2 Ways Automation Can Solve Your Hiring Problem

“Good help is hard find” is as true today as ever, but new automation tools can help you solve your hiring problems in ways you might not expect. And no, we’re not talking about building better job listings.

There are two key areas that modern automation can help you deal with a dearth of good job candidates: shortening the onboarding cycle of anyone you hire, and improving the productivity of everyone on your team.

When you bring on a new team member, it takes time for them to achieve full productivity — but automation can shorten that learning curve. For example, an advanced knowledge base with automated interaction tools can make it easy for new employees to look up and find key information. An artificially intelligent virtual assistant with access to a well annotated knowledge base can even guide new team members through standard procedures and workflows to ensure they follow best practices and conform to company policies. They learn by doing, and they learn to do it right the first time.

Moreover, a capable automated onboarding assistant can also streamline and customize the administrative side of employee training so that as little time as possible is spent completing forms, enrolling in benefits, or learning the Wi-Fi password. Training requires less human oversight and less rote repetition, shortening ramp up cycles for new hires.

Automation can also enhance the productivity of both new and existing team members, making it possible to accomplish the same historical level of performance with fewer employees.

For example, if you have an automated assistant that understands the basic processes of your team, it can do more than simply guide employees through best practices. After developing competence through observation, an artificially intelligent assistant can automate much of the administrative overhead for your team. If you have a customer service team that must file, update, and close support tickets for every customer interaction, a virtual AI agent could handle much of that “form completion” work, sparing your human employees from boring, rote tasks and speeding up your first call resolution cycle.

If that same team is working on a knowledge-centered support model — which requires a constantly updated central knowledge base to deliver high quality support — that same virtual agent can manage the maintenance of your documentation and training and reference materials. If a key knowledge base entry is out of date or inaccurate, the virtual agent can flag the entry for correction or even add updates to the documentation itself.

This same process of AI “guiding first, automating later” can be extrapolated to a wide array of administrative tasks across your organization. And that same AI can help ensure that its own performance improves by building data annotation into the processes it oversees, so your company native creates AI-ready training data and becomes AI-optimized as quickly as possible.

Hiring is hard. Training is harder. AI automation can make both easier. If you’d like to learn more about how automation can make your support team leaner and more effective, contact Talla today.