your recruiting team, enabling them to engage more deeply with the most promising candidates and accelerate the time-to-hire for critical roles. This system doesn’t just save time; it enhances your employer brand and ensures a consistent, professional candidate journey.
3. Expediting Employee Lifecycle Event Management
The employee lifecycle is punctuated by numerous significant events beyond hiring and firing – promotions, departmental transfers, performance reviews, anniversaries, and more. Each of these events often requires a specific set of administrative tasks: updating records in multiple systems, notifying relevant stakeholders, drafting new offer letters or contracts, adjusting benefits, and ensuring compliance. Managing these transitions manually can be complex and time-consuming, creating opportunities for errors or omissions that could impact employee satisfaction, payroll accuracy, or regulatory adherence. When an employee is promoted, for example, it involves not just a title and salary change, but potentially changes in reporting structure, access permissions, and benefits eligibility, all of which need to be communicated and actioned.
Make.com offers a robust solution for automating these critical lifecycle events, ensuring consistency and accuracy. When an employee’s status or role changes in your HRIS (e.g., a promotion or transfer), Make.com can be configured to automatically initiate a series of predefined actions. This could include updating their profile in your payroll system, adjusting access rights in various internal applications (via integration with identity management tools), sending personalized communication to the employee and their new manager outlining the changes, and generating updated contractual documents through platforms like PandaDoc or DocuSign. For anniversaries or performance review cycles, Make.com can trigger automated reminders to managers, initiate the distribution of feedback forms, and even pre-populate review templates with relevant data from the HRIS. By automating these recurring, multi-step processes, HR teams can ensure that all necessary administrative tasks are completed promptly and accurately, freeing up valuable time to focus on the human and strategic aspects of employee development and engagement. This proactive approach minimizes errors, enhances the employee experience, and ensures that the organization remains agile and compliant through all employee transitions.
4. Harmonizing HR Data Sync & Reporting
In many organizations, HR data resides in fragmented systems: an ATS for recruiting, an HRIS for core employee data, a payroll system, a separate performance management tool, and perhaps even spreadsheets for ad-hoc tracking. This siloed data creates a significant challenge for HR professionals who need to generate accurate, comprehensive reports for strategic decision-making, compliance, and operational insights. Manually compiling data from various sources is a labor-intensive, error-prone process that consumes countless hours and often results in outdated or inconsistent information. Without a single source of truth, it becomes incredibly difficult to gain a holistic view of your workforce, track key metrics, or identify trends effectively. This lack of data harmonization can severely impede strategic HR planning and delay critical business intelligence.
Make.com excels at connecting these disparate HR systems, creating seamless data flows that ensure accuracy and provide a unified view. Imagine Make.com acting as the central hub, pulling employee data from your HRIS, candidate data from your ATS, and performance metrics from your talent management platform. It can then cleanse, transform, and push this consolidated data into a centralized data warehouse, a business intelligence tool like Power BI or Tableau, or even a simple Google Sheet for dashboard creation. This automation allows for the creation of real-time or scheduled reports on key HR metrics such as turnover rates, time-to-hire, employee demographics, compensation analysis, and training completion rates, all without manual intervention. For example, a weekly report on new hires and departures can be automatically generated and emailed to key stakeholders. By automating data synchronization and reporting, HR teams eliminate the tedious manual aggregation process, drastically reduce the risk of errors, and gain immediate access to reliable, actionable insights. This empowers HR leaders to move from reactive data collection to proactive, data-driven strategic planning, ultimately improving workforce management and overall business performance. This is critical for scaling businesses that need reliable, up-to-date information at their fingertips.
5. Optimizing Expense Report Processing
While often viewed as an accounting function, expense report processing invariably involves HR, especially regarding policy enforcement, employee reimbursement, and ensuring compliance. The manual submission, review, and approval of expense reports can be a significant drain on employee and management time. Employees spend valuable hours meticulously filling out forms, attaching receipts, and navigating complex approval chains. Managers and HR personnel then dedicate precious time to verifying submissions against company policies, chasing down missing information, and manually entering data into financial systems. This entire process is ripe for frustration, delays, and potential errors, diverting high-value employees from their core responsibilities and delaying critical reimbursements, impacting employee satisfaction and morale.
Make.com can revolutionize expense report workflows by automating key stages, ensuring efficiency and compliance. Consider a scenario where an employee submits an expense report through a dedicated platform (e.g., Expensify, Zoho Expense, or even a custom form). Make.com can intercept this submission and initiate an automated verification process. It can check if the submission adheres to company policy based on predefined rules (e.g., spending limits, category restrictions). If all criteria are met, it can automatically route the report to the appropriate manager for approval via email or Slack. Upon approval, Make.com can then push the expense data directly into your accounting software (e.g., QuickBooks, Xero), trigger a notification to payroll for reimbursement, and update an HR record if necessary for tracking. If an expense is out of policy, Make.com can automatically flag it, notify the employee and manager, and request clarification or rejection. This level of automation significantly reduces manual data entry, minimizes errors, accelerates the reimbursement cycle, and ensures consistent application of company policies. For HR, this means less time spent on administrative minutiae and more focus on strategic financial oversight and employee well-being, enhancing trust and transparency within the organization.
