How Chatbots Can Help You Increase Conversion

Chatbots have evolved impressively thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence. Many brands have recognized the potential of these sophisticated tools and now use them to provide seamless user experiences. Studies predict that 85% of customer interactions with brands will be handled without a human agent by 2020. 

From immediate feedback to humanizing brand presence, chatbots can improve your conversion rates on multiple levels. Here is what to know.

Providing Excellent Customer Support

With the advent of mobile technologies, social networks, and natural language processing, online customers’ expectations have also grown. Being held on hold while trying to connect with a customer support representative is not an option for them anymore. They want brands to provide exceptional customer service 24/7, across multiple online channels. Research says that most customers want brands to address their problems and questions within 24 hours.

This is exactly where chatbots shine. They are available to your prospective customers 24/7, providing them with real-time assistance. Chatbots will ask customers relevant questions to learn more about their needs and problems and provide clear, accurate, and helpful feedback. Precisely because of that, online users often consider them a faster, more convenient, and real-time resolution to their minor problems.

Another great benefit of chatbots lies in the fact that they streamline your customer support assistants’ jobs. By automating many repetitive tasks, they help them focus on more challenging tasks and, therefore, boost customer satisfaction.

Simplifying the Customer Journey

Statistics say that one of the most common reasons why people ditch shopping carts is a too complicated checkout process, as well as the fact that they need to create new accounts. They often need to fill out a lengthy form and then verify their email address before finalizing the purchase. This is a tedious process that may frustrate your target customers and prevent them from buying from you. 

One of the easiest ways to optimize your checkout process is to use chatbots on your website. Use them to simplify buyers’ journeys and provide customers with guided task completion. One such example is Ebay’s ShopBot. It asks customers numerous questions, such as what brands or product features they are looking for. The bot interactively guides users, encouraging them to complete the purchase. Another amazing example of using chatbots to improve sales and user experiences is Lyft that lets users request a ride via their Messenger bot, Slack bot, or Amazon Echo. The bot provides data about their driver’s location and sends the photo of the license plate and the car model to ensure a client’s security.

Evoking FOMO

In today’s oversaturated digital marketing landscape, when your prospective customers are bombarded with different brands and products, getting yourself noticed can be extremely challenging. To engage users and entice them to convert faster, many brands focus on triggering customers’ fear of missing out, or FOMO. For example, they offer time-sensitive deals, exit-intent popups, exclusive offers for VIP customers, etc. Many SaaS brands rely on social proof tools like Cue that displays real-time notifications about new webpage visits or product purchases. 

Combining your most powerful CRO tools with chatbots can also be highly effective. For example, you could use bots to inform users about your brand’s latest news or trends. Chatbots help you promote exclusive content to generate leads and time-sensitive offers to inspire impulse purchases. 

Providing Personalized User Experiences

Research says that 63% of online users don’t know that they’re talking to a bot. While your goal shouldn’t be to deceive your prospective customers, it is still good to know that chatbots can provide reliable user experiences and humanize your brand. 

This is exactly where you need to hire reliable content creators. Their task is to create an engaging chatbot script that reflects your brand’s personality and values. Your goal is to keep users’ conversations with your chatbot more natural and consistent. To humanize your chatbot, consider giving it a human name, such as Ross, Siri, Cortana, or Alexa. 

Apart from using chatbots to make customer conversations more relaxed, you could also provide more personalized product recommendations. For example, Sephora’s bot asks users about their needs and preferences and, based on them, recommends the right products. A user can even upload a photo and try out different makeup products.

Collecting Feedback from Users

Online businesses are continuously trying to understand their customers. They use numerous techniques for collecting customer feedback, such as surveys, online reviews, social media polls, quizzes, website analytics, heatmaps, and so forth. 

This is exactly where chatbots can help. For example, if a user is leaving their shopping cart, a chatbot could ask them why they are leaving. It could offer several options for users to choose from, such as “not interested,” “the price is too high,” or “I want to explore other options.” Or, you could create a one-question survey in your chat to assess users’ satisfaction with your website, products, or brand. 

This sort of feedback is immensely important to any marketer wanting to improve their conversion rates. By gathering honest feedback directly from your customers, you will be able to identify the most common user experience issues and resolve them fast to improve conversions. In the abovementioned scenarios, a chatbot can even help you save the sale. For example, if it finds that the product is too expensive for a customer, it could recommend more relevant products that suit their budget.

Over to You

With the rise of artificial intelligence, chatbots have become an inseparable aspect of your conversion rate optimization strategy. They give you the opportunity to simplify buyers’ journeys, provide personalized product recommendations, and evoke their emotions. Above all, you can collect customer feedback easier and use it to improve user experiences and sales.

