The Art of the Possible: Practical AI and Automation Use Cases for HR

Scott King: Well, hey, everyone, thanks for joining this episode of the Union Podcast. I’m Scott King, and I am joined by Chris Kraus. Hi, Chris.

Chris Kraus: How’s it going?

Scott King: Today, we are going to start a series called The Art of the Possible. So people ask us about automation, they ask us about AI, what it can do, how they can use it, what the outcomes are. So they’re basically asking what’s possible? Give me a list of items that I can choose from, like a menu or something or a template. Everyone always wants a template. So we will provide you with some, and today, we’re talking about HR use cases. So, how can human resources processes be enhanced with automation? How can AI help alleviate some of these concerns? So we’ve got some use cases that we want to talk through, some of the challenges, some of the things you can do, some of the outcomes you can expect, and how easy or hard each one of these use cases is to implement. So Chris, any opening remarks before we start with basically Q&A scenarios?

Chris Kraus: Yeah. So I think definitely, this is stuff people are talking about and everybody’s got a little bit of fear of these types of use cases. So the nice thing is HR can talk about them in the context of how it would help themselves and employees, so that it’s assistive to help actually with that adoption. Cause, you know, a chief people officer really is worried about training, culture, how do you adopt, how do you grow your employees? So this is actually a pretty cool way for HR to say, “In our world, we could help and grow. And here are examples. You know, we’re not going to get rid of people; we’re going to actually make things better.” And then how do you start building the trust of AI? You know, it’s not going to take your job; it’s not a robot. It’s actually a very assistive technology. So it’s kind of a good thing for HR to have these things to say, “Look, look, this is helping. We want to learn how to trust AI and use it as a virtual worker versus thinking it will replace everybody like a robot.”

Scott King: Yeah, yeah, I think AI is really going to need a shepherd or a mentor in a company. I think the HR organization is perfect for that. You know, if you do have a big enough one, right? That someone can say, “Okay, just like you did learning and development for whatever you’re teaching your employees, AI can be one of those.” And I think the easiest use case to get started is just a simple Q&A for questions, right, Chris? So, if you have questions around policies, procedures, or your role, you don’t know everything. So, how do AI and automation help with finding information?
Chris Kraus: Right. Well, there’s actually a lot of devil in the details. For example, I have a friend I go to the gym with, Marlene, and she’s an HR manager in a hotel chain, and they have restaurants. So she said, “Really, it looks like I’m employing people in multiple countries, even though some of them are in California, some of them are in Texas, some are in New York. The employment laws are so different.” So when she has to answer questions about employment benefits, there are the core policies that the company has, but then they have to ask, “Is this a union inside of New York, or is this a CCPA company in California?” So there’s a lot of details there. So, actually having something like an AI platform that can read all the policies and then help you compare and contrast and get answers on those is super helpful. Even if it’s a small company, like she’s an HR generalist, she’s the sole person in HR. But she said, “It’s actually a ton of work to keep track of that because, you know, some are union states, some are non-union states. You know, California’s privacy concerns differ from Texas or Louisiana’s.” So she said, literally, we’re talking through this. She said, “You know, we have policies for hiring, policies for how overtime works, how different things like that work. I’m a generalist, I have to know all those things. So we have things written down, resources like SHRM, and legal guidance, but I have to keep track of all those things. And there’s a lot of details.” So I think answering questions from employees about these things is helpful because you can literally ask, “What is the difference between overtime for contractors and a union versus non-union?” And yes, there are details about that, but it can actually get those answers. So I was explaining the story, and she’s like, “This would really actually help me. It wouldn’t get rid of me, but it would really help me because there are a lot of details that I need bullet-pointed and that help me get answers for.” So that’s that’s a use case. Just like an individual in HR, maybe you’re in a larger company like Scott, and I work for CA. So, we had HR generalists like Christina Hoffman in each business unit. I didn’t know anything because I knew to call her, and she’d say, “If you want to hire someone, you want to do this, you want to do that.” She was like this…

Scott King: Christina Hoffman, how did you remember that? This was years ago.

