| chat bots will continue to transform virtually every business function from marketing to sales to customer support. One of the other areas that we’ll see a major transformation in is HR. HR teams have a very challenging job with seemingly conflicting objectives: keeping employees focused and working hard while also keeping them happy and satisfied. HR teams are often held accountable for employee retention and churn without the ability to manage them directly. HR is expected to have a finger on the pulse of a very large employee base while operating with a very small team. HR teams find that their responsibilities are vast and the goals are high – there’s rarely enough time or resources to do justice to it all. A lot of their time is invested in managing routine processes, which impacts the focus on higher priority activities. Teams have limited time left over to offer employees the individual attention they need when handling sensitive personal issues. Even more reduced is the ability to proactively engage with employees, to guide and mentor them through their career paths. Chat bots can help the HR professionals by dramatically amplifying their capabilities. Chat bots can help HR teams stay on top of the substantial responsibilities and achieve the impossible goals they have. Chat bots can automate routine processes that take a lot of their time. Recruiting activities such as screening candidates, scheduling interviews and managing the recruiting life cycle for candidates and hiring managers can be substantially automated. In fact, a startup called RoboRecruiter, built on the Gupshup platform, has developed a chat bot for automating the end-toend recruitment process, with amazing results and improvements in productivity. Employee onboarding and orientation is another area that’s ripe for automation. New employees account for a high number of HR queries that can be easily automated. Even regular processes, such as attendance tracking, goal tracking, performance reviews, employee surveys, leave balances, etc. can be substantially automated. A company called QuickWork has built chat bots that are automating HR and related business processes for many enterprises. To be clear, even though most companies use an HR system to automate many tasks, chat bots make existing systems much more userfriendly than before, dramatically increasing the usage and compliance. |