Artificial intelligence is becoming an indelible part of modern business in every industry and every niche. Business leaders in all sectors nowadays have a golden opportunity to leverage conversational AI recruitment to empower all of their departments to achieve better results–HR included.
With conversational AI making strides and breakthroughs at every corner, it’s no wonder that businesses of all sizes are nowadays integrating AI tools into their processes. When it comes to HR, this can be a game-changer for the way you source and hire talent, onboard employees, and run your daily HR operations.
What Is Conversational AI?
Conversational AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can mimic human conversations and behaviors. While conversational AI has been around for years by now, in the last few years it has experienced exponential growth in popularity due to advanced tools like ChatGPT hitting the global market.
Role of Conversational AI in Improving Workflow in HR Department
Let’s take a look at the role conversational AI holds in your HR department.
Automated and streamlined candidate screening
First things first, it should go without saying that conversational AI recruiting has an important role to play in modern recruitment. From sourcing and reaching out to potential candidates, all the way to candidate screening, post-interview analysis, and even decision-making– AI has something valuable to bring to the table.
Since conversational AI is inherently unbiased, it can eliminate subconscious biases from the screening and recruitment processes in general. But as we all know, this type of AI is also great for generating ideas and creative solutions.
In addition to standard candidate screening, you might also want to use AI to generate fun icebreaker questions for the interview process, and every follow-up conversation with each candidate as well.
By scrubbing through their application and other available data from different sources, the AI can recommend unique icebreaker questions that will engage a particular candidate and make them feel more at ease.
Creating more interactive onboarding programs
There are several important perks that AI brings to the table that HR experts can use to create better onboarding experiences: speed, inclusivity, and self-service.
To put this into perspective, conversational AI can be a great tool for quickly generating the foundational pillars of your onboarding strategy. With the right set of parameters and guidelines, the AI can quickly generate the basis for what your HR experts will turn into a comprehensive onboarding process.
AI is also useful for eliminating bias in the onboarding process. Proper application can help members of the LGBTQIA+ community feel more included, respected, and welcomed in their new work environments.
However, one of the best parts is that you can use conversational and generative AI tools to create a self-service onboarding database. This platform will serve to provide new hires with all the info they need to hit the ground running.
Building an employee self-service platform
Speaking of a self-service platform, this is a great opportunity for business leaders to enhance productivity and efficiency across their organizations. Aside from building an AI-driven resource platform for onboarding and new hires in general, it’s a good idea to build a general company self-service platform for all teams.
Veteran employees and new hires alike need a resource center where they can get answers to their questions and source the materials they need to do their jobs. With AI, they can do this without disrupting the workflow of others or taking time away from their colleagues and higher-ups.
This is where conversational AI and chatbot platforms come in.
One of the biggest advantages ChatGPT has over traditional search engines is, for example, the ability to provide useful information and answers to questions with related context. Not only can they search for the right information but they can respond to employee queries with real-world examples, explanations, and interpretations.
While Google typically only provides search results, generative AI provides information and insights. Armed with your internal database, a conversational chatbot can provide these types of insights to your employees.
Providing personalized employee training
Generally speaking, personalization and providing personalized experiences is one of the biggest challenges that companies face nowadays when it comes to customer acquisition and retention. That said, the same goes for the employee-facing strategies and processes in your organization.
Personalizing HR processes is a difficult challenge because of the sheer number of processes in question, but again, generative and conversational AI can lend a helping hand. When it comes to personalizing training, ongoing development, and even mentorships, conversational AI for HR professionals and project managers can be an instrumental tool.
HR professionals can take on the task of structuring and personalizing employee training by first devising training programs with the help of AI. They can then use AI to complement direct mentorship in the workplace and offload some of the work from the mentors’ shoulders.
Both mentors and HR experts alike have an opportunity to leverage AI to personalize their training approach for every employee. This means using AI for ideation, yes, but it also means using it to compile and make sense of employee data and behaviors to adapt and personalize their strategies.
Also, read: Next in Tech: AI, Assessments, and The Great Over-Correction
Better data analysis and insights
If there is one thing that conversational AI is good at, it’s collectively delivering data, insights, and reports quickly. The ability to collect, collate, and present data efficiently and effectively can save businesses time and money, and empower HR professionals to make better, data-driven decisions for the company.
Modern businesses have a great opportunity to leverage HR data analytics to generate company-wide insights fast. This is done through surveys, pulse surveys, engagement metrics, and behavioral data obtained through employee interactions with various tools and software.
This is really where modern AI tools shine in comparison to previous generations of AI.
With visualization software, the AI can quickly present the data as manageable charts and infographics that illustrate key points and insights and even suggest the next steps.
Modern conversational AI can advise and use various inputs (prompts and datasets) to quickly ideate solutions and strategic decisions.
Ensuring better compliance in the organization
When it comes to compliance and policymaking in your organization, conversational AI can help you with compliance and creating policies that adhere to local laws and regulations. From tech-driven DE&I to defining workplace safety, culture, and ensuring compliance with local labor laws, conversational AI can help HR generate the right documentation.
But of course, it’s not just about creating policies, it’s also about implementing and integrating them into the workplace. Employees need to internalize these policies and adopt them to ensure not only the safety of the brand as a whole but also their success in your organization.
By providing accurate and up-to-date information, AI systems can guide employees through various policies, address compliance-related questions, and flag potential issues. The system can send alerts directly to the HR department if some policies require attention or if any of the employees are having trouble adopting them.
HR can then send subsequent short-form surveys to employees to gather additional feedback and see if the AI-suggested changes have made a difference.
Automated leave and attendance management
It should go without saying that AI is good for process automation in any HR department, even if it simply means automating some menial and repetitive tasks to free up individual bandwidth.
AI-driven attendance management allows employees to use chatbots to submit leave requests, check leave balances, and get notifications or answers to questions before submitting their requests. All of this reduces paperwork and administrative overhead for the HR staff.
Most importantly, simply automating this one aspect of people management allows HR professionals to tend to complex tasks and focus on strategic work for the company. But on the strategic level, you can use AI not only to automate this process but to plan for it as well.
What this means is that AI-driven software can help HR professionals plan their human resources well in advance, based on demand forecasts, projected staff shortages, and more.
Automated performance management and analysis
Last but not least, conversational and general AI can automate performance management both in-house and remotely. While you’re using performance monitoring software to capture employee data in the workplace, you can then use AI to interpret that data.
AI can help you spot trends in the workplace, analyze the culture, gauge performance, etc. Visualized, interpreted, and put into context, this data will be invaluable for HR professionals to personalize their approach for every employee.
Experienced HR professionals know that performance management requires a personalized approach for each team member in your organization. Automated performance management makes it easier for them to analyze the unique needs of every employee to maximize their potential.
Also, read: AI in Recruitment: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Conclusion
In the fast-paced, competitive business world, companies big and small need to leverage the increasing accessibility of AI technology to empower their teams and transform their processes. Elevating your HR department through AI applications and conversational AI in particular should be one of your priorities in 2023, as well.
With these AI-driven solutions at your side, you can streamline various HR tasks, projects, and processes while minimizing financial and time waste. Be sure to start implementing conversational AI in your HR department, and you’ll be able to take your business forward as a whole.