Chris Kraus: She was actually one of the nicest HR people. Yeah, that’s 10 years ago, but she was just great. She was literally the answer. Any question you had? She knew how the company policies worked and how you did things, you know? And so it was so easy. It was like I would say, “Ask Krista,” I would say, “Ask Christina.” It would be the same thing, right? So they kind of move to that self-service. It’s like, okay, how do employees know to do things, right? It’s a similar concept. You still have FMLA leave, you have state regulations, you have local policies, things change based on if you’re a full-time employee, say, a part-time employee, or an hourly wage, things like that. So those people still have questions. So if you’re in a medium-sized company and you don’t have an HR rep in every business unit like we did, or Christina, then you could actually make that self-service. So you could actually let people do things like look up what constitutes overtime for an hourly worker versus a contractor based on this company versus this other operating company, or unions and things like that. So you could actually extend those things there. The nice thing is with AI giving the answers, you’ll always get a very consistent answer. It’ll tell you if it doesn’t know the answer. So it’s not going to make something up. But then you can say, “Keep track of those questions and know what are the top questions or concerns people have.” So you can start proactively addressing them? So there’s a lot of things you can move past just Q&A, not just the audience, but help with training and facilitating that.

Scott King: Yeah, that would be really helpful for companies that don’t offer whatever system they’re asking about. You may not even have access to that system, but you could have an AI assistant or AI agent ask on your behalf. So that would alleviate a lot of the IT issues, right? And you can’t have everybody with access to, say, a system with a per-user pricing model, and you have a thousand employees and one person, so you can’t pay 12 months to ask one question. So maybe something like that, too, would be beneficial. So, yeah.

Chris Kraus: Yeah, that ability to integrate to a system, say, “Okay, this is an employee in the state, in this country, or what have you, this is your profile, and answer the question specifically.” Because, let’s face it, some things you don’t do very often, like look up your PTO leave or request vacations, you’re never going to remember how to get to that system and log in, right? You do it so infrequently.

Scott King: I only ask for my W-2 once a year, “Hey, I know you already emailed this to me, but I lost it. Where do I get it?” All right, so that’s Q&A. From a generalist perspective, and then extending that to employee self-service, I think that’s a no-brainer. It helps people build trust in AI. Clearly, no one’s job is in danger for that.

Chris Kraus: Yeah, exactly.

Scott King: So let’s walk through it. The next one we have is candidate experience. So we really, you know, we struggled with this one because there are so many different systems and SaaS products that enhance the candidate experience, but I think we’re… where we find, like our product Krista, where we find the biggest benefit is not with the knowledge workers and not with the white-collar workers like us, because there are lots of systems and lots of processes to do this. It’s really slow. I always laugh that it takes forever to get a regular job, but the football coaches get hired in six hours. How is that possible? But for the majority of the U.S., they are like blue-collar workers or labor workers, right? The number one job in every state is either you work for Walmart or you’re a truck driver. These guys may or may not have resumes. How can like AI or automation improve the candidate experience for the majority of the workforce?

Chris Kraus: Right. So it’s really meeting the candidates where they are. So, you know, someone who’s a Java developer is going to go into a resume and the software, they’re going to go to Monster, they’re going to go to LinkedIn and do things. But for everybody else, it’s like, there’s not a lot of automation and platforms to help there. So, as an employer, you need to meet the people where they are and make it easy. So everything should be able to be done, say, through an automated process on a mobile phone. You don’t assume people have computers and are walking around with them and have internet, but most people have a phone. So scoping it to like, “How do you interact with them?” And then you’re going to build a mini resume basically. If you’re working, looking to hire someone in, say, a restaurant, or a grocery store chain, you’re not going to ask for 15 years of experience and patents you’ve applied for and things like that. It will be more specific to, you know, “Where do you want to work? How many hours can you work? You know, can you work the day shift? Do you need to work the evening or early morning shift? You know, what skills do you have? Have you done this in other places?” So, really, basically, letting you gather information to fit them into a specific position without having to have a formal resume and all that review process. Those people get hired much faster because it’s usually done in the field by a local manager. It’s not going through the corporate, you know, recruiting arm. So there are many opportunities there to make that easier, to meet them where they are, get the processes, but realize it’s very distributed. Every grocery store will have a manager on duty who does that. It’s not like it’s a centralized HR function itself in that case. They’re very distributed. So automation, actually doing rules on employment and age and all those things, making sure they meet them, full-time versus part-time, benefits or no benefits, actually automating that to make it very smooth so there are no questions that they can’t answer makes a lot of sense.

