⚡️ Human Resources + AI ⚡️

Companies fail without the right people. But finding them, training them, and retaining them is risky and resource intensive. No matter if you are hiring a single virtual assistant or a sales team of 20 getting the human resources needed for success is difficult.

AI builds better teams faster. Whether it is in screening applications or checking the pulse of your team, AI can be a constant assistant enabling and accelerating teamwork. The strategies in this issue make building, training, and maintaining a top-performing team easier than ever.

Your AI Report:

• 💻 Case Study: BuzzFeed Finds Its Best Candidates with AI

• 🤖 3 Ways to Use AI to Win

  1. Understand Your Team

  2. Find the Right Candidate

  3. Train Employees Fast

• 📚 Further Reading and Supplemental Resources

Read Time: 11 Minutes

CASE STUDY

💼 BuzzFeed Finds Its Best Candidates with AI

BuzzFeed attracts thousands of job applicants every year, but with some roles receiving hundreds of applications per day, identifying great candidates was a major challenge.

"With such large talent pipelines, pinpointing the top performers is often a tough challenge for our hiring managers," explains Dan Geiger, BuzzFeed's Recruiting Ops Manager.

To solve this, BuzzFeed partnered with Uncubed to pilot an AI-powered solution: IBM Watson Candidate Assistant. The tool engages applicants in personalized career discussions and recommends positions that fit them best.

"When Uncubed proposed an AI-based solution, we recognized its potential to transform our approach to talent management," says Geiger. "We loved the idea of using data to tell a recruiting story."

Uncubed trained the AI assistant on common questions about working at BuzzFeed. Now, prospective applicants can chat with the bot and receive real-time answers as text, videos, and links to open positions.

The results speak for themselves: 87% of candidates coming through the AI assistant progress to face-to-face interviews, compared to only 53% from other sources. In other words, BuzzFeed is 64% more likely to invite IBM Watson Candidate Assistant candidates in for face-to-face interviews than other candidates. 

"For us, there's no better proof of the effectiveness of the pilot than the quality of the candidates that are coming through," concludes Geiger.

🔑 Key Takeaways for Your Business

• Use AI to Scale Screening: Automating initial candidate engagement allows your hiring managers to focus their time on the most promising applicants.

• Personalize the Experience: By training the AI on your company's specific roles and culture, you can provide candidates with uniquely relevant information.

• Leverage Conversation Data: Analyzing the questions candidates ask the chatbot can reveal insights to refine your recruiting strategy and employer branding.

• Improve Candidate Quality: AI-powered screening and personalized engagement leads to better-fit candidates progressing to interviews, as BuzzFeed's 64% improvement shows.

➡️ Read the full case study here.

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1) Understand Your Team

Staying in touch with employees has always been hard, but with more and more work going remote, it's become even harder. Managers and team leaders need to make an explicit effort to stay in touch with the day-to-day activity and well-being of their employees.

Regular surveys can be a game changer for keeping a pulse on your team. They allow you to notice shifts in morale, address issues before they bite you, and figure out who needs more help. Done right, they can be a powerful tool to boost retention and team cohesion.

But surveys are only useful if you actually look at them. They pile up fast, and going through them all is a lot of work. That's where AI comes in.

Build an AI Assistant to Analyze Employee Surveys

💡 You can use AI to build an assistant that knows the ins and outs of your team's daily operations and morale.

Here's how to do it in 3 steps:

1. Use a tool to collect regular feedback from employees

• Google Forms or ClickUp Forms are great options

• Set up daily or weekly pulse surveys asking employees to rate how things are going on a scale of 1-10

• You can also send out surveys after specific events like sales calls or content production sprints

• Include a mix of structured numerical data (e.g. "On a scale of 1-10, how did this task go?") and open-ended questions (e.g. "What was the most frustrating part of this project?")

2. Export the survey data

• You can export data for an individual employee, a whole team, or a specific time period like the past week or month

• Most form tools will let you easily export to CSV or Google Sheets

3. Analyze the data with AI

• Upload the exported data to an AI tool like ChatGPT, Claude, or Google's Gemini

• Ask the AI to analyze the responses and give you insights, for example:

Or for a higher-level view:

The AI will comb through all the survey data and pull out the key insights, saving you hours of manual analysis. You'll get a clear view of how each team member is doing and where you need to focus your management efforts.

⚡ AI gives you superhuman insight into your team's daily experience and performance.

2) Find the Right Candidate

Recruiting the right people is both important and difficult. Scheduling, qualifying, interviewing, and selecting candidates requires a massive pipeline to hire the right people at scale.

Fortunately, much of this work is processing and sorting data, which is where AI excels.

💡 Enter Humanly.io, an example of what the future of AI-assisted hiring looks like.

Humanly accelerates each part of the hiring process:

Screening and Scheduling

• Humanly's AI can automatically screen candidates based on their resumes and applications.

• It can then reach out to qualified candidates to schedule interviews, handling all the back-and-forth coordination.

Candidate Engagement

• Humanly's AI assistant can answer candidate questions 24/7, providing a great candidate experience even when your team is offline.

• It can also send reminders and follow-ups to keep candidates engaged throughout the process.

AI Interview Assistant

• During interviews, Humanly's AI can transcribe the conversation in real-time and even suggest follow-up questions based on the candidate's responses.

• After the interview, it generates a summary highlighting key points, making it easy for hiring managers to review and compare candidates.

Full-stack solutions like Humanly are powerful but can be complex or expensive for smaller companies to implement. Luckily, even smaller-scale hiring can benefit from AI.

Even just 10 or 20 interviews can be difficult for decision-makers to go through. You want to be involved in hiring, but can't watch 20 hours' worth of content for every open position.