6. Automating Performance Review Scheduling & Reminders
Performance reviews are a cornerstone of employee development and organizational growth, yet their administration can be notoriously cumbersome. The manual coordination of scheduling review meetings between employees, managers, and sometimes peer reviewers, along with sending out reminders and tracking completion rates, consumes an inordinate amount of HR’s time. This can lead to delays in the review cycle, inconsistent feedback, and a perception of administrative burden rather than a valuable development opportunity. Missed deadlines and constant follow-ups detract from the strategic intent of performance management, making it difficult to foster a culture of continuous feedback and improvement.
Make.com offers a robust solution for automating the entire performance review scheduling and reminder process, ensuring that cycles run smoothly and on time. Leveraging Make.com, you can set up a scenario that, at the start of a review period, automatically pulls employee and manager data from your HRIS. It can then generate personalized review templates (e.g., in Google Docs or your performance management system), assign them to the relevant parties, and automatically send initial email notifications with clear instructions and deadlines. Furthermore, Make.com can integrate with scheduling tools like Calendly or Google Calendar to facilitate the booking of review meetings, sending automated calendar invitations to all participants. Crucially, Make.com can be configured to send a series of intelligent reminders: to employees nearing their submission deadline, to managers who haven’t yet completed their reviews, and to both parties a few days before a scheduled meeting. It can also track the completion status of each review and, once finalized, automatically update the employee’s record in the HRIS or performance management system. This automation dramatically reduces the administrative overhead for HR, ensures higher participation rates, fosters timely feedback, and allows HR professionals to focus on the quality of the reviews and the developmental aspects, rather than chasing down forms and appointments. It transforms a logistical nightmare into a streamlined, effective process for talent development.
7. Centralizing Employee Feedback Collection & Analysis
Gathering regular, actionable employee feedback is vital for understanding employee sentiment, identifying areas for improvement, and fostering a positive workplace culture. However, manually deploying surveys, collecting responses from various channels (e.g., anonymous forms, direct emails, suggestion boxes), and then consolidating and analyzing this data can be a time-consuming and inconsistent process. The effort involved often limits the frequency and depth of feedback collection, leading to missed opportunities for timely intervention and improvement. If feedback isn’t consistently collected and analyzed, its strategic value diminishes, making it harder for HR to proactively address issues or celebrate successes within the organization.
Make.com provides an excellent framework for automating the entire employee feedback lifecycle, from collection to initial analysis. You can design scenarios where Make.com automatically deploys regular pulse surveys (via tools like SurveyMonkey, Typeform, or Google Forms) to specific employee segments or the entire workforce on a scheduled basis. As responses come in, Make.com can automatically capture this data, anonymize it if necessary, and then push it into a centralized database or spreadsheet (e.g., Google Sheets, Airtable). Beyond simple data aggregation, Make.com can be integrated with natural language processing (NLP) tools (like those offered by Google Cloud or OpenAI) to perform basic sentiment analysis on open-ended comments, categorizing feedback as positive, negative, or neutral and identifying common themes. This initial analysis can provide quick, high-level insights without manual review of every single comment. Furthermore, Make.com can be configured to automatically generate summary reports or trigger alerts to HR leaders when specific keywords or sentiment thresholds are met, highlighting urgent issues. This automation enables HR to collect feedback more frequently and efficiently, gain faster insights, and respond more proactively to employee needs and concerns. By reducing the manual burden of data management and initial analysis, HR teams can dedicate more time to understanding the nuances of the feedback and implementing meaningful changes that enhance employee engagement and retention. This ensures that employee voice is not just heard, but acted upon systematically.
The strategic imperative for HR today is clear: move beyond the administrative treadmill and embrace solutions that empower your team to focus on human capital. Make.com stands as a powerful ally in this journey, offering a practical and immediate path to automating the repetitive, low-value tasks that consume so much of your day. By implementing just a few of the workflows outlined above, you can significantly reduce manual effort, enhance data accuracy, improve employee and candidate experiences, and ultimately position your HR department as a truly strategic asset. The ability to reclaim countless hours and redirect them towards impactful initiatives, talent development, and cultural enrichment isn’t just a luxury; it’s a necessity for any forward-thinking organization. The time saved and efficiency gained translates directly into a more agile, responsive, and human-centric HR function, contributing directly to your business’s bottom line and competitive advantage.
If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Beyond Efficiency: Strategic HR Automation with Make.com & AI