Scott King: Yeah, then I like how you said, “Meet them where they are,” because they may only have WhatsApp or SMS, or they may not even have a smartphone where they can’t download an app. So I think that is a huge benefit. So if we’re going to improve the candidate experience, we will have to track these people. So the next use case we want to walk through is the recruiting and tracking of all the applicants. And there are a ton of ATS systems that do this.

But you know, just like we talked about with, you know, white versus blue-collar jobs, there are some gaps. You know, in these systems, some people, some of them, you know, let’s say mid-market companies where they have just a payroll system, the payroll system does some of this, but it doesn’t really do enough. And then an ATS system is just too much, right? They don’t, they don’t need that much, or maybe they have, like, disparate systems.

Moving data from one system to another—and this is the whole process orchestration thing that we’ll get into later—is a problem. But from a recruiting and tracking perspective, Chris, if we tie in the candidate experience with the lower end of the labor market, how does this work? So theoretically, if I have an ATS system or payroll, and then if not…

Chris Kraus: Yeah. So often, the first thing is actually scheduling interviews and then keeping track of the interviews, who showed up, the yes or no decisions, and things like that. So a lot of that is not automated at all. “Let me look at my calendar, let me put something on the calendar.” It is very manual. So can we actually help with a candidate being able to say, from a simple webpage on their phone, “I want to do an interview on Tuesday,” and present them with, “These are the time slots available, can you come in?” and then gather some information about them and tell them what they need to bring when they come in. It’s like, “You need to bring in your driver’s license. You need to bring in certain things.” And there will be some of that just core scheduling that usually is not supported by any formal system to help people with that. And then it’s like setting up the expectations: “What do you need to bring? What documentation do you need for the employment process? Do you have a birth certificate, Social Security card, and all the types of things that they may need to actually complete the process?” Cause sometimes these are one-and-done. You know, to bring them on board, you need to make sure they’re of age, and have all this type of thing in place. But a lot of times, there is another step behind that. It’s like, okay, do we have to do some background check? Or do we have to do a driver’s license validation because they will be driving for us? Do we have to verify they don’t have a bunch of speeding tickets? So, like you mentioned, this kind of starts the concept of orchestration, automation of getting them to a point where they can be hired. And sometimes there are third-party checks. I mean, like with, I know we were doing some stuff with nurses, and there’s a system you can use to ask, “Give me all their nursing credentials,” but it was all manual. So you submitted the request, and a day or two later, you got a response back, and then you had to match those up manually. So putting some automation in place to keep track of those things so they don’t slip through is really important.

Scott King: Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine all the credential checking. And I mean, yeah. Driver’s licenses, welders, like union cards, right? Like Texas, it’s not a union state, but I guess you’d have to do that. So, okay. So if we improve and attract the candidate, we track them, and now they’re hired, employee onboarding is always a big conversation because that is complicated, right? You have to sign them up for systems access, facilities, security, all the different payroll and things, and if they need equipment and training. Like, clearly, this is probably, to me, this is the ripest opportunity for… because, like, most people could articulate the cascading effects of getting hired because they’ve been hired a few times. How does automation help with this? It seems really complicated, and it seems like this is the ripest opportunity.