 

How do you use chatbots to improve conversions?

Modern Tools for the Modern Employee

Written by Deepak Bharadwaj, General Manager of the HR Business Unit at ServiceNow.

The modern corporate world strikes a stark contrast to the workplace of 20 years ago. Beyond the tearing down of cubicle walls and the obliteration of the nine-to-five workday, the changes in the way companies meet staffing needs, and the way we work have been nothing short of revolutionary.

At each turn in the evolution of the workplace, advances in technology have both pushed and enabled these changes. There isn’t any better example of the shift that has occurred in the workplace than comparing the bulky desktop computer that occupied office desks for decades to the modern smartphone, an always connected, supercomputer that fits in your pocket. The magnitude of change is undeniable and it is no surprise that these changes in technology have completely altered how employees expect to communicate, connect and stay informed in the workplace.

Today’s employees want easy, seamless experiences in the office. To them, requesting time off or checking their company’s maternity leave policy should be just as easy as ordering an Uber and using Venmo. Within seconds, consumers can find the answer to just about anything. But when it comes to life at the office, even with the advances in technology in recent years, employee requests or questions can take days or sometimes weeks to answer.

We asked more than 350 HR leaders at last year’s HR Tech Conference and Expo how their employees find information on HR policies. While nearly half (47%) admitted employees want easier access to information, only 12% of respondents said it’s easy for employees to find the information they need. While a common scenario throughout the enterprise, employees are speaking up and pushing their organizations to look at other options that would enable them to get the answers they need no matter where they are or the time of day.

The path to the future that will enable companies to meet employees’ needs is an integrated HR Service Delivery (HRSD) approach. One of the many tools enabled by HRSD is chatbots. In fact, two-thirds of respondents to our survey believe their employees are very comfortable using chatbots. We have Siri and Alexa to thank for that. With the majority of respondents (92%) agreeing that chatbots will be important in directing employees to find information, it’s clear that this technology represents an important step in enabling employees to access the information they need when they need it. There may be nothing more valuable to an employee than accessing information without having to go through hoops.
Given the increasingly “on demand” nature of staffing solutions, tools like chatbots that connect users to an organization’s data are key to avoiding common pitfalls when working with temporary and new employees. Chatbots are an exciting solution to a common pain point, but before implementing intelligent technologies, there are other things to consider.

A more recent trend among large employers, Gartner market guide, is for them to “approach service comprehensively, by organizing it around the totality of employees’ needs rather than by department.” HR influencer Josh Bersin calls this this a ‘system of productivity’ that helps employees to get their work done. Chatbots and other new intelligent technologies are not standalone solutions but rather, part of a larger HRSD strategy to enable these new technologies and improve the employee service experience. Through careful planning and consideration of new intelligent technologies combined with HRSD strategies, companies will be in a unique position to provide a superior employee service experience in the coming years.

 

Artificial Intelligence trends become today’s HR realities

The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in the past years has profoundly impacted a tremendous number of companies and sectors. Take the example of supply chain functions – these have been completely reshaped and fully robotized warehouses are now the new standard. In parallel, other support or corporate functions have also caught this technological wave, but not with the same speed and pace. Human Resources today are the perfect illustration: the shift towards Digital HR has started for pioneer organizations, but the majority of companies are still in the reflection and conceptualization stages. On one hand, there is an overwhelming feeling related to the immensity of ‘the possible’ in terms of HR technology offerings, and on the other hand, there is a need to answer growing expectations from an evolving workforce.

Today, HR C-levels are facing a common main equation: Ensuring that HR roadmaps will become even more relevant in the C-suite and help streamlining organizations while improving the employee’s experience.

But how are AI technologies concretely impacting the HR community?

Beyond the reflection and conceptualization stages mentioned earlier, AI is clearly acknowledged as a critical component of the future HR service delivery model. Most of discussions today are about how to incorporate chatbots, robots or other cognitive solutions within Human Resources departments.

Just to name a few examples:

• Robotic process automation (RPA) is a new norm today. Any process optimization exercise almost always considers robotic automation as a solution. In this context, almost all HR processes are subject to automation. The main recurring ones that we observe are related to recruitment, core HR administration, compensation, payroll and performance, but all HR processes that require significant manual input are candidates for automation.
• Chatbots are also getting a lot of traction. For example, in the HR space, chatbots are replacing traditional FAQs. Cognitive chatbots can also be trained by humans in order to improve their correct answer rate. This is a real game changer and robust accelerator to change the employee experience.
• Robots are less and less considered as exhibition gadgets and can now be found in some HR front office departments.
• Voice assistants on mobile for any employee, anytime, anywhere are becoming more common – say hello to the new HR ‘Siri’. A vacation request for example can then be part of a quick phone conversation, instead of several less efficient transactions involving HR systems and emails.

