AI has become a useful catchall tool for content marketers and other salespeople, but its efficiency doesn’t end at generating text. Many employers are looking into AI as a valuable partner in onboarding new staff. With its enormous capabilities, it can prove a daunting task for the average recruiter to acclimate.
To help, we asked six business leaders for their unique insight into how to best involve AI in onboarding new employees. These recommendations span from AI’s helpfulness in personalizing the onboarding experience to the more complicated role of immersing people in role-play.
Dive in to discover experiences from a CEO in the AI space to multiple HR professionals to see how you can best apply AI to improve your onboarding process.
Personalizing
Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all orientation programs. With AI, new hires get a tailored onboarding plan that meets their individual needs, skills, and learning styles. This accelerates assimilation and makes employees feel valued from day one.
For example, at our company, we use AI to match new team members with a “work mentor” based on their role, interests, and expertise. This mentor isn’t just a guide; they’re a match made by AI, ensuring a smoother, more personal integration process. The new hire not only feels onboarded but truly welcomed into our work community.
AI isn’t just automating onboarding; it’s humanizing it. It’s about creating a sense of belonging and empowerment, not just ticking off training modules.
Providing unbiased, custom training
In traditional onboarding practices, companies implement a generalized onboarding/integration, leaving little room for personalized training. However, since we incorporated AI-powered onboarding at our tech startup, every new hire now has their skills analyzed and receives training suggestions accordingly.
If we discuss fostering a sense of belonging and empowerment, AI is more unbiased and cooperative than a human on any given day. Unlike human employees, AI guides are accessible 24/7, and it has been found that people feel less judged when asking AI for help.
Plus, factors like gender, race, age, etc., also affect how easily a new employee meshes with their immediate point of contact. But with AI, all those problems are eliminated, making their experience less daunting and helping them get comfortable with their workplace faster.
Sairam Uppugundla, founder and CEO, Codegnan
Taking a holistic approach
The blessing of AI in the onboarding process, when done thoughtfully and thoroughly, is that you can more easily involve all the appropriate departments, trainers, and tools in a cadence that provides the most holistic approach possible. This can help make sure that the new employee has the needed context when going into any given training.
We use Whale (usewhale.io) as our SOP and process database, and automation allows us to dictate both the workflow of training and key information, so it’s not hitting the newbie all at once. Automation also triggers review reminders for the content within Whale, to make sure nobody is receiving outdated information.
This use case has helped empower the employee in their new role and frees up the time of HR, their manager, and trainers to focus on contributing to the new employee experience in more personal and meaningful ways.
Ali Aguilar, HR Manager, Envisionit
Offering interactive tutorials and predictive analytics
Within my organization, we frequently onboard data engineers and AI professionals. Given the complexity of our operations, this process can be overwhelming for new hires.
To address this, we developed an AI-powered onboarding tool. This tool provides new hires with interactive tutorials tailored to their role and uses predictive analytics to anticipate their questions. For instance, if a new engineer spends significant time on a specific data set, the AI proactively offers relevant documentation and best practices, and connects them with in-house experts.
Within weeks of implementing this system, we noticed a significant uptick in the speed at which new hires were integrating into their roles. More importantly, the feedback indicated a heightened sense of belonging. New employees felt “heard” and “valued,” with the AI tool serving as an information dispenser and a bridge connecting them to the larger Airbnb community.
Mitesh Mangaonkar, tech lead of Software Engineering and Data, Airbnb
Eliminating gaps in understanding
Traditional onboarding can leave gaps in an employee’s understanding or integration into the company culture. On the other hand, AI-driven onboarding can be tailored to each individual’s needs, background, and pace of learning, ensuring that every new team member feels understood and valued right from the start.
For example, consider a global corporation with a diverse set of employees coming from various cultural, educational, and professional backgrounds. With AI-driven onboarding, the system can identify the unique needs and preferences of each employee.
It might offer language-specific content for someone whose first language isn’t English or even adapt training modules to cater to different learning styles. Such a tailored approach accelerates the assimilation process while also increasing employee engagement and loyalty in the long run.
Maheen Kanwal, founder and CEO, Call to Authority
Training with immersive role-play
We’re keen on using AI to role-play scenarios the new employee may face. This is true for roles like customer service agents, where the AI can be trained on real data to play a customer with a question or concern.
The new employee does their best and gets instant feedback from the AI, and later on, a review from their manager. While they’re always encouraged to do their best, the “fake” nature of the role-play makes this low-stakes and ensures the employee corrects any errors before setting out with real customers.
We can apply this AI role-play ability to other roles as well. The AI could play a coworker, their manager, or even the CEO! Collecting ongoing data and actual communications to train the model allows for a very realistic facsimile on the screen.
This type of AI model can do even more when it’s able to imitate a human convincingly, but in the realm of onboarding, it’s a great way to create immersive training events.
Corey Donovan, president, Alta Technologies
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