Chris Kraus: Yeah, there’s so much tribal knowledge in this. Like I said before, we would have, for Christina, and she had the checklist. She knew how you did it for this company and this business unit based on your location, right? And so when we hired people onshore and offshore, she had different checklists. And so there’s a lot of workflow and tracking in that process. And as you mentioned, the interesting thing about this is HR has very, they’ve got one little tiny step, right? They may be giving you an offer letter, they may be getting that in place, but then the benefits department, then the payroll department, then facilities have to badge you, security has to, like, assign your buildings you can get to, then you have to have desks and hardware and then system access. So this is really orchestrating lots of areas across the company. I mean, you touch almost every part of the company when you bring someone on board if you step back and think about it because everybody has to know that you’re going to be there. Everybody, you have to have access, systems access, you have to have your hardware. So that’s a lot of orchestration. And I mean, I know people said, “Yeah, I’m starting work Monday, but I’m not going to do anything for two weeks because I don’t know if I have a computer my first day.” You know, I remember there was a big deal. It’s like, “You, you have an email address your first day. You don’t have a computer yet, but we have an email address for you,” right? IT could get that provisioned quickly, but then that cascaded into all the other systems, like getting hardware, systems access, and those things. So there’s so much tribal knowledge, and it’s a lot of manual tasks and checking, right? Lots of emails get sent. Huge, huge orchestration opportunity there.

Chris Kraus: Yeah, so that’s definitely when you have people who have no specifics of how to hire someone into a union or non-union state, or the privacy concerns of data with CCPA or not, or GDPR, whatever it is. So when you actually put those steps inside of software automation like Krista, everybody follows the same process. So, you know, everything’s being done. And then, if something changes, it’s not a training problem. It’s a “change the automation to include a step because something changed at a federal level” or “change a step because something changed at a state level,” and it’s implemented automatically. People don’t have to say, “Okay, I need to go… do I need to retrain because a process changed?” So it really does help with the general liability of doing the process the correct way every time, and everything, you know, thinking about, we call it “dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s.” It’s literally that level of all that minutiae of details. Process orchestration, even if it’s orchestrating people and saying, “You know, I put a ticket into ServiceNow, and then verify, did security create a badge? Yes. And then create a ticket in JIRA for a global ID, and then check it.” So sometimes it’s literally, “I’ve put information in your system, and then verify that you manually did something,” or sometimes it’s, “We actually can automate those steps.” But it’s a huge, huge problem. And it’s not specific to HR. It’s specific to, like, running a business, right? Everybody has these problems. Sometimes it’s the, how do you say, “Open the office in the morning?” It’s like, you know, obviously turn off, turn on the lights with things like, “Did you change, did you set the phones right? Did you do these things? Did you,” you know, all those types of things you have to do to, like, open the office in the morning. Those are processes that everybody has to do, and they need to be done consistently the same way. And you do get an audit trail when you automate things. So if someone needs to know, you know, “How, when did this happen? When did we do these things?” The good thing is with automation, we do have that audit trail, so we can walk back and improve processes over time. Say, “What’s taking too long? What can we do better with?” So, there are efficiencies that can be helped in understanding the process, along with the prevention of errors.

Scott King: You know, you didn’t really talk about improving the process. If you get enough transactions going back and forth with these processes, you can have a machine-learning opportunity, a model to actually understand like, “Hey, you could improve this,” or “This is always the exception. This ought to be the rule anyways.” So that’s another opportunity. So I know, Chris, that we talked about all these processes. Obviously, you can do this with others, but we just wanted to provide an overview of human resource processes because people ask us about that. What, you know, from a closing standpoint, if I’m an HR person, how do I get started? What are some of the easiest use cases, and what can I do to bring automation and AI in to alleviate everybody’s fears?

Chris Kraus: Yeah. So I think in HR, you have to be at the forefront of this new technology. So, getting people comfortable with the technology and understanding it so that you have it is just making adoption easier. So to realize people, it’s not going to take away your jobs, it’s not going to do all those crazy things. It always appears to be fear, uncertainty, and doubt. But the idea is starting small, like Q&A. You know, it’s, it’s very audible. People can see the answers and start internally. So let’s say executives and HR people start using it, see how it’s doing things accurately so they build trust, and then you bring it to your larger audience of employees. Now, then maybe you expand that to your customer support calls, your customer center have customer calls, and they have questions about returns and policies. But starting somewhere is the, and you have to start somewhere to build the trust and understand how it will help you. Then, it’s very easy to say, “Let’s expand horizontally within another part of the organization doing the same thing or going vertical and doing more orchestration capabilities.” So it’s neat because HR isn’t the job. Part of their job title is like culture, helping people understand and be happy employees and improving their work-life balance. This will actually help with that, right? It seems like a logical place to start or at least evangelize out to the rest of the organization.

