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5 Ways Voice Technology will Shape Human Resource Management

HR Tech Outlook | Monday, July 22, 2019

With voice assistants like Siri and Alexa becoming everyone's go-to search tool today, voice technology could be one of HR's biggest technological breakthroughs for organizing schedules and answering employees' questions.

Fremont, CA: Technology has provided the world of Human Resources with tools to reduce time taken on most administrative tasks, which gives the HR professionals the opportunity to focus more on strategy and issues that require immediate attention. Gone are the days of lengthy multi-page documents and important employee communications sent through written or printed text. Voice is one technology that is poised to play a driving role in the evolution of a post text era for HR. From webinars and podcasts to chat bots, voice-based communications are enabling crisper and contextual messages that make it easy for employees to access, understand and take action.

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Here's 5 ways through which voice-enabled employee communications is taking the world of human resources by storm:

Recruiting

Artificial intelligence enabled software automation tools are helping businesses identify the right candidates for the job. The increasing use of voice and video resumes offer recruiters an opportunity to analyze resumes more accurately, enabling the initial filtering of candidates. Voice analytics and machine learning algorithms are providing recruiters with the tools to analyze interviews more deeply and pick up those subtle nuances such as confidence and honesty via tone analytics. These tools are also helping them complete the hiring process faster. For example, Talkpush, a Candidate Relationship Management firm which enables recruiter-employee conversations has helped increase candidate satisfaction by 35 percent while reducing cost per hire by 65 percent. With accurate data-driven assessments, the recruitment process will become more accurate—in turn helping improve job roles—candidate fit and productivity.

Training

With the advent of voice technology, employee learning and training is undergoing great change. A very engaging and realistic medium, audio-visual allows trainers to bring in relatability into training—helping employees understand the training materials better. Moreover, the medium lets the trainer bring in higher levels of interactivity and participation into the session by way of gamification, including augmented reality and virtual reality simulations. Recorded on smart phones and produced within minutes, audio visual content can also be uploaded to internal repositories for later consumption. Measurement is the key to gauging the success of any training program. With advanced voice capture and analytics technologies, trainers can now do in-depth analytics on the sessions to understand effectiveness, candidate responses and potential ways of improvement.

Global communications

Businesses are no longer restricted by geography or language. Multinational businesses now offer services to companies across the globe. So it becomes critical to provide employees with communication that is consistent across geographies and in complete alignment with the business goals. Voice-driven mediums like podcasts, live streaming and digital assistants are extremely helpful to the HR Management teams. They craft engaging and motivating communications that reaches all the employees simultaneously. From digital townhall meetings to globally streamed product launches and shareholder meets, voice technology and high speed internet have allowed companies to communicate better and substantially reduce operational costs. Moreover, language translation technology offers simultaneous translation of the company communications into multiple languages, a benefit of the businesses’ many regional stakeholders, employees and shareholders alike.

Automated search

In today’s age of the empowered, digitally adept individual, search and self-learning have become the norm. Infact, the nature of search itself is changing. A recent report from ComScore suggests that almost half of all searches done on digital mediums will be through voice. This is increasingly the case with internal or employee communications as well. With almost all companies having a robust intranet, audio visual content coupled with voice based search enables employees to access relevant information faster. Whether it's organizational notices or information on internal events, employees can search archived information easily now. Machine learning and AI-driven chatbots have intuitive natural language processing capabilities to understand search requests in context of emotion and urgency.

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Benefits questions

Data analytics studies suggest that employee benefits related queries constitute the majority that the HR tackles on a daily basis. The answers to these are often available in the employee handbook or company policy documents, paving way for chatbots to be of great assistance. Modern chatbots with pre-designed algorithms and access to the HR knowledge base can offer instant resolutions to these standard queries. The need for a human interaction arises only for complicated non-regular queries. With intuitive algorithms that provide chatbots with a level of emotional intelligence, employee satisfaction levels improve while reducing the need for human interaction and time taken for query resolution.

Looking at the above mentioned applications, we can safely conclude that voice-based communications in conjunction with artificial intelligence is the way forward. This technology promises to reduce costs, increase effectiveness of communication and employee satisfaction. In an increasingly global business environment, the management aspect of human resources are set to be overhauled.

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