What we are observing, is that AI technologies are becoming fully embedded within the HR community. The initial doubts and fears have been overcome by most HR professionals and AI is recognized as a real added value to the employee. The HR operating model shift is ongoing and we are only at the early stages as the technological change is evolving at an exponential speed. Tomorrow new Artificial Intelligence offerings will emerge and will continue to reshape HR departments.

For more insights, please visit hr-jump.com

Author: Thomas Dorynek – Manager, People Advisory Services, EY

Thomas is a seasoned consultant with extensive experience in HR Digital Transformation projects. Views are his own. Follow @tdorynek

An AI Intern For Your Recruiting Team

Source: Wanda Arca via Dribbble

As a recruiter, have you ever had an intern?

It’s awesome. They take on many of the tedious administrative tasks that typically take up so much of your time. They assist with everything from processing applications to coordinating interviews and compiling applicant profiles for hiring managers.

Ah, the luxury.

Then they leave for the Summer. Suddenly all those tasks are put back on your plate. You now have to cut back on one-on-one time with candidates. You’re back to scheduling interviews and filtering through application after application. Gone are the days of complete, uninhibited focus on building relationships with candidates. Gone are the days of getting ahead of your hiring managers’ needs.

But with AI interns, you get the best of both worlds.

Artificially Intelligent (AI) interns share many of the qualities of their human counterparts, except they’re in it for the long haul. AI is impressionable, sponge-like and eager to learn. With AI interns, you get all the benefits of having human interns and none of the downsides. AI doesn’t take lunch breaks or Summer Fridays.

This is what inspired our beta testing program, aptly titled the Wendy Internship Program. Wendy is our conversational AI chatbot for recruiters. Wendy is young and eager, like an intern. She melds seamlessly into your existing workflow, easing burdens and lightening your workload along the way.

As a first round interviewer, Wendy helps recruiters engage and qualify candidates by chatting with them after they apply. This chat occurs via SMS/Facebook Messenger or our web app, and is similar to an initial phone screen. Here’s an example of Wendy initiating a conversation with Katie, a Software Developer who applied to a role at ACME:

This an example of how Wendy starts a chat with an applicant.

Like previously mentioned, Wendy is young and impressionable, so this is your opportunity to shape her to your needs as a recruiter. Wendy…

• Allows for more data-driven decision making — Wendy is able to gather information not found in applicants’ resumes. With these enriched applicant profiles, you can make more informed decisions about who to interview.
• Increases your bandwidth — Rather than going through countless email exchanges and phone screens, you can allocate that time to other areas, like sourcing and building candidate relationships. Wendy also handles many administrative tasks, like scheduling and updating applicants.
• Improves applicant engagement — Because Wendy can engage every single applicant, applicants no longer experience the “ATS black hole.” Unlike humans, Wendy never sleeps — meaning she can screen applicants at any time of the day and even on holidays.

We are currently filling out our Wendy Internship Program and looking for the next class of companies who are excited to help us train Wendy. If you’re interested in adding Wendy to your team, sign up here.

About the Author:

Bailey Newlan is the Content & Growth Marketer at Wade & Wendy, a New York City-based startup on a mission to make hiring more human. Wade & Wendy is a conversational engagement platform for recruitment automation. To connect, reach out to Bailey via LinkedIn, Twitter or Medium.

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HR Your Way

How the next-generation digital workplace can power a deeply personalized HR customer experience

Business disruption is rampant—new business models, new technologies, a challenging economic environment, and the overall quickening pace of business are all disruptive to “business as usual.” Workforce demographics and trends—retiring boomers, high-expectation millennials, workforce-on-demand models, team-based work—are another disruption. It is incumbent on HR to find ways to “hack” these disruptions for their customers, leveraging the digital workplace to customize the HR customer experience according to each individual’s unique needs in the face of this almost constant change.

To better understand how the next-generation digital workplace can counter disruptions by powering a deeply personalized HR customer experience, let’s flash forward about 10 years to 2027. This is when we could see the first cohort of Gen Z employees—engage in their organization’s open enrollment process for benefits.

Our Gen Z futuristic scenario envisions three hypothetical levels of digital workplace “chatbots” at increasing levels of sophistication:

• Workflow Adviser—assists the HR customer through the life or work event workflow using natural language, while automatically gathering data from disparate systems and tapping into available training, research, and operational services support resources.
• Solution Adviser—“understands” desired outcomes and leverages all available internal and external data to design and propose an optimized solution for the HR customer.
• Human Adviser—“empathizes” with the human emotions and feelings likely involved in the HR customer’s decision process, and provides support—or referral to an actual human—as required.