Scott King: Seems logical to me. Well, appreciate it, Chris. I love this conversation. If anybody has a question, you can obviously reach out to us on probably LinkedIn, which is easiest because we live there. Or you can go to Krista.ai, poke around, let us know who you are, and we’d be happy to help you. So until next time.

Scott King: Well, hey, everyone, thanks for joining this episode of the Union Podcast. I’m Scott King, and I am joined by Chris Kraus. Hi, Chris.

Chris Kraus: How’s it going?

Scott King: Today, we are going to start a series called The Art of the Possible. So people ask us about automation, they ask us about AI, what it can do, how they can use it, what the outcomes are. So they’re basically asking what’s possible? Give me a list of items that I can choose from, like a menu or something or a template. Everyone always wants a template. So we will provide you with some, and today, we’re talking about HR use cases. So, how can human resources processes be enhanced with automation? How can AI help alleviate some of these concerns? So we’ve got some use cases that we want to talk through, some of the challenges, some of the things you can do, some of the outcomes you can expect, and how easy or hard each one of these use cases is to implement. So Chris, any opening remarks before we start with basically Q&A scenarios?

Chris Kraus: Yeah. So I think definitely, this is stuff people are talking about and everybody’s got a little bit of fear of these types of use cases. So the nice thing is HR can talk about them in the context of how it would help themselves and employees, so that it’s assistive to help actually with that adoption. Cause, you know, a chief people officer really is worried about training, culture, how do you adopt, how do you grow your employees? So this is actually a pretty cool way for HR to say, “In our world, we could help and grow. And here are examples. You know, we’re not going to get rid of people; we’re going to actually make things better.” And then how do you start building the trust of AI? You know, it’s not going to take your job; it’s not a robot. It’s actually a very assistive technology. So it’s kind of a good thing for HR to have these things to say, “Look, look, this is helping. We want to learn how to trust AI and use it as a virtual worker versus thinking it will replace everybody like a robot.”

Scott King: Yeah, yeah, I think AI is really going to need a shepherd or a mentor in a company. I think the HR organization is perfect for that. You know, if you do have a big enough one, right? That someone can say, “Okay, just like you did learning and development for whatever you’re teaching your employees, AI can be one of those.” And I think the easiest use case to get started is just a simple Q&A for questions, right, Chris? So, if you have questions around policies, procedures, or your role, you don’t know everything. So, how do AI and automation help with finding information?

Chris Kraus: Right. Well, there’s actually a lot of devil in the details. For example, I have a friend I go to the gym with, Marlene, and she’s an HR manager in a hotel chain, and they have restaurants. So she said, “Really, it looks like I’m employing people in multiple countries, even though some of them are in California, some of them are in Texas, some are in New York. The employment laws are so different.” So when she has to answer questions about employment benefits, there are the core policies that the company has, but then they have to ask, “Is this a union inside of New York, or is this a CCPA company in California?” So there’s a lot of details there. So, actually having something like an AI platform that can read all the policies and then help you compare and contrast and get answers on those is super helpful. Even if it’s a small company, like she’s an HR generalist, she’s the sole person in HR. But she said, “It’s actually a ton of work to keep track of that because, you know, some are union states, some are non-union states. You know, California’s privacy concerns differ from Texas or Louisiana’s.” So she said, literally, we’re talking through this. She said, “You know, we have policies for hiring, policies for how overtime works, how different things like that work. I’m a generalist, I have to know all those things. So we have things written down, resources like SHRM, and legal guidance, but I have to keep track of all those things. And there’s a lot of details.” So I think answering questions from employees about these things is helpful because you can literally ask, “What is the difference between overtime for contractors and a union versus non-union?” And yes, there are details about that, but it can actually get those answers. So I was explaining the story, and she’s like, “This would really actually help me. It wouldn’t get rid of me, but it would really help me because there are a lot of details that I need bullet-pointed and that help me get answers for.” So that’s that’s a use case. Just like an individual in HR, maybe you’re in a larger company like Scott, and I work for CA. So, we had HR generalists like Christina Hoffman in each business unit. I didn’t know anything because I knew to call her, and she’d say, “If you want to hire someone, you want to do this, you want to do that.” She was like this…

Scott King: Christina Hoffman, how did you remember that? This was years ago.

