ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN HR

The moment you log into your office mail, you see subject lines like…

Immediate requirement in Sales team
Immediate update required for new hire training
New Compliance Deadlines this month
The Coffee Machine is broken!

Before you can get started, a manager calls to ask you about recruiting status on his engineer requisition.

Many times you miss parts of the conversations as you always have a mobile to your ear and eyes on an email on the monitor.

You turn your head to see a colleague at your desk wanting to chat - which ends with ‘Good Day’. This so-called ‘good day’ actually ends up with many regrets like forgetting to inform a manager about a skype interview schedule, falling back on priorities, tough times with your boss, going home late, and failing at your personal promises.

Your day ends just when you felt it had started. You hardly find time to work on building strategies that elevate your culture and engage talent.

Is more time all you need?

What if you had a tool that not only saves you time but also enhances your effectiveness - a technology tool that can wisely handle your routine tasks like recruiting and onboarding activities, monitoring training and compliance, and coordinating with managers and staff to communicate on updates.

Enhance efficiency by implementing AI in HR

Artificial Intelligence - where we make machines work, think and react much like humans, can be a boon if adapted well to your HR processes.  

And the fascinating fact about AI is, the more you work with it, the better it learns and adapts.

AI can effectively manage the day-to-day activities of your HR team and here are few ideas to help you start thinking about it.

How AI can help Recruiting improve candidate profiling

Implementing AI in your recruiting processes saves time. AI can help you identify the right candidate profile that matches your skill set. While you let your machine deal routine repetitive tasks, you can work on critical things like having one on one conversations with candidates and drawing insights to improve communications.

While you onboard, reach out to your New Hires with answers to their questions - before they ask

During the process of onboarding, you have to coordinate with the new hires right from day one until they establish strong relationships with peers and managers. Many times it is hard to reach out to every new hire and provide instant guidance.

This is where AI can help you. You can deploy an AI-based virtual assistant that will tackle new hire queries and offer answers so you can focus on tasks that need human intervention.

In your training, let AI recommend the right courses for your employees

AI can analyze the kinds of training that have been successful to make better recommendations for your employee development plans.

Achieve smoother communication flow

With AI, you can train your machine to respond like the way you do. Your employees need not wait for answers. They can get instant help with their questions.

AI will give you the gift of time to focus on elevating your company culture and improving the employee experience. Not only that - your AI will provide spontaneous service by finding answers much faster than a human can.

Chatbots are making their way into HR. At the beginning of this wave of change, we predict chatbots will change the relationship people have with HR technology. As the application of this technology matures, it will fundamentally alter the relationships people have with each other.     

The Fundamentals of Chatbots 

Chatbots are software robots that enable technology to interact with humans on human terms. With a well-trained bot, users can say or type what they need, and the bot will locate and provide information, answer questions, and take any action you train them to do. These virtual assistants can be trained to handle repetitive tasks that would typically require users to log in to an HR application, remember how to use it, and adapt unique their human needs to preconfigured lists of values designed for clean reporting. 

With these capabilities, we understand why many organizations choose to apply bot technology to HR self-service as a first effort. It has a profound impact on the user experience, and it makes HR more efficient by handling many tasks and requests formally handled by humans. The quick return on investment makes it easy to build a business case. 

However, there is much more to chatbots than efficiency. As chatbots grow into maturity, they will make both your HR group and the people it serves more connected and productive. The underlying technology in chatbots, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), has a significant impact on operating costs, but it also shifts human effort from routine tasks,¹ allowing them to focus more on building human relationships that foster creativity and innovation. 

How Chatbots Will Change Relationships 

How do these efficiencies in communication translate to higher value-add activities, and what are those activities? We explored three situations where we see significant gains. 

Chatbots in Recruiting 

Communication with job candidates influences how people feel about joining an organization. In a 2017 study, IBM found that only 57% of candidates said they were kept well informed during the hiring process, and only 63% were very satisfied with the candidate experience. Applicants who had a good experience were 38% more likely to accept a job offer.  The study also found an impact on attitudes toward the company and subsequent sales^.2 

Chatbots handle many of the routine communications that recruiters can often forget, like acknowledging applications and resumes, sending reminders about upcoming tasks, scheduling interviews, and even administering assessments. The big bonus here is that they can help overcome the lapses in communications that make applicants vulnerable to being snatched away by competitors. 

What’s the value-add for recruiting? 

Recruiters have more time to work with hiring managers. According to research by Bersin by Deloitte, that relationship is the most influential predictor of talent acquisition performance.³  

Recruiters have more time to work with prospects and candidates. The most effective recruiters are those who build relationships with potential employees. Top candidates are much more likely to want to work for an organization where they have a positive relationship with people in it. 

Chatbots in Learning and Development 

L&D has gone through some rapid changes in the past few years. We have new delivery modes in e-learning, instant video, and micro-learning. Adaptive learning driven by artificial intelligence promises to take learning on the job to a level of effectiveness we could not even imagine just a couple of years ago. 

All those changes have brought with them a new world of complexity to both L&D staff and the people they serve. Chatbots hold the promise of making that complexity manageable. 

Even without AI, chatbots can reduce the complexity of learning for the end-user. Instead of searching through catalogs, course lists, YouTube, the intranet, and who knows where else, users can tell chatbots what they need, and a chatbot will deliver. 

Chatbots can be trained to offer up suggestions for learning based on an individual’s career development plan or find recommendations for a new learning path. They could also handle many more time-consuming repetitive and mundane tasks, like managing an individual’s training calendar, locating resources, and producing reports. 