Future forward to Gen Z

Jamie, an employee and a new mom, along with her husband, Liam, kick off the enrollment workflow in Jamie’s digital workplace and are greeted by the chatbot who will be assisting them through the workflow.

The chatbot explains that, set at the level of Workflow Adviser, it has the capability to listen, understand natural language, and talk back, and is also able to interpret the context of Jamie and Liam’s questions in order to suggest relevant training, research, or operational services assistance as they work through the open enrollment process.

As a bonus, the chatbot explains, it has recently been upgraded to a beta version of the Solution Adviser level. So if Jamie would like to explore this advanced level of digital workplace engagement, the chatbot will be able to understand desired outcomes and leverage Jamie and Liam’s demographic, health, and financial data, as well as cloud-based benefits solution provider data, to effectively personalize a recommended package of benefits.

Jamie authorizes the chatbot to use its Solution Adviser capabilities for her open enrollment process. After a structured conversation driven by the chatbot, she is rewarded with a customized portfolio of company benefits that are customized for her family’s unique health needs and financial resources. After a discussion with the Solution Adviser chatbot to clarify the details, Jamie verbally accepts the recommended portfolio of benefits and completes the open enrollment process.

Toward a true AI model for HR

So, what’s going on behind the scenes in our futuristic scenario, and how far are we from being able to deliver this hyper-personalized experience? Let’s drill a bit deeper into the chatbot’s capabilities at the Solution Adviser level by considering one element of the benefits package—long-term disability insurance—the chatbot recommended.

At the Solution Adviser level, the chatbot was permitted to leverage Liam’s personal health records, (which included information about a mild attack of unexplained vertigo that sent him to the ER six months prior), as well as financial income and liabilities information (indicating the couple was living paycheck-to-paycheck with very little savings). By leveraging this information, along with the context gathered through a structured conversation with Jamie and Liam, the chatbot was able to conclude with a reasonable degree of probability that covering a portion of Liam’s expected future income in the event of an unexpected disability made sense for the couple.

Impressive to be sure. But this ability to use natural language to understand context in order to make reasoned judgments about desired outcomes isn’t even the end of the line. Interestingly, and perhaps just a bit frighteningly, true AI is reserved for what we call the Human Adviser level. Here, the chatbot actually understands the human situation, demonstrates empathy with HR customer feelings, and even engages in humor opportunistically to build a deeper bond of understanding with those it has been designed to serve. Of course, at this level of sophistication, the chatbot would also discern, given the nature of the HR customer’s questions, when a referral to an actual human on the operational services team may be in order.

Hacking the disruption

While the advanced cognitive and empathetic capabilities we are ascribing to our next-generation Solution Adviser and Human Adviser digital workplace chatbots are in the infant stages today, we are making rapid advances at the Workflow Adviser level of sophistication for Deloitte’s own digital workplace solution.

As we increase digital workplace capabilities, however, we may find that the process of benefits enrollment itself has become disrupted by our technology advances, and a complete rethink of how benefits are packaged, priced, and administered will likely not be far behind. After all, disruption tends to breed more disruption—which, by the way, is why achieving sustainable HR is so imperative.

About the Authors:

Michael Gretczko is a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP and the practice leader for Digital HR & Innovation. He focuses on helping clients fundamentally change how they operate, often working with large, complex, global organizations to guide transformation programs that enable HR organizations to reinvent the way they leverage digital to improve the employee experience and business performance.

Daniel John Roddy  is a specialist leader with Deloitte Consulting LLP and a member of the Digital HR & Innovation team. He focuses on leveraging his decades of global HR transformation experience to develop and promote thought leadership that helps create breakthrough opportunities for our clients. 

Copyright © 2017 Deloitte Development LLC. All rights reserved.

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Source: HR your way | Michael Gretczko | Pulse | LinkedIn

5 Machine Learning Startups To Improve Your Recruiting Workflow

This list was originally published on Product Hunt here. Below is an abbreviated version.

Sam DeBrule co-founder of Journal and voice of the Machine Learnings Newsletter has curated a list of top startups using Machine Learning to automate work-related tasks. I’ve pared this down to my favorites for simplifying recruiting and team building efforts.

1. Textio | Spell checker for gender bias and more

Job descriptions are often vague and unintentionally biased, which affects the quality and diversity of applicants applying to your jobs. By generating insights from your job posts, Textio teaches you how to better message an open job role in a way that is both non-discriminatory and eye-catching to applicants.

