HR Chatbots: How To Ensure A Successful Future For HR Management

As AI becomes more and more capable of handling various tasks, businesses search for ways to improve their operations. Human Resources (HR) departments are no different! HR chatbots are a great way of improving efficiency and employee satisfaction. Let’s take a look at these possibilities.

What Are HR Chatbots?

Chatbots can be different. There are rule-based ones, which are limited to responding when they are prompted with specific words. There are AI-based chatbots, which manage to understand human requests due to Natural Language Processing. Both these options can give your HR department a boost. 

An HR chatbot is only different from any other chatbot in that it has been trained to assist an HR department. It can be a relatively simple FAQ-based chatbot. It can also be an extremely complicated AI-based chatbot that provides personalized responses and is integrated with all of your systems. Either way, it is there to help you with HR management.

What Can HR Chatbots Do?

HR chatbots are very versatile. However, most of what they do is automate tasks that would otherwise take up the valuable time of your HR team. So what can they do? Here, we consider both rule-based and AI-based chatbots, with AI offering more opportunities.

HR Chatbots Helping Employees

• Answer questions.  That’s what chatbots are made for, right? Employees can have all sorts of questions, especially when they are still learning about your company. For example, an employee might want to know how many paid days off they have. Most likely, your HR department answers such simple questions regularly. This repetitive task can be automated with a bot, even a rule-based one. 
• Assist in onboarding and training. AI can help new employees with their queries, and it is also great for keeping track of the training employees need to complete. Often, it can test and analyze an employee’s skills and make recommendations on what training would benefit them.
• Engagement and feedback. HR chatbots foster employee engagement. It is especially true for advanced AI that can predict issues employees experience. An AI can, for instance, offer a personalized message and a gift for an employee who recently had a child. As for feedback, AI is very good at carrying out surveys, both short and simple and long and detailed.

Recruitment

• Pre-screen candidates. Recruiting is a complex task, but a chatbot can make it easier. It can analyze candidates and eliminate the unqualified ones very quickly, leaving only suitable specialists for your HR department to consider. 
• Talk to candidates. Sometimes, the process of interviewing a candidate or responding to their questions can be automated with a chatbot.

HR Chatbots Helping Managers

• Deal with paperwork. When a document needs to be created, bots are very helpful. They can use templates easily. They can also assist in determining which paperwork needs to be done and when.
• Help in making decisions. AI is capable of analyzing data. A chatbot can also retrieve information and present it for you. HR departments have a lot of decisions to make, for example, in performance appraisals and their outcomes. AI can help with that. 
• Make decisions. Depending on how much you trust the technology, you can enable it to actually make decisions regarding hiring, promotions, warnings, and so on. Some decisions are small, but you do need to consider AI drawbacks (see below) before trusting your HR chatbot with serious decisions.
• Automate other things. Be it appointment scheduling or reminders, HR chatbots are great at helping to make repetitive activities automated.

AI will not replace humans, but those who use AI will replace those who don't.

Ginni Rometty, businesswoman, former IBM CEO

HR Chatbot Advantages

The advantages of an HR chatbot are numerous! Here are a few key ones.

• HR chatbots are always available to help. It might not sound all that important; after all, it is an HR bot, not a chatbot for customers. However, if your team is global, you understand how crucial this HR chatbot ability is. If your employees are on the other side of the planet, they might really appreciate a chatbot that can address their queries when convenient for them.
• HR chatbots can handle increased numbers of questions and issues. As your business grows, the chatbot will be as efficient, replying simultaneously to multiple people. It will also manage increased amounts of paperwork and other HR activities. HR chatbots are very scalable.
• Personalization is easy with advanced HR chatbots. They can retrieve information about an employee to make messages and proposals suited just for them. 
• HR chatbots are there specifically to make the life of the HR department easier. They free the department of repetitive activities, leaving more time for working on serious issues. In addition, a lot of people prefer creative pursuits over routine tasks, which makes your HR team happier when you use an HR chatbot. 
• Savings. Bots require investment and a lot of work. But in the long run, a well-trained AI leads to savings. It is the result of streamlining HR activities, ensuring better efficiency.
• Happy employees who have their queries answered and their needs addressed are a benefit for any business. When an HR department uses a bot, it is better equipped to ensure employee satisfaction.

What Are the Pitfalls?

• Initial investment can be quite daunting. That is why it is a good idea to plan well and start small.
• One would think that a chatbot cannot be prejudiced. It is a piece of technology; it knows nothing about bias. However, in practice, people train HR chatbots, and people are not immune to prejudice. As a result, do not hope that your chatbot will ensure unbiased decision-making. If you can, make sure to supervise it for better results. 
• Your bot is only as good as the information it uses. Outdated information in the databases it has access to will greatly hinder a chatbot. Always update the databases, which can be a complicated and costly process. 
• Unfortunately, HR chatbots — or any bots for that matter — are not perfect. They make mistakes, and the more permissions a bot has, the more likely it is to cause issues. There is a solution, and it consists of continually trying to improve your bot. Have humans monitor its activity and provide feedback to minimize the likelihood of error.
• Some employees might not be happy to use a bot. A lot of people do not trust bots too much, and they might prefer talking to a human. That is a culture issue, and it is one you can change. Encourage your employees to think outside the box and prove to them that your bot is useful. IBM has a wonderful case study in the form of AskHR. They had to make the radical choice of shutting down other means of communication to get employees to use AskHR, and they do not recommend this approach. However, it did help employees figure out AI.

The negative factors in chatbot adoption can all be mitigated, but they still need to be taken into account.

Best Practices for HR Chatbots

There are certain best practices for chatbot development.

Three Main Things to Remember

• Data security. We cannot overstate how important it is. As an employer, you have access to sensitive data. If your HR chatbot gains access to it as well, you have to think about security. The more permissions a chatbot has, the more crucial it is to ensure careful data management. Also consider regulations. Your country may have specific requirements for data management. Do not forget about those.
• Quality control. Another absolutely vital point! Right now, chatbots do not replace humans. It is literally impossible for HR chatbots to operate without humans. Make sure that humans oversee AI processes and give feedback as necessary.
• Integrate. Your HR department probably has a database and various pieces of software. Your chatbot will be cleverer and better at its job if it has access to all that knowledge and capabilities. Do remember that HR chatbots can make errors and choose wisely what to let AI know while keeping in mind security issues. However, those are bad reasons not to integrate your AI with your databases if it can be.

Additional Recommendations

• Plan and monitor. It is always very important to create a plan with goals and milestones and to track the progress toward those. Know what your chatbot is supposed to be doing and check whether it seems to achieve that result.
• Testing. Every time you add a new feature to your chatbot, make sure to test it extensively. Your HR department will help with that. 
• Ensure clean user interface and good user experience. Employees can be already reluctant to adopt a new technology; do not make it more difficult for them. A good user experience means faster adoption.
• Use your brand. While creating the bot’s look, consider using the colors, symbols and other aspects of your brand. Make that bot yours!
• Be careful in hiring a developer — possibly, from Insolvo. Learn how to select the best talent here!

In Conclusion

HR chatbots are very different in what they actually do, but they can do quite a lot. From handling paperwork to responding to employee questions, this technology can be very useful. Chatbots are scalable and work around the clock, but they still need human supervision. There are drawbacks to them as well, especially in terms of money and effort spent on them. But in the long run, they are typically worth the investment.