Support libraries for administrators can become conversational helpers instead of inanimate lists of technical material. They can even be trained to manage routine, repetitive tasks. 

What’s the value-add for learning? 

Finally, we can bring learning into the flow of work. What employees need information, learning in the moment, or a refresher on a new procedure, they don’t need to stop what they are doing and search for what they need. They can assign that task to a virtual assistant who will never tire of being helpful. Your people can spend their time learning instead of searching for what to learn. 

Chatbots in Performance 

The transition from annual performance reviews to ongoing conversations about performance is a long-term culture change project. Anything we can do to facilitate the conversations can be a benefit to both employees and their managers. 

Knowledge workers can spend up to 40% or more of their time looking for information they need to do their jobs. Imagine how you could help them by providing a virtual assistant that has indexed every resource in your content repositories. 

What’s the value-add for performance? 

How about reminders for busy managers? Think about a virtual personal assistant the will do this: 

• “It’s been over a week since you talked with Brenda about her project. Should I make an appointment for you?” 
• “You asked me to remind you to discuss training progress with your team this morning.” 
• “Jack’s report was due yesterday.” 
• “Your team meeting is tomorrow. Let’s develop the agenda. You can dictate it to me.” 

Imagine how your managers will feel when they can view any employee profile, any report, and their management coaching resources merely by asking for them. 

The Limitless Opportunity of Chatbots 

The examples given above are only a few of the possibilities for chatbots to improve communication and performance in your organization. Employee self-service is an excellent place to start, but we encourage you to move on to more sophisticated and productive applications as you can. The possibilities are endless. 

References:

1. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/human-capital/us-cons-hr-bots-new-super-power-for-workforce.pdf

2. https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=LOW14341USEN. 

3. http://blog.bersin.com/surprising-1-predictor-of-talent-acquisition-performance.

Chatbots have arrived in HR, and we are celebrating. After three decades of chasing the user experience dream, we may finally have someone (or something) that won’t complain about doing “HR stuff.”

Before we automated HR, we had armies of people who made a living doing the tedious manual work of handling employment and payroll transactions. For the employee, requesting vacation time was a matter of scratching a couple of dates on the paper form and handing it off to a supervisor, who handed off to the HR clerical staff. From the employee perspective, taking a day off meant saying “Hey Boss, I need to take my kid to the doctor on Friday,” leaving the manager and HR to handle the administrivia.

The Quest for HR Efficiency

The first wave of HR automation made HR more cost-efficient. The army of workers became much smaller, and fewer people made a living doing tedious computer and manual work.

Then came self-service, when HR pushed the work out to employees and their managers.

They hated it. Managers and employees flooded HR with calls about how to handle transactions, so a cadre of administrative worker arose to handle the tasks for everyone in the business unit or work group because people balked at learning how to use the software.

With the growth of cloud platforms, talent management platforms, payroll, and time and attendance, competition drove the effort to make those systems easy enough for anyone to use.

Why People Are Not Overjoyed about the New User Experience

People still hated it. Organizations deployed wave after wave of new systems with a lot of “change management” and hype, only to see the enthusiasm dissipate over time.

The trouble is that nobody who already has a job to do in the organization wants to do “HR stuff.” We don’t know anyone who becomes joyous at the prospect of applying for Family or Medical Leave. We have never heard anyone say, “I’m so happy! I get to fill out my online timecard!” or “I love doing those development plans!”

In practice, we just want to get the HR stuff done so we can get back to what we like doing.

The Tedium Is Still with Us

Today, instead of those vast armies of clerical workers, we have skeleton HR staffs populated by professionals and semi-professionals. They spend up to 30 or 40% of their time answering questions from managers, employees, prospective employees, and ex-employees about how to manage their transactions or where to find the information they need to do it.

Virtual Assistants Have Arrived

Relief is here. Cognitive computing, natural language processing (NLP), and artificial intelligence (AI) are working with text and voice messaging to create virtual assistants in our personal lives. Millions of us are using Cortana, Siri, Alexa, and Google Home.

We want the same experience at work. HR technology providers are responding, but small startups and niche providers are moving faster. Chatbots and text bots are currently used primarily in customer self-service, but they are moving quickly into HR, among other areas.^[1]

Now is an excellent time for companies to get in on the ground floor of HR virtual assistants to improve their productivity and to influence the direction these products take.

Recommendations

Before you jump into the mix, there are four things we recommend for you to think about as you prepare for your virtual assistants.

1. Evaluate solutions for compatibility with other emerging technology. A virtual assistant that stands alone will become an administrative burden. A textbot or chatbot should be compatible with others used in business including Cortana, Siri, and Alexa for Business. It should easily integrate into your HR software platforms, and be fully compatible with collaboration software, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack.
2. Work with other cognitive computing initiatives across your organization to build a shared lexicon.
3. Make it easy for users to report issues and suggestions by integrating the function directly into your virtual assistant. Automate the information-gathering for analysis so your users will be more willing to help.
4. Be transparent. Tell your people what you are doing, what information you are gathering, and how you will use it. And, while it almost goes without saying, it is better to say it – don’t pretend it is not a robot.

Sign up for more of our conversation about virtual assistants and the future of work. We look forward to hearing of the success stories of having assistants who are happy to do that “HR stuff” we all hate to do.

References:

1. Lun, Erwin Van. "Virtual Assistant – humanlike artificial agents for self-service areas." Chatbots.org. Accessed January 17, 2018.