I’m an accidental HR professional. I started my government career as a paralegal and then moved into business management and project management. However, I have been an IT developer ever since I received a Commodore 64 for my fourteenth birthday. I have worked in two dotcoms and present at developer conferences on my latest prototypes in open source applications. I tell you this because I have come into HR through a non-traditional career path.
However, I believe the HR IT world is the most exciting and impactful place for technology developers. This is why I have stayed in HR (specializing in training and development) and even gained a certification as a Senior Professional in Human Resources and the Human Resources Information Professionals. I am a great believer in the potential for technology to revolutionize HR, to increase employee engagement, and to unleash even more potential from the workforce. I am especially optimistic about the increasing use of chatbots in HR.
For those who are new to chatbots, these are computer programs that use artificial intelligence to answer questions in everyday language. You may have heard of Siri or Cortana. You probably used a chatbot when you phoned a company and was asked a series of questions or you interacted with a chatbot when you texted a restaurant for a reservation. Thanks to cloud computing, incredible advances in machine learning, and the ability for computers to better understand spoken speech, new chatbots are being launched every day.
It is even easier to build chatbots. Recently, I played with two online services that allow you to build chatbots with almost no programming knowledge. The first service is motion.ai [http://www.motion.ai/] where you can visually build chatbots through linking together modules that you can configure by dragging and dropping onto a canvas. Motion.ai has a free account and tutorials if you want to experiment with building bots. Pandorabots has a similar service in that it offers a free sandbox and extensive tutorials for building free chatbots. Once you start experimenting with chatbots, I believe you will find many uses for chatbots in HR.
For example, think of how you can enhance the onboarding experience through a chatbot. Once you have selected an applicant, but before he or she is onboard, you can send the welcome package along with a link to the chatbot. The chatbot can send reminders and tips to the applicant while answering any questions about material in the welcome package. Once the applicant has officially come on board and been through orientation, the chatbot will be available for follow-up questions. The chatbot can also send helpful workplace tips and HR reminders. The chatbot will collect statistics on the questions asked by the new employee and will do pulse surveys to measure employee engagement. All of these measures can be displayed in a dashboard to the manager so that he or she can provide additional support when needed.
Start building a chatbot today to determine how a chatbot can improve your HR processes.