Chris Kraus: She was actually one of the nicest HR people. Yeah, that’s 10 years ago, but she was just great. She was literally the answer. Any question you had? She knew how the company policies worked and how you did things, you know? And so it was so easy. It was like I would say, “Ask Krista,” I would say, “Ask Christina.” It would be the same thing, right? So they kind of move to that self-service. It’s like, okay, how do employees know to do things, right? It’s a similar concept. You still have FMLA leave, you have state regulations, you have local policies, things change based on if you’re a full-time employee, say, a part-time employee, or an hourly wage, things like that. So those people still have questions. So if you’re in a medium-sized company and you don’t have an HR rep in every business unit like we did, or Christina, then you could actually make that self-service. So you could actually let people do things like look up what constitutes overtime for an hourly worker versus a contractor based on this company versus this other operating company, or unions and things like that. So you could actually extend those things there. The nice thing is with AI giving the answers, you’ll always get a very consistent answer. It’ll tell you if it doesn’t know the answer. So it’s not going to make something up. But then you can say, “Keep track of those questions and know what are the top questions or concerns people have.” So you can start proactively addressing them? So there’s a lot of things you can move past just Q&A, not just the audience, but help with training and facilitating that.

Scott King: Yeah, that would be really helpful for companies that don’t offer whatever system they’re asking about. You may not even have access to that system, but you could have an AI assistant or AI agent ask on your behalf. So that would alleviate a lot of the IT issues, right? And you can’t have everybody with access to, say, a system with a per-user pricing model, and you have a thousand employees and one person, so you can’t pay 12 months to ask one question. So maybe something like that, too, would be beneficial. So, yeah.

Chris Kraus: Yeah, that ability to integrate to a system, say, “Okay, this is an employee in the state, in this country, or what have you, this is your profile, and answer the question specifically.” Because, let’s face it, some things you don’t do very often, like look up your PTO leave or request vacations, you’re never going to remember how to get to that system and log in, right? You do it so infrequently.

Scott King: I only ask for my W-2 once a year, “Hey, I know you already emailed this to me, but I lost it. Where do I get it?” All right, so that’s Q&A. From a generalist perspective, and then extending that to employee self-service, I think that’s a no-brainer. It helps people build trust in AI. Clearly, no one’s job is in danger for that.

Chris Kraus: Yeah, exactly.

Scott King: So let’s walk through it. The next one we have is candidate experience. So we really, you know, we struggled with this one because there are so many different systems and SaaS products that enhance the candidate experience, but I think we’re… where we find, like our product Krista, where we find the biggest benefit is not with the knowledge workers and not with the white-collar workers like us, because there are lots of systems and lots of processes to do this. It’s really slow. I always laugh that it takes forever to get a regular job, but the football coaches get hired in six hours. How is that possible? But for the majority of the U.S., they are like blue-collar workers or labor workers, right? The number one job in every state is either you work for Walmart or you’re a truck driver. These guys may or may not have resumes. How can like AI or automation improve the candidate experience for the majority of the workforce?

