Blog | Talview

HR in 2019: From Automation to Personalization.

Written by Melisa Marzett | Jan 16, '2019

Companies spend billions a year on recruiting and personnel management. The growing pace of the fourth industrial revolution and the emergence of a massive number of new competencies leads to an escalation of the struggle for highly qualified candidates and the expansion of technologies to search for new talents, as well as to unleash the potential of existing employees.

In recent years, the HR sector has actively developed towards total automation of the processes. Personnel control systems, job evaluation, payroll and bonus calculation, qualification tests, even interview, and hiring - for all, special software was created, integrated into other business processes. As a result, today a whole line of software and online services helps HR improve employee productivity and seriously simplifies the work of the team as a whole. According to Forbes, about 40% of companies in the US use HCM cloud solutions, ERP and other talent management software.

In just a few years, the HR sector has come a long way in the field of automation, which seriously eased the tasks of personnel management, accelerated processes, and increased labor productivity. New systems help in managing the finances, document flow, coordination, and teamwork — all within a single integrated architecture. However, the primary trend of HR in 2019 is the transition from quantity to quality.

There is a growing need in the market for platforms that allow improving the quality, productivity, competencies, and commitment of each employee.

HR is working on the creation of automated systems (using machine learning), working with each person personally. Such systems help to find people with the necessary qualifications, assess their personality and development potential within the company, and reveal the talents of current employees. In the future, companies will increasingly use AI methods to create new categories of applications working in the areas of productivity, sales and marketing, and security. Virtual customer helpers and chatbots will be more common.

Software systems have significantly simplified the work of companies with a large number of employees and personnel turnover (trade, manufacturing, hospitality, medicine, etc.). Here, recruiting is maximally automated: there are resume tracking systems, online application evaluation, chatbots for the initial interview, video interview evaluations, etc. For years, organizations have been trying to improve productivity by hiring employees whose knowledge and the most successful employees copied experience. Now the analytical capabilities of HR-software give a clearer picture of the hidden potential of candidates.

Recruiting machine learning technologies

For companies that have a staff of thousands or even tens of thousands of employees, HR is always an issue. 8Two thousand eighteen was a breakthrough year in this direction, thanks to the involvement of machine learning technologies, both in the field of staff recruitment and in the organization of its work. Over the past year, software using artificial intelligence has become a vital tool for finding and pre-selecting candidates. According to a Jobvite study, 43% of recruiters consider the contribution of artificial intelligence to their daily work to be significant.

In the last Global Recruiting survey, an average US recruiter processes applications from 91 candidates daily. At the same time, indicators of the quantity/quality of candidates remained stable over the past decade. But the involvement of machine learning technologies in the hiring process has made it possible for the first time in a long time to significantly improve the labor costs of attracting one new employee. Intelligent automation allows enhancing the efficiency of recruiters, taking on the functions of pre-selection of applicants through a whole database scan and selection of the necessary questionnaires fo llowing specified criteria. The hiring managers were able to pay less attention to working with the primary funnel, and more - to improve conversion rates let alone reduce hiring time.

Chatbots

The use of AI is also positively evaluated by candidates. With large recruitment volumes, candidates used to receive a minimum of time for an interview, since managers were always in time trouble. The mass use of chatbots for primary contact allows you to make the conversation more detailed and informative. Applicants can ask questions to the robot, and he will give them accurate answers, tell more about the tasks, position, and rules of the company, career prospects, etc. Like Alexa, Siri and Google Home, Chatbot uses AI to recruit questions and get the right answer. Companies can customize their chatbots so that they respond to emails or conduct a conversation via instant messengers.

At the same time, the chatbots themselves analyze the answers of the candidates, evaluate their literacy, language skills, level of competence and work experience to then enter the data into a general table for a comparative analysis of the candidate's potential. According to a recent survey by Allegis, most candidates have a positive attitude towards talking to a bot early in the course of the spread method. 66% of candidates indicated that they prepared for an interview with a chatbot beforehand, although most still prefer to work with a human recruiter.

Voice assistants

Another role of automated systems in HR is the introduction of voice assistants. Alexa and Siri have long been firmly established in home life, showing their practicality, usability, and versatility. Within HR, similar programs will increasingly be applied to reduce the workload and speed up the work of employees. Such voice-driven programs bring the most significant return to companies where low-skilled employees work. Instead of going to the terminals and typing in commands (which requires additional training), employees can "talk" to the local network via a standard voice interface.

Experiments with new models of personnel management

Continuous improvement of HR technologies has become a key trend in the business world. We see an incredibly fast growth of innovative HR projects. Previously, developers, technology companies that invented new software, were at the forefront of progress, and HR services bought ready-made solutions and integrated them into their structure. Today, HR departments are experimenting with new models of performance management, learning strategies, risk reduction, new methods for recruiting and training people. A living example is People Analytics. It is not only a severe optimization of the infrastructure, but it is also a new vision of the process in which working with the team, with the data of employees, becomes even more important than working with clients. It is here that are looking for the key to more successful business management.

Selection of analysis tools for training

At the corporate level, new wave software complement dozens of existing programs for the variety and supervision of personnel: these are tools for analyzing corporate staff with a simultaneous selection of optimal training programs. They include the so-called "experience platforms," upgraded LMS systems. Recommend, find and provide training - AI algorithms are actively used All three tasks use Al algorithms actively. Ultimately, this improves the quality of the company's most valuable resource - human capital. It is about creating a continuous coaching process, motivating people and optimizing through constant feedback.

Relationship Analytics

The second important direction in the new generation of HR is relationship analytics. A person is not the sum of his knowledge and competencies, but a multifaceted and emotional personality. In addition to the standard indicators inherent in each HRMS, new technologies take into account data on personal contacts, social life, well-being, habits, hobbies, attitudes, character algoand mood. At the beginning of the century, this might have seemed an invasion of privacy, unethical or even immoral. But we live in an open society, and modern people use to demonstrating their personal lives through social networks. HiQ Labs, for example, scans LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and other open data to determine the employee's current internal mood using keywords.

Personalized helpers

Today, work is underway to create personalized program assistance provided to each employee. These programs will assess not only professionalism, but also the well-being, mood, and priorities of each person. Ultimate Software uses the technology of analysis of timbre, tension, and hues of speech to monitor the emotional background of the employee. As the first practice shows, the younger generation of workers perceives such programs with evident enthusiasm. Personal assistants are no longer weekly with a list of tasks, customers or contacts, these are training and diet tips, daily routines, non-core but interesting training courses, household tips and links to interesting acquaintances, relaxing exercises or even abstract games. The first tests showed that such programs significantly improve teamwork, help to avoid stress, maintain mood, and maintain tone and health.