Human Resources is a key testing ground for business chatbots

Many chatbots are written for a customer to use, mixed with social media to create a friendly persona for a brand. But increasingly, companies are now deploying chatbots internally for their own staff to use, with the HR department a key battleground in the deploy-learn-evolve approach.

For any company, the human resources (person or department) has become immeasurably valuable in recent decades. Far from hiring-and-firing, they are now a key integral part of the business, helping to build up teams, ensure a litany of regulations and laws are followed, while keeping the workforce positive, engaged and in line.

The force is strong with HR

With that high workload on their plate, the demands on a HR department have grown rapidly in recent years. This creates an opportunity for businesses to leverage chatbots as a vital time saver. It can help improve the business in key areas like onboarding (as welcoming new hires and getting them up to speed is now called), calendaring (holiday, sickness and so on) and even the hiring process itself.

Since the HR department is already expert at dealing with staff requests, they are the ideal people to ask about what the chatbot needs to do. Chatbots in this case provide a win-win, as the HR team can focus on their critical tasks, allowing the bot to take the load with many basic functions and hand-holding queries.

Oracle has an in-depth piece on how chatbots can feature in the HR department, with that constant reminder that the chatbot needs a specific focus and task that it needs to perform well, and to be well received.

Chatbots can also work 24/7 allowing staff to interact if the office person is unavailable. Or, if the company has offices around the world, it can help the business keep a department in one place, rather than scattered across many offices.

Chatbots can impress as a key part of HR

As well as handling basic tasks like booking time off, a chatbot in HR can provide a welcoming and neutral presence. That’s a benefit as many workers have grown up with a, irrational fear of their HR department. By providing a new and novel method of communication, workers are more likely to engage and understand how the HR team is there to help, not hinder their career.

For hires, a chatbot part of the interview process could also help get the common questions that all candidates are asked out of the way, with the responses accurately recorded to highlight the fairness of the process. With more people being interviewed remotely, this can save time and accelerate the hiring process. This chatbot role is especially interesting for companies with lots of seasonal or part-time roles where the types of questions are all standard, allowing the system to identify the best candidates for very specific role types.

Across the wider company, people can also understand how an internal-chatbot benefits the business and may look for their own use cases where chatbots could save a particular department time, or help raise a profile or share information.

While larger businesses are more likely to experiment with these type of bots, they could soon come packaged as part of a startup IT system to help teams with no dedicated HR staff get off the ground and enable the business to grow faster and manage its staff. The chatbot can also help locate other staff, arrange internal meetings and so on.

Building that HR chatbot

In a traditional business environment, this would sound like an awful lot of development work and expertise. However, building chatbots is a relatively simple task, of building a conversation and a set of options as responses. Since most HR teams know the responses, digitising their work in the guise of a chatbot is relatively straightforward.

Teams can even build their own departmental chatbots, especially with design tools like SnatchBot that doesn’t require any coding expertise. It can be published live on an internal website, and provides analytics and feedback. Using these features, the creators can see how the tool is being used. Also, what elements people use the most and which could do with improved lines of questioning or promotion to make people aware of it.

From answering common office questions to helping locate relevant forms or information, chatbots within a business are a fast growing feature, and HR is the ideal place to test them out and inspire others to build them.