2. Slack | Real-time messaging, archiving & search

Slack facilitates quick, real-time communication using ML-powered search, allowing you to chat with your team and candidates without the lag-time between emails. It automates many internal status updates and meetings regarding candidates as they move through the pipeline. Additionally, with hundreds of groups, it’s a great place to source candidates and learn tactics and best practices from other recruiters.

3. Wade & Wendy | AI chatbot for engaging & interviewing candidates

Wade & Wendy has developed an Applicant Experience Chatbot, Wendy. She serves as a first-round interviewer and candidate engagement tool. By chatting with applicants at the top of the funnel, recruiters and hiring teams can spend more time building relationships with candidates and sourcing hard-to-fill positions.

Disclaimer: I work at Wade & Wendy! 😎

4. Grammarly | Clear, effective, mistake-free writing everywhere you type

With nearly 1 in 3 employees searching for new opportunities, many often communicate with recruiters when a few spare minutes arise while at their current job. When candidates have a small window of time, recruiters need to move fast with their communication. Grammarly is a seamless way to side-step embarrassing typos when quickly emailing (or Slack-ing) back and forth.

5. X.ai | An AI personal assistant who schedules meetings for you

Between, texting, calling, emailing and messaging candidates, it’s tough to keep your calendar straight. X.ai uses AI scheduling assistants to automate this process. Cc’ing Amy to emails eliminates the time-consuming task of scheduling phone calls, interviews and coffees with candidates.

Any other tools keeping your recruiting efforts on track? Drop them in the comments section.👇

About the Author:

Bailey Newlan is the Content & Growth Marketer at Wade & Wendy, a New York City-based startup on a mission to make hiring more human. Wade & Wendy is a conversational engagement platform for recruitment automation. To connect, reach out to Bailey via LinkedIn, Twitter or Medium and join the private beta list.

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Google for Jobs: Opening the Door for Applicant Experience Chatbots

Source: TechCrunch

Recently, the Google Cloud Jobs API team unveiled Google for Jobs. By aggregating similar job titles into groups of jobs, job seekers can search and discover relevant jobs in a centralized location, rather than visiting multiple job boards and company career pages. Google says recruiters can expect “more, motivated applicants.”

Google’s entrance to the job search space, brings much needed innovation. In a recent blog post, Google for Jobs: Disrupting the Recruiting Market?, Josh Bersin, details today’s frustrating landscape:

“The bottom line is a lot of headaches and inefficiency in the job market: the average open position receives more than 150 resumes, more than 45% of candidates never hear anything back from the employer, 83% of candidates rate their job search experience poor…”

With Google doing what they do best — organizing information and making it searchable and discoverable, the job search experience will improve. This further catalyzes an already budding, industry-wide movement towards improved candidate engagement.

When coupled with the increasing pervasiveness of “Quick Apply” options, Google’s enhanced job discoverability has officially knocked down all barriers to applying. Recruiters will experience a massive increase in inbound applicants.

As applicant pools grow, recruiters’ needs will shift from, “How do I get applicants to apply to my jobs?” to “How do I engage this new and much larger applicant pool?” The application floodgates have opened and recruiters, already stretched thin, lack the bandwidth to engage.

Here’s where chatbots come in.

Chatbots engage on candidates’ schedules.

Most applicants and recruiters have tight schedules, which makes it hard to find time to connect. With narrow windows of time to communicate, recruiters and applicants often miss each other. Unlike recruiters, chatbots are not limited by time. Rather, they engage with applicants at their convenience.

Chatbots are patient and listen attentively.

In order to move through the ever-growing queue of applicants, recruiters often rush through the most important aspect of their job: building relationships with candidates. Recruiters strive to listen to candidates, to empathize with their situation and to provide thoughtful feedback and context about the job. Unfortunately, buckling under the pressure to quickly engage, screen and assess, recruiters lack the bandwidth to provide such a thoughtful experience. Chatbots, on the other hand, can be patient when recruiters cannot. Chatbots fulfill the outcome recruiters desire, but are too overburdened to achieve themselves.

Chatbots allow recruiters to make data-driven decisions.

Lastly, similar to “Quick Apply” applications, rushed interviews reduce the data available to recruiters. Short, distracted phone screens provide an incomplete picture of a candidate. Not only does this force recruiters to make decisions based on data they know is incomplete, but candidates are left feeling misrepresented. Chatbots patiently listen to applicants in order to gather a complete picture of their experiences and skills as they relate to the role in question — effectively replicating the outcome recruiters seek in the initial phone screen, but with more holistic data.

Candidates deserve a hiring experience that is un-rushed, attentive and personable. Recruiters want this too, but lack the bandwidth to provide such engagement at scale. The introduction of Google for Jobs further compounds this dilemma.

🙋 ️Enter Wendy.

