The Labor Shortage: APIs To The Rescue
It’s no secret that companies searching for and retaining top talent have faced more significant challenges over the past few years. As reported in May, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shared that a steep 4.5 million people had quit their jobs between March 2019 and March 2022. Society, in general, has experienced a shift within the labor market. Leaders in different industries are now advocating for new tactics to provide employees with improved efficiency and performance, ensuring they retain talent and keep their business running.
With a diminished talent pool, leaders are looking for ways to fill operational gaps and empower their employees by focusing on investing in innovative technologies that can assist in various integral areas. For example, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are becoming a vital resource for tackling labor shortages, helping companies create quick and efficient automated workflows, and reducing administrative oversight. This not only provides companies with cost efficiencies but frees their employees to dedicate more time to more critical activities. APIs can ease the need for new employees while also improving retention rates.
To fully break down how APIs can revolutionize workflows and help employee retention while minimizing the resources needed for specific tasks, we’ll go over the basics, the technical purpose, and how companies can use them to their full advantage.
Your New Employees: APIs
At a base level, APIs create a pathway for two applications to communicate without knowing the nitty-gritty details of one another’s programming. They’re so widely dependent on them that the modern digital world would significantly slow in their absence. Businesses leveraging APIs to support mundane day-to-day administrative tasks reap the benefits of increasingly structured, accessible, and accurate data. If programmed with deep learning abilities, APIs can also enable automation, further easing the lift of daily, manual exhaustive tasks.
One process APIs can expedite a data extraction and make that data actionable. While companies are in the midst of digital transformation, there are still an astounding 2.5 trillion PDF documents globally. Companies are turning to technology to extract the information held within them more accurately and efficiently.
When done by hand, manual data entry can be very time-consuming. From a business perspective, the task consumes too many employee hours, increasing the chance of human error and poor-quality data.
Minimizing the time spent on data extraction by automating the process is a significant first step to streamlining an employee’s daily tasks.
By handing off the manual-intensive tasks, employees are rewarded with more time to focus on more involved, strategic, and pleasant activities. This process of eliminating specific tasks with APIs applies to many business functions—from easing customer transactions to building service applications. Once this technology is incorporated, companies benefit from more efficient and quicker workflows, minimizing the urgent need for additional employees to complete admin duties.
Getting Started with API Adoption
Adopting technology such as APIs is vital for company success to stay on par with our digitally driven world. Organizations looking to integrate APIs first need to understand where the technology will have the most significant impact, starting with identifying the major pain points they need to resolve.
Once these hurdles are pinpointed, it’s time to evaluate which type of API solution will work best for the company and whether that will include building a specialized API from scratch or selecting a third-party API that is already built (often called off-the-shelf API). Both options provide benefits in their way. In the case of document data extraction, an entirely new document parsing API can complete more specific needs.
Still, the API becomes more complex and time-consuming to design and implement to fulfill these needs. It also requires some particular and deep expertise not just from software developers but also from data scientists and machine learning engineers. While an off-the-shelf API is already trained using a massive collection of documents to ensure that users are provided with a robust and accurate parsing solution. With the help of an API implementation, employees will have the time to focus their energy on critical activities that support company growth and impact goals.
Advanced Technologies Leading the Way
Now more than ever, organizations are being met with the demand for rapid technological adoption and implementation to succeed. Incorporating adept APIs provides agility and bountiful operational benefits. When properly utilized, APIs can ease hurdles that have been amplified due to labor shortage challenges and the need to scale rapidly. By addressing and alleviating the pressures brought on by these difficulties, APIs directly impact and improve talent recruitment, hiring, and retention.
Jonathan Grandperrin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Mindee.
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