💡 Use AI to summarize and focus on what matters about each candidate.

This is quick to set up and saves hours of time, while also improving hiring quality by allowing more decision-makers to be involved.

1. Use a recording tool like Fireflies or Otter.ai to record and automatically transcribe every candidate's interview.

2. Put together a quick spreadsheet with basic information on each candidate like their name and a link to their application.

3. Add a column for the transcript of their call and paste in the transcript from your meeting recorder.

4. The magic happens when you set up GPT for Sheets.

GPT For Sheets integrates with Google Sheets to let you use AI prompts as standard spreadsheet formulas. It adds a set of simple spreadsheet functions that allow you to pipe any data from your sheet to an AI and then get back the results.

Once you are set up after following their Getting Started Guide it’s time to build your custom AI hiring tool.

Use a simple formula like `=GPT("Your prompt", C1)` formula to calculate any data you could want from the transcript.

Extract structured information like their exact past experience, or whether they are available to work on weekends:

You can then use that structured data to color code, sort, or rank candidates based on any attribute discussed in their interview.

AI is also great at parsing out the “feel” of a given candidate and giving you a high-level overview of how their interview went.

With this setup, you can see the key information about each candidate all in one place. Share the spreadsheet with other decision-makers so they can quickly review and weigh in.

⚡ AI makes it possible to deeply understand candidates at scale.

3) Train Employees Fast

Employees need training to do their jobs right. But building and managing that training is a job in itself.

AI can help you create and deliver effective training materials in a fraction of the time.

💡 Enter 360Learning, an AI-powered learning management system (LMS) that can create an entire course from just a document.

360Learning's AI Course Creator can take any existing document, like a PDF or PowerPoint presentation, and automatically generate a fully-fledged interactive course.

Example: Turn a sales playbook into an onboarding course

Let's say you have a 20-page sales playbook document that you want to turn into an onboarding course for new sales reps.

1. Upload the playbook document to 360Learning.

2. The AI will analyze the content and structure of the document.

3. It will break the content down into logical sections and create a course outline.

4. For each section, the AI will generate interactive elements like quizzes, exercises, and discussion prompts to reinforce the learning.

5. The AI will also suggest additional resources and further reading based on the content.

6. You can review and edit the AI-generated course, then publish it to your team with a single click.

According to 360Learning's documentation, the AI Course Creator can generate the following elements from a document:

• Course outline and structure

• Learning objectives for each section

• Summaries and key takeaways

• Quizzes and assessments

• Interactive exercises and activities

• Discussion questions and prompts

• Additional resources and links

This can save L&D teams countless hours of manual course creation and allow them to rapidly spin up training for new products, processes, and initiatives.

Build an AI-powered knowledge base

If you don't need a full-fledged LMS, you can still use AI to quickly supercharge your training materials.

💡 Tools like Notion AI and ClickUp Docs AI can turn your existing documents and knowledge base into an interactive Q&A assistant.

They add a conversational AI interface on top of your content, so employees can ask questions and get instant answers from the documentation.

For example, let's say you have a folder full of HR policies and documents. An employee could ask the AI:

The AI would scan the relevant documents and provide a direct answer, along with links to the source content for further reading.

This is like giving every employee their own personal tutor that's available 24/7 to answer questions and explain concepts.

⚡ AI-powered training is like giving every employee a personal coach to help them level up their skills.

🎧️ Podcasts & Talks

• Transform Talent Acquisition with Advanced AI Techniques — Kshitij Jain, Founder & CEO, and Yazad Dalal, Chief Growth Officer of Joveo, explore how advanced AI and innovative marketing techniques are transforming recruitment strategies and optimizing HR processes.

• How IBM Uses AI to Transform Their HR Strategies — Nickle LaMoreaux, Chief Human Resources Officer at IBM, explores the impact Artificial Intelligence has had in HR, exploring IBM’s pioneering work in integrating AI into the practice.

📖 Books

• "Artificial Intelligence in Human Resource Management" —  Dr. Nisha Sharma, Dr. Vishal Dattana, and Dr. Prakash Kumar Udupi explore how AI transforms HR, enhancing employee development, engagement, retention, and overall organizational performance.

• "AI Revolution in HRM: The New Scorecard" — Dr. Upadhyay, Dr. Khandelwal, and Jayanthi Iyengar explore AI's impact on HR, discussing its benefits, challenges, and key applications. They provide insights and case studies to help HR professionals implement AI-based systems effectively.

📲 Influencers

• Martha Curioni — HR professional blending data science with HR to develop data-driven insights and solutions. Passionate about user-friendly processes and empowering HR teams.

• Christopher J. Fernandez — Corporate VP at Microsoft, Christopher leads global HR digital strategy and AI-enabled HR systems, enhancing employee experiences with engineering teams.

📃 Articles

• The Business Case for AI in HR — IBM's Diane Gherson and Tina Marron-Partridge discuss AI's impact on HR, highlighting solutions like Watson Candidate Assistant and Career Coach. They provide practical tips and steps for AI adoption, focusing on enhancing employee experience and improving HR efficiency.

• How Data And AI Are Reshaping Contemporary HR Practices — Bernard Marr discusses how data and AI revolutionize HR by enhancing decision-making, recruitment, onboarding, performance management, training, and wellbeing

📹️ YouTube Tutorials

• AI for HR: A practical guide — An easy-to-understand guide on what AI is, how to start using ChatGPT, and how to implement it effectively in your HR operations.

• ChatGPT Prompts for HR: Helps With HR Operations and Recruiting — Learn ChatGPT prompts for HR using prompt templates from Keywords Everywhere.