Wendy is an Applicant Experience Chatbot. She automates the experience recruiters wish they could provide for every applicant. She does not seek to replicate the candidate-recruiter relationship itself. Rather, she replicates, at scale, the outcome a conversation between candidate and recruiter achieves. She aims to engage candidates in an attentive, empathetic way that makes them comfortable enough to open up about their professional accomplishments and career goals — just as a recruiter seeks to do.

What other implications do you think Google for Jobs has on the industry? Let us know in the comments or start a conversation with us on Twitter: @wadeandwendy.

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5 HR Tech Trends Shaping Your Business

Technology continues to drive and disrupt today’s talent management strategies. As we move closer to the halfway point of 2017, we take a look at 5 key HR tech trends shaping your business.

Cybersecurity skills challenges

The widely publicised global data breach that affected the NHS last month highlights the very real risks to all businesses. After the talent shortage, PWC notes that cybersecurity is the second highest ranked concern for CEOs, with three quarters (76%) citing this it as a significant challenge in its annual CEO Survey. A UK government report also found that half of all businesses have experienced at least one data breach or cybersecurity attack in the past year, rising to two thirds of medium and large businesses. Your ability to secure your data is an increasing issue and the pressure is on HR to source talent with vital cybersecurity skills. A report from Experis found that demand for cybersecurity professionals is at an all time high, echoing an earlier survey from Robert Half, Technology and Recruitment : The Landscape For 2017 which found that sourcing tech talent with cybersecurity skills was a priority for over half of all hiring managers this year.

The ongoing debate over AI

Predictions of a jobless world have thrown the debate over AI sharply into focus but AI and automation offer a number of benefits for hiring teams. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Satya Ramaswamy describes ‘machine to machine’ transactions as the ‘low hanging fruit’ of AI rather than ‘people displacement’.

Elsewhere, Gartner predicts that by 2022 smart machines and robots could replace highly trained professionals in sectors including tech, medicine, law and financial services, transforming them into ‘high margin’ industries resembling utilities. But it stresses the benefit that AI brings in replacing repetitive, mundane tasks and offering more meaningful work. The key is to create the right blend of AI and human skills, which HR is ideally positioned for. Gartner suggests that a further benefit of AI is the alleviation of skills shortages in talent starved sectors.

A beneficial and immediate use of AI for HR is the automation of mundane and repetitive tasks in the recruitment cycle through HR technology, allow hiring teams to focus on creating the effective candidate and employee experience that their business urgently needs.

Chatbots in hiring

Today chatbots are emerging as an essential tech tool for high volume recruitment, engaging with candidates via messaging apps with the aim of creating a more interactive and engaging hiring process. The AA was one of the first brands to feature this smart technology and this year it is predicted that chatbot Stanley will interview 2.5 million candidates. As the skills shortage continues, the chatbot offers a more direct and effective way of engaging with sought after millennials or graduate talent. Chatbots are also predicted to make HR’s life easier through simple interactions via mobile devices for both candidates and employees.

Dark data

While still in the exploration stage, dark data can offer vital insights into talent sourcing. Up to 80% of the data created is ‘unstructured’ or ‘dark’ data found in, for example, e-mails, text messages, spreadsheets and pds. At present it is not usable in analytics but AI can be leveraged to organise it into a more usable form. Last month it emerged that Apple have acquired a machine learning based company to strengthen its own capabilities in the area of dark data. Deloitte’s Global Talent Trends report for 2017 reports that only 9% of businesses have a good understanding of the talent dimensions that drive performance. Dark data may help to illuminate those dimensions.

Moving to predictive analytics

It’s not a new or emerging HR tech trend but the transition to predictive analytics is one that HR must eventually (reluctantly?) make as the skills gap in the UK widens and the availability of qualified and digitally able candidates continues to fall. Applying people analytics improves hiring outcomes, reduces the level of early departures from your business and enables HR to begin to predict and plan for future hiring needs. The first step towards predictive analytics is for tech-averse hiring teams to relinquish manual recruitment systems in favour of HR technology and begin to understand the key metrics affecting your hiring process.

Advorto’s recruitment software provides workflow and structure across the entire hiring process, offering a dynamic database of candidates and analytics. Used by some of the world’s leading organisations, it provides a straightforward first step into AI, HR analytics and big data. Start your 30 day free trial today.

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Enterprise Journey to Becoming Digital

Do you want to be a digital enterprise? Do you want to master the art of transforming yourself and be at the forefront of the digital realm?

How can you change your business to achieve this?

Derive new values for yourself, and find better and more innovative ways of working. Put customer experience above and beyond everything as you find methodologies to support the rapidly changing demands of the digital world.

