Reviewing hundreds of resumes, handling administrative tasks, and creating relationships with candidates sounds like a big challenge that demands lots of work and resources from Human Resources (HR). However, there is a solution that can make it much easier – HR chatbots. These intelligent virtual assistants can improve the recruitment process and, at the same time, handle other HR processes and interactions for you and your HR team.
In this article, we will explore HR chatbots and their benefits. We want to show their potential and how they can cooperate with HR professionals, making your workplace more efficient and focused on a good employee experience.
Chatbots and HR chatbots
Let’s start with the chatbots itself. It is a computer program, a virtual assistant, that can converse with people, making them feel that they are talking to a human being. Thanks to artificial intelligence and other technologies like natural language processing, it understands what people say and naturally responds using text messages in a chat window.
The best part is that chatbots don’t need human help. They can take care of many users and their questions simultaneously, giving your team more time to focus on complex matters. You can use them in many different areas of your business: sales, marketing, human resources, etc. If you want to learn more about using chatbots in business.
So what is an HR chatbot? It’s a tool that makes HR processes smoother, increasing employee satisfaction and improving their experience. You can see its positive influence across the whole human resources area. It can simplify onboarding and offboarding processes or manage many everyday HR tasks. It can speed up the hiring process or gather feedback from your employees.
It is a powerful and valuable chatbot with many benefits that can make your HR department work more effortlessly and efficiently. Now, let’s move into the details.
HR operations managed by HR chatbots
Let’s start with two essential functions where HR chatbots are a precious helping hand, onboarding and offboarding, as well as absence and attendance tracking. An HR chatbot can significantly impact all of them, resulting in employee and HR team satisfaction.
Onboarding and off-boarding
Welcoming new hires in the company and saying goodbye to those leaving it are two very complex and important procedures. In their Research Brief, The True Coast of a Bad Hire, Brandon Hall Group states, “Organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%.”
Onboarding and offboarding may demand lots of attention and effort from your HR team. These two processes include training and guiding your employees, answering many urgent questions, and handling lots of important documents. The good news is that the HR chatbot can automate these tasks and leave Human Resources space for other issues.
Using the help of this virtual assistant results in your HR team having more time for making your new and existing employees feel supported, taken care of, and valued.
Remember that an excellent onboarding experience may boost employee engagement, while a good off-boarding may strengthen positive memories about your company.
Absence and attendance tracking
Whether you have a big or a small company, tracking employees’ absences and attendance may be an endless task for your Human Resources Department. An HR chatbot can easily take care of all time off requests submitted by your workers and then provide them with appropriate responses. While doing that, it can also quickly answer other questions, like how many vacation days a particular employee can still take.
In addition to absence tracking, this AI tool can monitor employees’ work hours and track when they come and leave work. It keeps this data organized and updates it continuously so other departments, like the payroll team, can easily access and use it to complete their work.
How HR chatbots impact recruitment
Each recruitment process is one of the biggest challenges for the HR department. First, HR professionals need to collect and screen many resumes and applications. The HR and recruitment statistics in 2023 made by OnHires say that “52% of recruiters believe that the most challenging aspect of recruitment is screening candidates from a large pool of applicants.”
Next, recruiters must assess who might be a perfect fit for a role and schedule interviews. Very often, there are additional tasks, such as ensuring good information flow with the manager wanting to hire a particular person. These complex responsibilities may cause delays in the hiring process and, in some cases, result in missing out on some talented individuals.
The HR chatbot is able to collect and categorize resumes and source and screen candidates. It can inform people about all the open positions and guide them to the one that is the best match. It can also take care of the initial assessment by asking candidates specific questions and later scheduling interviews with the ones the manager has chosen. The HR chatbot can do all of this with its natural language processing skills and the option to be powered by AI or use a template, for example, a job application template.
As a result, when your chatbot is doing all the basic and repetitive tasks, the hiring team can focus on decision-making responsibilities or build closer relationships with candidates.
Employee experience and HR chatbots
Your HR chatbot is often a company’s first point of contact and the first impression. That is why we will now focus on the chatbots’ interactions with people and their cooperation with the HR team.
Instant and personalized support
HR chatbots don’t take breaks and provide people with immediate assistance. They help employees 24 hours, 7 days a week.
Thanks to advanced technology, chatbots can understand and process specific questions about HR or the company itself. By analyzing each conversation, these assistants can adjust responses to meet employees’ needs and provide them with fast and appropriate support.
With this personalized approach and quick access to the necessary information, HR chatbots make your workers feel appreciated.
Transparent communication and feedback
Giving your employees a chance to share their thoughts, ideas, and concerns is important as it makes them feel valued and heard. According to the Workforce Institute, in their The Heard and the Heard-Nots report, “92% of highly engaged employees feel heard at their workplace compared to 30% of highly disengaged employees.”
HR chatbot can fulfill these needs. It can collect all the feedback anonymously and comfortably, resulting in a positive work environment and a sense of belonging to the company.
The balance between chatbots and HR professionals
Chatbots are assistants that can easily handle many basic interactions simultaneously, but they don’t have human qualities such as empathy or emotions. They won’t substitute an actual human, so creating natural and strong relationships, handling complex situations, and making important decisions need to be done by people.
When using chatbots, you must remember that the balance between technology and the human touch has to be maintained.
The benefits for the HR industry
When looking at all the ways an HR chatbot can be used in human resources, this is a handy and valuable tool for boosting HR efficiency.
These intelligent tools cooperate with HR professionals, making their everyday work easier and allowing them to focus on strategic actions and creating meaningful employee relationships. The HR chatbot is a beneficial partner because:
- It automates repetitive tasks, giving the HR team more time to handle more complex issues.
- It’s extremely useful in improving the recruitment experience because it reduces manual tasks and paperwork and speeds up the whole process.
- It provides employees with fast responses to their questions and collects their feedback and opinions, which creates a closer relationship between them and the company.
Conclusion
HR chatbots benefit you in many ways, from automating tasks to creating satisfaction among your workers. They bring innovation to the workplace and positively impact employee experience.
The next step is choosing a chatbot platform that fits your business perfectly. It is a challenging and complex task, but don’t worry – we created a helpful guide to make this choice easier for you.