In this era of technology, the advancements seen will apply to most, if not all, aspects of life. And its impact could not be any more prominent when it comes to the world of business. The ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ or ‘Business 4.0’ brings with it some incredibly innovative technologies with the potential to completely revolutionize how work gets done. Of all the available applications of said technologies, bots are one of the most popular applications.

A bot is a cognitive software technology designed to imitate the behaviour of humans and respond to user input accordingly.

Bots in Business

Bots enable employees to focus more of their time, effort and resources on essential and productive work. Such benefits have prompted organizations to look into the feasibility of installing bots for creating new business opportunities for them.

According to the 2017 Deloitte State of Cognitive Survey, 59% of the surveyed organizations were exploring the integration of mature cognitive technologies for different functions.

Bots in HR

Businesses refer to bots using diverse terms like ‘intelligent assistants’, ‘digital assistants’, ‘conversational agents’, ‘robotic process automation’ or simply ‘chatbots’. Chatbots have shown substantial results in all domains of business. But their application in HR is currently straggling behind the rest.

According to Deloitte’s 2017 Human Capital Trend report, although HR and People Teams have shown strong interest in the technologies, only 17% of Global HR executives are ready to manage such an integrated workforce.

Implementation of bots in HR

HR, as the term suggests, deals with managing ‘human resource’ or ‘people’. And the idea of implementing bots in HR raises several questions. But in reality, bots, although a powerful piece of modern technology, are designed to help humans become more productive. They alleviate the burden of routine processes from HR by automating the menial and repetitive tasks, allowing HR to focus on creative and strategic objectives. Moreover, chatbots can collect, record and analyze information while interacting with users and accordingly generate suggestions and reports regarding the situation then. The impact of chatbots on different aspects of HR functions is discussed below.

Recruitment

A recruitment bot is an HR chatbot that performs the functions required to engage the people applying for jobs. Its range of tasks covers the aggregation of applicant details, pre-screening of the job applicant, assessment and shortlisting based on user-defined criteria and the scheduling of in-person interviews. Additionally, recruitment bots revamp the application process into an interactive process facilitated by the interaction between the chatbot and the applicant through a messaging system. Chatbots can also be used to provide answers to various FAQs relevant to the organization’s recruitment process.

Employee Onboarding

The onboarding of employees primarily includes three areas: introduction of the company, professional training and social integration. Earlier, the process involved the appointing of mentors who were responsible for the onboarding of new employees. Presently, chatbots integrated into the social intranet provide the new employees with a step-by-step guide of the entire onboarding process. Chatbots can also use the gamification process to make delivering essential company information interactive and engaging for the employee. Chatbots guide professional integration by providing the employees with necessary contact information and involving the employees in some department-specific tasks. Similarly, chatbots help with social integration by providing employees with a platform to customize their intranet profile, create an intranet blog post, schedule virtual coffee breaks with their colleagues and other similar activities.

Employee Training

The inclusion of chatbots into the employee training platform offers manifold benefits to the HR department and the organization. Chatbots provide the employees with answers to most of their trivial questions, freeing the HR department to focus on other strategic tasks. Chatbots also facilitate easy access to learning resources by offering the employees a choice regarding time, platform and language. Properly executed chatbots provide the employees with better engagement than a single, continuous sitting using convenient navigation, test gamification and several other features. Lastly, chatbots allow the HR departments to scale their training programs across different platforms and languages without significant deviation or incurring huge costs.

Performance Management System

One salient feature of a good PMS is that it should allow the employees to understand their performance at any time of the year. Earlier, it was a tedious task for team leaders and HR managers to generate regular performance reports. But, PMS chatbots can monitor and evaluate employee performance on a real-time basis. This arrangement allows employees to receive their performance reports at their convenience. Some advanced PMS bots also offer suggestions to the employees keeping in mind the employee’s aspirations and performance evaluation.

Benefits Enrollment and Leave Management

Chatbots can also be engaged to deal with two of the recurring headaches for the HR department – Benefits Enrollment and LMS. Benefits Enrollment Bots can monitor and guide the employee during the application process. A tweaked version of the bot will help send regular updates to the benefits team regarding any change. Chatbots integrated with LMS helps both the employees and the HR department as it facilitates quick leave applications alongside real-time updates regarding the leave application status.

Advantages of Bots in HR

The HR Departments and People Teams have several responsibilities that involve various repetitive, menial and time-consuming tasks. And according to a 2018 article on sageHR, the usage of chatbots can help companies save up to 20% on costs. HR bots lower the risk of errors while allowing for the processing of urgent requests 24×7. Functions integrated with a chatbot enable easy scaling up while reducing the costs incurred. HR bots monitoring employee performance help with quick compliance checks and operational audits.

Challenges of using Bots in HR

HR bots, even with all their advantages, are facing some challenges when it comes to implementation. HR bots, to analyze data, first need to collect and store said data. Data storage leads to various concerns about the security of the data – personal and otherwise, gathered by the chatbots. Similarly, chatbots rely on AI to automate requests and generate responses to the users’ inputs. There needs to be an assurance that the chatbots’ responses do not cause any legal or ethical repercussions.

Are HR Bots replacing humans?

The simple answer to the question is ‘NO’. Bots are powerful tools but, they are not standalone tools. Bots were designed to improve human productivity. Bots can take care of tiresome and monotonous tasks like employee onboarding, benefits enrollment and leave management. However, when it comes to tasks that involve human intervention – recruitment and training, chatbots can only handle certain aspects of the task. But, with the proper integration of chatbots into the existing HR processes, there will be an increase in the efficiency of HR departments and people teams – lessening bureaucracy, granting independence to employees and revolutionizing the business.