HR Chatbot

HR chatbot is a program that utilizes advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and other advanced technologies to interact with employees to act as a virtual HR for the company.

Since it can recognize the employee queries in natural language, it becomes easy to interact with it and undertake the common human resources related tasks, on behalf of your HR team. A chatbot can automate various employee functions for your HR, such as resolving employee queries, downloading payslips, and others. As a result, it reduces the burden on HR professionals, since they are no more required to answer the repetitive employee queries.

HR chatbots can streamline and simplify multiple employee-related tasks of the HR department. There are multiple benefits of deploying an HR chatbot, as it can improve the following:

• 24/7 Query Handling: It can handle employee queries all the time, which makes the process of resolving doubts and queries effortless for the staff.

• Improved Employee Experience: Having seamless access to your HR chatbot helps improve the employee experience since they can get help with any HR-related task anytime.

• Enhanced HR Efficiency: It increases HR efficiency as they are free from having to repeatedly answer the same queries from different employees.

• Better Employee Insights: The HR chatbot can also track and reveal advanced real-time analytics related to employee queries for the HR team, helping in better insights and data-backed decisions.

• Enhanced Employee Onboarding: With a dedicated HR bot, a variety of HR tasks related to employee onboarding can be automated, helping the HR team to focus on other areas.

The main purpose of deploying a chatbot is to improve HR efficiency by redirecting repeated employee queries to the chatbot. This chatbot can interact with the staff and provide easy answers to their queries, which will help HR understand common doubts and improve their business processes to resolve them.

HR chatbots can also undertake simple HR-related tasks on behalf of the staff member, such as applying for leave when the employee asks it to do so or employee onboarding or even downloading payslips for them. The HR bots that can provide insights in real-time can also improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of the HR department by multiple times.

While deploying AI-powered chatbots in companies can improve the overall experience for your employees, there are some disadvantages too, as listed below:

Data Security: Since an HR chatbot deals with employee and company data, you should have adequate measures in place to ensure that the chatbot is effectively abstracted from sensitive confidential data. Hence, it is essential to ensure data security and access control for both the chatbot and the staff interacting with the chatbot.

Complex Queries: An HR chatbot cannot understand complex questions from your employees as they are usually trained to answer common queries. There are multiple reasons for the lack of complex query-handling ability such as knowledge base shortcomings, lack of creativity and problem-solving abilities, among other current AI technology limitations.

Human Connection: It has been observed that employees might feel disconnected from their company if there is a lack of human interaction with the HR professionals. Since the success of a business depends on employee retention, it is essential to let the employees feel the human connection. The human connection also provides them with the assurance of being taken care of. However, interacting with a chatbot for multiple queries can never be as engaging as conversing with an actual HR.

There are various algorithms used by different software vendors to develop an AI-powered HR chatbot. Some of the common ones are:

• Naïve Bayes Algorithm

• Natural Language Processing (NLP)

• Grammar & Parsing Algorithms

• Support Vector Machine

• Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN)

• Markov Models

• Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)

Since all AI-based HR chatbots rely on NLP, it is essential to focus on the algorithms used for NLP, as well as how the query is processed. Once the query is processed, one should consider how the query should be resolved, whether by action or verbal response.

Additionally, the HR chatbot should be ready for follow-up queries, and hence, it should have a log of the previous queries. All these features enhance the usability of the chatbot further and makes it an essential part of the modern HR experience, while also improving employee engagement.

While an HR chatbot can undertake all administrative tasks, they lack human interaction capabilities. As a result, these chatbots are unable to react to complex questions. While they are excellent at undertaking certain tasks based on the user inputs, their interactivity and dexterity are often put to the test when the user asks something out of the ordinary.

Hence, we can safely assume that chatbots will not replace human HRs for the foreseeable future. While the AI algorithms behind HR chatbots are advancing rapidly, it is still not advanced enough to replace complex human interactions. As a result, they are designated keeping in mind their basic duty of undertaking normal daily tasks and assisting the employees in completing certain HR processes such as employee onboarding.

There are specific features of an HR chatbot that make them ideal to interact with employees and provide the necessary assistance. Some of the most essential features of a dedicated HR chatbot include:

• Adaptive learning: It is critical that the chatbot learns the user’s query patterns and understands them better to ensure improved performance over time. Adaptive learning also ensures that the HR chatbot can help the employee better in the future.