Your transformation will be successful only when you identify and practice appropriate principles, embrace a dual strategy that enhances your business capabilities and switch to agile methodologies if you have not done it already.

The journey to becoming a digital maestro and achieving transformation traverses through four main phases.

• Becoming a top-notch expert with industrialized IT services – by adopting six main principles
• Switching to agile operations to achieve maximum efficiency – so that you enjoy simplicity, rationality and automation
• Creating an engaging experience for your consumers using analytics, revenue and customer management – because your customers come first; their needs and convenience should be your topmost priority
• Availing opportunities for digital services – assessing your security and managing your risks

Becoming a top-notch expert with industrialized IT services

There are five key transformation principles that can help you realize the full potential of digital operations and engagement.

• Targeting uniqueness that is digitized
• Designing magical experiences so as to engage and retain your consumers
• Connect with digital economics, and collaborate so as to leverage your assets
• Operate your business digitally, customer experience being the core
• Evolving into a fully digital organization through the side by side or incremental approach

Initially a digital maturity analysis has to be performed, followed by adoption of a targeted operational model. Maturity can be divided into five different levels: initiating, enabling, integrating, optimizing and pioneering, which are linked to seven different aspects: strategy, organization, customer, technology, operations, ecosystem and innovation, of which the last two are the most critical. The primary aim should be to cover all business areas that are impacted by and impact digital transformation.

Before taking a digital leap, the application modernization wheel should be adopted. Identify your targets, which will act as main drivers. Determine application states, and then come up with a continuous plan. This is referred to as the Embark phase, during which you understand the change rationale of your applications, and then improve metrics, which drive changes. During the Realize phase, you analyze ways in which you can change your operations and speed up your delivery. In the process, you have to improve quality, while ensuring your product line is aligned with your business needs. You establish DevOps, beginning from small teams, and then moving forward using new technologies.

The third phase is Modernize, during which you plan and implement your architecture such that your apps are based on API services. The last stage is Optimize in which performance is monitored, and improvements are made when and where they are necessary.

Switching to agile operations to achieve maximum efficiency

Data centers now feature several applications, suitable for the IT, telecommunication and enterprise sectors, but their offered services have to be responsive to the changing trends and demands. Ericsson brings agility into the picture so as to achieve efficiency through automation. This can be made possible with the NFV Full Stack, which includes a cloud manager, execution environment, SDN controllers and NFV hardware. The solution is capable to support automated deployment while providing you flexibility through multi VIM support. Check out this blog post to see a demonstration of a virtualized, datacenter and explore their vision of future digital infrastructure.

NFV’s potential can be fully achieved only when the hybrid networks are properly managed, which dynamic orchestration makes a possibility. The approach taken automates service design, configuration and assurance for both physical and virtual networks. Acceleration of network virtualization is being realized through the Open Platform for Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV), a collaborative project under the Linux Foundation that is transforming global networks through open source NFV. Ericsson is a platinum-level founding OPNFV member, along with several other telecom vendors, service providers and IT companies leading the charge in digitalized infrastructure.

Creating an engaging experience for your consumers

Customer experience is the central focus when you are in the digital realm. Customer experience should be smooth, effortless and consistent across all channels.

Design a unique omnichannel approach for your customers. This means that you should be able to reach out to your customers through mobile app, social media platforms and even wearable gadgets. Analyze real-time data, and use the results for improving purchase journeys obvert different channels like chatbots and augmented reality. Advanced concepts like clustering and machine learning are used to cross data over different domains, and then take appropriate actions. For instance, if you were a Telco, you should be able to offer a new plan, bundle or upgrade to each customer at the right time. All of the analytics data can also be visualized for a complete understanding through which the customer journey can be identified, and the next best action can be planned out.

Availing opportunities for digital services

Complexity increases when all your systems are connected, and security becomes a more important concern. You should be able to identify new vulnerabilities and threat vectors, and then take steps to protect your complete system. And this protection should extend to your revenues, and help you prevent fraud.

A Security Manager automates security over the cloud as well as physical networks. The two primary components are Security Automation and 360 Design and Monitoring. New assets are detected as security is hardened, which are then monitored continuously.

Additionally the Digital Risk and Business Assurance enable your business to adapt in the dynamic environment while reducing impact on your bottom line. Assurance features three levels: marketplace, prosumer and wholesale assurance. The end result is delivery of a truly digital experience.

Want proof that the above methodologies do work wonders? Two of Ericsson customers, Verizon and Jio, have already been nominated as finalists for the TM Forum EXCELLENCE Awards.

I also encourage you to join and/or follow TM Forum Live this week. If you’re headed to the conference, be sure to check out the Ericsson booth and connect with the team to learn more and discuss your digital transformation journey.