Chris Kraus: Right. So it’s really meeting the candidates where they are. So, you know, someone who’s a Java developer is going to go into a resume and the software, they’re going to go to Monster, they’re going to go to LinkedIn and do things. But for everybody else, it’s like, there’s not a lot of automation and platforms to help there. So, as an employer, you need to meet the people where they are and make it easy. So everything should be able to be done, say, through an automated process on a mobile phone. You don’t assume people have computers and are walking around with them and have internet, but most people have a phone. So scoping it to like, “How do you interact with them?” And then you’re going to build a mini resume basically. If you’re working, looking to hire someone in, say, a restaurant, or a grocery store chain, you’re not going to ask for 15 years of experience and patents you’ve applied for and things like that. It will be more specific to, you know, “Where do you want to work? How many hours can you work? You know, can you work the day shift? Do you need to work the evening or early morning shift? You know, what skills do you have? Have you done this in other places?” So, really, basically, letting you gather information to fit them into a specific position without having to have a formal resume and all that review process. Those people get hired much faster because it’s usually done in the field by a local manager. It’s not going through the corporate, you know, recruiting arm. So there are many opportunities there to make that easier, to meet them where they are, get the processes, but realize it’s very distributed. Every grocery store will have a manager on duty who does that. It’s not like it’s a centralized HR function itself in that case. They’re very distributed. So automation, actually doing rules on employment and age and all those things, making sure they meet them, full-time versus part-time, benefits or no benefits, actually automating that to make it very smooth so there are no questions that they can’t answer makes a lot of sense.

Scott King: Yeah, then I like how you said, “Meet them where they are,” because they may only have WhatsApp or SMS, or they may not even have a smartphone where they can’t download an app. So I think that is a huge benefit. So if we’re going to improve the candidate experience, we will have to track these people. So the next use case we want to walk through is the recruiting and tracking of all the applicants. And there are a ton of ATS systems that do this.

But you know, just like we talked about with, you know, white versus blue-collar jobs, there are some gaps. You know, in these systems, some people, some of them, you know, let’s say mid-market companies where they have just a payroll system, the payroll system does some of this, but it doesn’t really do enough. And then an ATS system is just too much, right? They don’t, they don’t need that much, or maybe they have, like, disparate systems.

Moving data from one system to another—and this is the whole process orchestration thing that we’ll get into later—is a problem. But from a recruiting and tracking perspective, Chris, if we tie in the candidate experience with the lower end of the labor market, how does this work? So theoretically, if I have an ATS system or payroll, and then if not…

Chris Kraus: Yeah. So often, the first thing is actually scheduling interviews and then keeping track of the interviews, who showed up, the yes or no decisions, and things like that. So a lot of that is not automated at all. “Let me look at my calendar, let me put something on the calendar.” It is very manual. So can we actually help with a candidate being able to say, from a simple webpage on their phone, “I want to do an interview on Tuesday,” and present them with, “These are the time slots available, can you come in?” and then gather some information about them and tell them what they need to bring when they come in. It’s like, “You need to bring in your driver’s license. You need to bring in certain things.” And there will be some of that just core scheduling that usually is not supported by any formal system to help people with that. And then it’s like setting up the expectations: “What do you need to bring? What documentation do you need for the employment process? Do you have a birth certificate, Social Security card, and all the types of things that they may need to actually complete the process?” Cause sometimes these are one-and-done. You know, to bring them on board, you need to make sure they’re of age, and have all this type of thing in place. But a lot of times, there is another step behind that. It’s like, okay, do we have to do some background check? Or do we have to do a driver’s license validation because they will be driving for us? Do we have to verify they don’t have a bunch of speeding tickets? So, like you mentioned, this kind of starts the concept of orchestration, automation of getting them to a point where they can be hired. And sometimes there are third-party checks. I mean, like with, I know we were doing some stuff with nurses, and there’s a system you can use to ask, “Give me all their nursing credentials,” but it was all manual. So you submitted the request, and a day or two later, you got a response back, and then you had to match those up manually. So putting some automation in place to keep track of those things so they don’t slip through is really important.

Scott King: Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine all the credential checking. And I mean, yeah. Driver’s licenses, welders, like union cards, right? Like Texas, it’s not a union state, but I guess you’d have to do that. So, okay. So if we improve and attract the candidate, we track them, and now they’re hired, employee onboarding is always a big conversation because that is complicated, right? You have to sign them up for systems access, facilities, security, all the different payroll and things, and if they need equipment and training. Like, clearly, this is probably, to me, this is the ripest opportunity for… because, like, most people could articulate the cascading effects of getting hired because they’ve been hired a few times. How does automation help with this? It seems really complicated, and it seems like this is the ripest opportunity.

