Los Angeles Turns to Automation to Streamline HR

Los Angeles County’s Human Resources Department serves 108,000 employees.

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Los Angeles County’s Human Resources Department serves 108,000 employees.

“About six years ago, we embarked on a transformative effort with a simple goal: Automate all things HR,” Human Resources CIO Murtaza Masood told Techwire.

The department wanted to automate as many activities as possible and enable employees to handle many of their own activities, even on Web-based and mobile apps.

The entire effort is centered on a CGI Advantage enterprise resource planning system.

“We tie the processes and interactions together and gain insights into where the workloads are coming from, where the growth of certain types of transactions and processes are coming from, and then look behind the curtain and make managerial decisions based on that,” Masood said.

Adobe Eforms is used for employees’ daily HR transactions, while Documentum is “our business process engine,” Masood said.

The department spends about $14 million a year on IT, and about 100 employees in HR and the Department of Internal Services work on the project daily.

More recently, the county has launched an application with Neogov to create a cohesive applicant tracking system that unifies applications, testing and recruitment processes. The program was guided by the department to maintain compliance standards.

“We partnered with them so they enhanced their product to meet our needs,” Masood said. “Being our size and being that we are governed by a very specific set of civil service rules, we felt that no product on the market met our needs to enable our compliance.”

The “unified retention and recruitment system” went live in May and has already won two awards.

The system includes communication methods to schedule interviews and exams. It also includes a public-facing appeals site, where applicants can lodge complaints and seek corrections if they feel unfairly treated.

Next, the county hopes to digitize all employee records, making them transferable across all departments.

This article was originally published on Techwire.

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Kayla Nick-Kearney is a staff writer for Techwire, which is part of e.Republic, Government Technology's parent company.
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