• Actionable insights: The HR chatbot should also provide actionable real-time insights which would enable the HR and management to simplify their processes further. It will help them avoid confusing scenario in the future and make the HR processes more streamlined.

• User-friendly interface: It should also have an intuitive user interface for providing ease of usage for the employees. Since the chatbot is supposed to be used by each employee, its user experience should be very easy, ensuring its prolonged usage.

• Lag-free performance: It should not freeze or lag as it is required to provide easier usage to the staff. If the chatbot lags or freezes while undertaking its tasks, it hampers the employee experience, making them avoid it.

There are several steps included in the deployment and implementation of an HR chatbot in any organization. While the exact steps may vary from one company to the other, a common flow of the process is:

• Define the goals and objectives which should be fulfilled by the HR chatbot.

• Select the right platform which can is compatible with your company.

• Share your company’s HR policies with the HR chatbot software vendor for training.

• Experiment by deploying the chatbot within a small team.

• Deploy the chatbot within the entire company.

• Gather feedback and create a set of improvements, which can be conveyed to the HR chatbot developer periodically.

Following these steps correctly ensures that the HR chatbot is customized as per the company preferences, as well as cementing its usability. Deploying an HR chatbot can help in enhanced engagement from the employees too, if you follow the steps provided above.

Yes, HR chatbots usually use advanced Artificial Intelligence technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to understand the employee’s queries and provide suitable answers as well as performing the required actions. AI helps these chatbots understand the employee’s intent in asking a specific query and provide relevant and accurate responses.

AI-based HR chatbots help the employees avoid disturbing their HR to fulfil smaller queries since the bot can perform some actions as well as resolve the employee queries on behalf of HR. As a result, HR can also be more productive since the HR chatbot provides all information to the employee, which enables the HR to concentrate on other creative pursuits for increasing employee engagement and satisfaction.

An HR chatbot can be used in a wide range of industries which require a team of HR professionals. Since it augments the HR functions efficiently, an HR chatbot has become essential for the HR professionals to offload their work. Additionally, since an HR chatbot can be conversed with, without the use of any special commands, they can be used intuitively without the requirement for any specialized training. Hence, HR chatbots are vital for various industries ranging from IT, retail, manufacturing, hospitality, education, healthcare, and more.

An HR bot can help HRs in upgrading employee engagement by enhancing various aspects of employment such as:

• Recruitment: HR chatbots can engage and screen candidates by conversing with them as well as help schedule interviews, provide feedback, and other important updates to the candidates.

• Employee Onboarding: HR chatbots are also good at providing orientation training, by introducing them to the team virtually and guiding them with the necessary paperwork and induction formalities.

• HR Services: HR chatbots can also easily handle employee queries once you train them with your HR policies and related FAQs. Hence, it can provide HR policy and related information to any staff member whenever required.

• Engagement: HR chatbots are also good at measuring employee satisfaction by collecting feedback and suggestions periodically. As a result, it can also provide rewards and recognition based on performance.

• Offboarding: HR chatbots can handle exit interviews by collecting feedback, helping process full and final settlements, and more. While it makes the process impersonal, it can also enhance the quality of the exit interview as the leaving employee can provide their honest opinion without fear of judgement.

An HR Chatbot can improve employee engagement and retention by providing personalized query resolution. It can also enhance employment engagement by providing accurate feedback, ensuring recognition, and conducting satisfaction surveys. It can even ask the employee to fill in surveys to capture the employee pulse. As a result of these efforts, the staff member feels valued in the company, improving their engagement and retention effectively. Improved employee engagement also results in enhanced productivity, leading to overall success of the company.

HR chatbots can easily handle confidential information by using advanced encryption techniques. Its programming makes use of authorization protocols, which will be compliant with privacy laws and regulations, enhancing its security. The data used for training the HR chatbots, as well as the company data which it uses to answer employees are stored in highly secure databases, which ensures complete confidentiality.

HR chatbots can easily integrate with other HR platforms by using APIs and SDKs. For example, there are many HRMS software which provide a dedicated HR bot for ensuring smooth operations. They are also integrated with the databases as they need to access the company databases to provide accurate information. One needs to ensure data abstraction by letting the HR bot access only the information required for its working, which effectively hides sensitive data with the use of advanced computing techniques.

HR chatbots can track their performance and impact by using advanced analytics and reporting tools. They can track their metrics such as response time, accuracy, employee engagement, retention, conversion, and ROI using these tools. Having access to such analytics will provide you with the data required to tweak it to serve your employees better.