If you would like to read more from Ronald van Loon on the possibilities of Big Data and IoT please click 'Follow' and connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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Source: Enterprise Journey to Becoming Digital | Ronald van Loon | Pulse | LinkedIn

The Conversation Paradox: Why 100% of Interviews Are Biased

In a recent New York Times article, The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews, Jason Dana, Assistant Professor of Management and Marketing at the Yale School of Management, explores the biases surrounding the unstructured interview process. He observes that:

“…interviewers typically form strong but unwarranted impressions about interviewees, often revealing more about themselves than the candidates.”

Throughout the article, Dana cites, Belief in the Unstructured Interview: The Persistence of an Illusion, a study he conducted in 2013 with 140 student subjects. To test the effectiveness of interviews in predicting a student’s GPA, Dana broke students into two groups. While both sets of students used past GPA and course schedule to make predictions, only one group was interviewed. The results of the study showed that GPA predictions were more accurate for the students not interviewed. In other words, the interviews muddled the data and negatively impacted the decision-making process. 

Conversations Are Biased

Something occurred during the interviewing process that led the interviewer to misidentify which interviewees were best qualified and thus most likely to succeed. This ‘something’ is the collection of biases that often come up through the course of conversation or what we, at Wade & Wendy, refer to as conversational bias.

Conversational bias is the set of biases that influence the quality and quantity of data extrapolated during the course of a conversation. At a high level, it includes two key components:

• Set of biases refers to external factors, including everything from confirmation biases and preconceived notions to physical environment and mood, that influence how a person engages in a conversation.
• The quality and quantity of data refers to the information learned during the course of a conversation and how helpful it is in facilitating good decision-making.

The data learned through conversation is inherently incomplete and/or misleading due to the external factors and biases that influence engagement and perception. This is clearly demonstrated in the study above, where subjects were better able to identify future success for students whom they had never met over students that they had met. While not explicitly referred to as ‘conversational bias,’ the issues it perpetuates have been studied time and time again.

Interviews Are Biased

There is information asymmetry between the data learned in a job description and the data learned from a resume. Former SVP of People Operations at Google, Laszlo Bock, says about this paradigm:

“[having] a taxonomy of skills and abilities that are hard to articulate, and resumes don’t do a good job of capturing them. Employers have a set of jobs, but are terrible at both articulating what they need, and actually filtering candidates.”

Essentially, the two forms (resume and job description) used to determine a job seeker’s ability to fulfill the requirements of a job both contain incomplete data. It is for this reason that a conversation — often in the form of an initial phone screen or a first-round interview — is necessary to resolve this asymmetry. This initial conversation allows candidates to better understand the requirements of the job and allows hiring managers to gather information not found in the resume.

It is at this point in the hiring process that conversational bias comes into play.

For example, imagine a hiring manager has a full day of interviews lined up. Throughout the day, he/she becomes increasingly fatigued and, as a result, asks poorer questions and takes fewer notes as the day goes on. Because the conversation and the subsequent data gathered about each candidate is different, it becomes impossible to compare candidate to candidate accurately.

The Problem

In Dana’s Belief in the Unstructured Interview study, GPA, course schedule and an interview were used to predict future success. Results showed that the assessments were less accurate when interviews were included in the decision-making process. In effect, the interviewers were counterproductive.

The Other Problem

To fill the information gap that exists between resume and job description, a conversation must take place. Applicants need clarification on the requirements of the role, just as hiring managers need to gather information not found within the resume.

The Paradox

These problems present two interesting concepts: 1) Conversations are biased and 2) Conversations are necessary. This is what we, at Wade & Wendy, call “The Conversation Paradox.”

Looking Ahead

While the very act of conversation has been proven to introduce numerous biases, it remains a critical part of the hiring process. To date, many solutions have been proposed, such as Dana’s suggestion to use structured interviews, but these solutions do not go far enough. Rather,

• What if there were an artificially intelligent tool smart enough to have a conversation without bias?
• What if there were an artificially intelligent tool agile enough to converse with 100% of candidates 100% of the time?

At Wade & Wendy, we are eagerly working on this solution. To join the conversation, chat with us on Twitter… We’re passionate about conversation, after all: @wadeandwendy.

About the Author:

Bailey Newlan is the Content & Growth Marketer at Wade & Wendy, a New York City-based startup on a mission to make hiring more human. Wade & Wendy’s artificially intelligent chatbot personalities bring clarity and simplicity to the hiring process. Wade is an always-on career guide for job seekers, while Wendy assists hiring managers throughout the recruitment process. To connect, reach out to Bailey via LinkedIn, Twitter or Medium and don’t forget to join the beta list.✌️

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