The Power of Conversational AI for HR in Recruitment and Hiring

Recruiting and hiring new employees brings many challenges for HR, but conversational AI in HR can help overcome them. HR departments are under pressure to quickly find top talent and identify the most appropriate new candidates for various roles. Once new employees have been hired, HR teams need to onboard them as rapidly as possible so that they can become effective in their new role. HR personnel are also responsible for ensuring compliance with company policies and industry regulations, and managing difficult and often sensitive conversations with employees.

Conversational AI for HR offers many ways to ease this burden for HR teams in every industry. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the benefits, use cases, and potential of using conversational AI in HR workflows.

Benefits of using Conversational AI tools in HR

Like people in most roles, HR employees face some routine tasks. These may be time-consuming, taking employees away from more complex obligations, and often leading to frustration that they aren’t able to address those obligations as soon as they would like.

Conversational AI tools can take over repetitive tasks like answering routine questions and gathering employee information, leaving HR employees with more time to focus on higher-value work and removing the most irritating tasks from their to-do lists. Using conversational AI tools can also help reduce the risks of manual errors, and speed up recruitment and onboarding.

What’s more, a conversational AI bot is available 24/7. This enables employees to respond to HR questions and find basic information whenever they like, without waiting for an employee to be available, thereby improving employee satisfaction in the wider organization.

How Conversational AI Improves Workflow in HR Industry

Let’s look at some of the ways that conversational AI helps streamline workflows and increase efficiency in the HR industry.

Enhancing interviews with AI

Conversational AI has significantly improved the interview process for HR departments. Conversational AI platforms like Second Nature use natural language processing (NLP) and AI-powered analysis to conduct personalized interviews that simulate a face-to-face experience, engaging candidates in realistic conversations and evaluating their suitability for the roles. An AI platform uses an objective scoring system that help remove bias and personal prejudice.

This not only allows HR professionals to efficiently screen a larger pool of candidates, but also enables them to assess candidates’ communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and cultural fit more accurately. Ultimately, conversational AI can help HR teams select the most qualified candidates more quickly and secure better hiring outcomes.

Speed up recruitment process

Conversational AI has proven a game-changer, speeding up the recruitment process by streamlining various stages of talent acquisition. Through AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants, organizations can engage with potential candidates 24/7, promptly responding to inquiries, scheduling interviews, and providing information about the company and job openings.

Moreover, conversational AI can efficiently screen and shortlist candidates based on predefined criteria, significantly reducing the time and effort spent on manual screening. By automating the initial stages of the recruitment funnel, HR teams can focus on the most promising candidates, expediting the overall process. Once selected, conversational AI tools can onboard new hires more swiftly, thereby shortening the entire process of recruitment and hiring.

Prepare for difficult conversations

HR team members often have to conduct challenging conversations such as performance reviews, disciplinary actions, or sensitive discussions about employee needs. Second Nature and other conversational AI tools enable HR teams to practice and refine their communication and conflict resolution skills in a risk-free environment.

This strengthens their listening capabilities, improves their ability to express empathy, and allows them to develop the most effective response strategies. As well as enhancing their capabilities, this approach boosts their confidence for the next conversation, helping build a more supportive and sensitive workplace culture.

Ensure compliance with conversational AI

Conversational AI plays a crucial role in helping HR teams raise compliance standards. AI chatbots can deliver consistent and accurate information about company policies, procedures, and legal requirements to employees, on demand and within the flow of work.

Conversational AI can also run engaging and effective customized compliance training programs, track employee progress and completion, and ensure that everyone is fully aware of their responsibilities around data security and privacy, workplace conduct, governance and ethics, and more.

Use Cases of Conversational AI in HR Industry

As discussed above, conversational AI can go a long way toward improving workflows for HR professionals. But there are far more use cases for conversational AI in HR, and they are expanding every day. Here are some of the top use cases for conversational AI for HR teams.

Employee training and development. Conversational AI tools like Second Nature can deliver customized training for employees, giving them a safe space to practice skills like sales calls, objection handling, and more.
Collecting information from employees. Conversational AI can take over the task of gathering employee details like tax information, bank details, and contact information, as well as reminding managers to submit information like employee evaluations.
Support and assistance for employees. Conversational AI chatbots can deliver immediate support to employees who have questions about their benefits, paid leave allowance, compensation, and other HR-related issues.
Employee surveys and feedback. A conversational AI platform can be more effective than a simple form at gathering feedback and conducting surveys about employee engagement, morale, and motivation.
Candidate screening and filtering. Conversational AI can interact with candidates, answer their questions, and conduct first-round interviews, helping narrow down the candidate list while delivering faster responses to applicants and improving their recruitment experience.
Onboarding for new hires. Conversational AI tools are available 24/7 to guide new employees through paperwork, introduce them to company policies, and help them master new tools. New hires feel comfortable interacting with AI that won’t judge them for repeating a query or asking a “stupid question.”
Performance reviews. Conversational AI platforms can carry out routine performance review conversations, ensuring that evaluations are consistent and fair and helping employees feel more at ease.
HR analytics and insights. Conversational AI can analyze data from employee interviews, conversations, and training sessions to understand employee weaknesses and strengths, identify areas for organizational improvement, and generate actionable insights that drive HR decision-making and workforce planning.
Compliance with company regulations. Conversational AI can deliver and reinforce information about company policies and requirements through interactive conversations, helping increase information retention and validate employee certification.
Preparation for challenging situations. Conversational AI allows HR professionals to prepare ahead of time for difficult and sensitive conversations, helping enhance their listening and communication skills and improve interactions.

Bringing Conversational AI into HR

Conversational AI can revolutionize the HR industry, enabling HR teams to streamline recruitment and hiring workflows, freeing HR personnel from repetitive tasks, enhancing onboarding and training, increasing consistency for and improving employee experience and engagement across the organization.

To tap into the capabilities of conversational AI and improve HR processes, contact Second Nature today.

FAQs

Can conversational AI assist with onboarding and post-hiring processes?

Conversational AI provides enormous value for a vast number of HR processes, including onboarding, ongoing training, performance reviews, and more. With conversational AI, HR teams can onboard new hires more quickly, ensure compliance with company regulations, deliver customized training, conduct more positive performance reviews, and more.
How can conversational AI contribute to data-driven decision-making in recruitment and hiring?

Conversational AI brings more consistency to candidate assessments and employee evaluations, together with objective scoring that is free from bias and the influence of personal opinions. This provides HR teams with reliable data about employee progress and performance. AI platforms also analyze this data to deliver actionable insights that support data-driven decision making around workplace planning and future skills gaps.

Is conversational AI suitable for all types of organizations and industries?

Conversational AI brings value to every organization. HR teams in every vertical industry benefit from delegating routine tasks to AI; gaining better insights into employee satisfaction; enforcing compliance; streamlining recruitment and hiring; strengthening their ability to hold difficult conversations; and more.

Additionally, companies in every industry can apply conversational AI for onboarding and ongoing training, through engaging role plays and customized training sessions that employees can complete in their own time and in a safe space.