76% of HR professionals say they experience stress in their job role and this makes the HR industry one among the top 3 most stressful ones.
We often talk about the HR department’s role in reducing workplace stress but nobody seems to be bothering about the stress the department goes through. There’s nothing nice about having to constantly listen to employee grievances and work on tight deadlines. Add to this the drudgery of having to deal with mundane employee queries and what you have is the perfect recipe for HR burnout.
While the first part of the job cannot be altered for betterment, the second part can. And that’s exactly what an HR Virtual Assistant (HRVA) is here to help you with.
The natural next question: what exactly is an HR Virtual Assistant?
An HR Virtual Assistant is essentially an AI-powered chatbot that can answer employee queries, raise tickets in real-time, and make your HR personnels’ lives a lot easier. Most HR Virtual Assistants are equipped with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to make employees feel like they’re talking to a human assistant. If and when employee queries go beyond the bot’s knowledge, they can raise real-time tickets that go to your HR department and then can be handled by human personnel.
These virtual assistants can answer most questions related to company policy, holiday calendar, or even tax deduction-related queries. HRVAs’ capabilities also extend to the onboarding and offboarding of employees. From documentation related to your new hire and their training right up to exit interviews, these virtual assistants can automate and smoothen all such mundane tasks and take them off of your HR department’s shoulders.
Moving on, what makes an HR Virtual Assistant your ideal first hire?
The Covid-19 pandemic has made it nearly impossible for offices to work the way they used to earlier. With the coming in of the hybrid workplace, the distance between HR and employees has increased, making it even more difficult for employees to have their queries answered or to even look for the information they need. While most organizations do have knowledge repositories that are supposed to be able to answer routine queries, when it comes to questions like “what is my eligibility for a car loan?” or “would my spouse be eligible for an insurance coverage worth half a million?” these repositories do not suffice. Reaching out to HR is now a long-drawn process as walking up to them is a far-fetched dream. Answering employee queries, however, isn’t the only thing an HR Virtual Assistant can do for you. Read on to know a few more reasons as to why these virtual assistants make for a perfect investment and let you deliver the employee experience your employees deserve.
They help automate employee onboarding and recruitment
The most tedious part of onboarding is not interviewing an employee. It is reading their resume to see if they’re a good fit and the documentation. Be it scanning through several candidates’ resumes or collecting the new hire’s photographs, educational certificates, and their job experience certificates, these mundane tasks can make onboarding and recruitment a complete waste of your HR personnel’s time and skills.
Your HRVA automates these tasks by skimming through the huge dump of resumes you receive, shortlisting them based on the required skills, and even performing background checks to see if the candidate is a safe bet. In terms of employee onboarding, these virtual assistants provide your new hire with a self-service portal where they can upload all the required documents. This portal is equipped with a conversational bot that can answer any queries your new hire might have regarding the organizational policy, benefits, and any other general query that does not require human intervention.
Virtual assistants remain available 24×7
Even the most dedicated HR executive needs breaks and off days. A virtual assistant doesn’t, though. HR Virtual Assistants can remain available 24x7x365 to answer employee queries and scan through candidates’ resumes. These virtual assistants do not need any PTO allowance or coffee breaks, making them the ideal choice for repetitive tasks such as the ones mentioned above.
These virtual assistants can be made accessible from different devices and are there to help locate any information employees need at any hour of the day.
Free up HR professionals’ time
By taking care of repetitive, mundane tasks that do not require the intricate thinking the human brain is capable of, HRVAs free up the HR department’s time. This time can then be used in more productive tasks such as strategy building, finding ways to decrease employee attrition, and policies to ensure employee wellbeing.
When the HR personnel’s flow of work is not disrupted by routine administrative tasks, they can put their human skills to use. HR Virtual Assistants can increase the scope for the strategic redeployment of HR personnel into projects and tasks that genuinely require human intervention.
Help organizations save money
The hiring and training of HR professionals particularly to perform tasks that HRVAs do would require a substantial amount of financial resources. These virtual assistants help you save this time and money.
Virtual assistants also do not leave the job, majorly because they’re incapable of such a thing, thereby bringing down the losses incurred when a human HR professional leaves the organization.
Enable organizations to deliver improved employee experience
Traditional employee portals are often run by admins and thereby do not evolve much in due course of time. These virtual assistants, however, draw on user behavior and patterns and use this information to improve the accuracy of responses.
Further, these assistants can deliver insights and reports based on the most frequently asked questions. These insights can help HR departments improve their knowledge repositories and maybe even make policy changes depending on the requirement.
If used properly and implemented well, HR Virtual Assistants can be the perfect tool you need to take the load off of your HR department and deliver a seamless employee experience at the same time. However, with technology comes responsibility and thereby a word of advice as we close this blog: always make sure to check for data security in any HR Virtual Assistant you choose. Failing to do the same can lead to siphoning off of personal data and loss of trust within your organization.
Here’s to the digital transformation your HR team deserves!