Chris Kraus: Yeah, there’s so much tribal knowledge in this. Like I said before, we would have, for Christina, and she had the checklist. She knew how you did it for this company and this business unit based on your location, right? And so when we hired people onshore and offshore, she had different checklists. And so there’s a lot of workflow and tracking in that process. And as you mentioned, the interesting thing about this is HR has very, they’ve got one little tiny step, right? They may be giving you an offer letter, they may be getting that in place, but then the benefits department, then the payroll department, then facilities have to badge you, security has to, like, assign your buildings you can get to, then you have to have desks and hardware and then system access. So this is really orchestrating lots of areas across the company. I mean, you touch almost every part of the company when you bring someone on board if you step back and think about it because everybody has to know that you’re going to be there. Everybody, you have to have access, systems access, you have to have your hardware. So that’s a lot of orchestration. And I mean, I know people said, “Yeah, I’m starting work Monday, but I’m not going to do anything for two weeks because I don’t know if I have a computer my first day.” You know, I remember there was a big deal. It’s like, “You, you have an email address your first day. You don’t have a computer yet, but we have an email address for you,” right? IT could get that provisioned quickly, but then that cascaded into all the other systems, like getting hardware, systems access, and those things. So there’s so much tribal knowledge, and it’s a lot of manual tasks and checking, right? Lots of emails get sent. Huge, huge orchestration opportunity there.

Chris Kraus: Yeah, so that’s definitely when you have people who have no specifics of how to hire someone into a union or non-union state, or the privacy concerns of data with CCPA or not, or GDPR, whatever it is. So when you actually put those steps inside of software automation like Krista, everybody follows the same process. So, you know, everything’s being done. And then, if something changes, it’s not a training problem. It’s a “change the automation to include a step because something changed at a federal level” or “change a step because something changed at a state level,” and it’s implemented automatically. People don’t have to say, “Okay, I need to go… do I need to retrain because a process changed?” So it really does help with the general liability of doing the process the correct way every time, and everything, you know, thinking about, we call it “dotting the i’s, crossing the t’s.” It’s literally that level of all that minutiae of details. Process orchestration, even if it’s orchestrating people and saying, “You know, I put a ticket into ServiceNow, and then verify, did security create a badge? Yes. And then create a ticket in JIRA for a global ID, and then check it.” So sometimes it’s literally, “I’ve put information in your system, and then verify that you manually did something,” or sometimes it’s, “We actually can automate those steps.” But it’s a huge, huge problem. And it’s not specific to HR. It’s specific to, like, running a business, right? Everybody has these problems. Sometimes it’s the, how do you say, “Open the office in the morning?” It’s like, you know, obviously turn off, turn on the lights with things like, “Did you change, did you set the phones right? Did you do these things? Did you,” you know, all those types of things you have to do to, like, open the office in the morning. Those are processes that everybody has to do, and they need to be done consistently the same way. And you do get an audit trail when you automate things. So if someone needs to know, you know, “How, when did this happen? When did we do these things?” The good thing is with automation, we do have that audit trail, so we can walk back and improve processes over time. Say, “What’s taking too long? What can we do better with?” So, there are efficiencies that can be helped in understanding the process, along with the prevention of errors.

Scott King: You know, you didn’t really talk about improving the process. If you get enough transactions going back and forth with these processes, you can have a machine-learning opportunity, a model to actually understand like, “Hey, you could improve this,” or “This is always the exception. This ought to be the rule anyways.” So that’s another opportunity. So I know, Chris, that we talked about all these processes. Obviously, you can do this with others, but we just wanted to provide an overview of human resource processes because people ask us about that. What, you know, from a closing standpoint, if I’m an HR person, how do I get started? What are some of the easiest use cases, and what can I do to bring automation and AI in to alleviate everybody’s fears?

Chris Kraus: Yeah. So I think in HR, you have to be at the forefront of this new technology. So, getting people comfortable with the technology and understanding it so that you have it is just making adoption easier. So to realize people, it’s not going to take away your jobs, it’s not going to do all those crazy things. It always appears to be fear, uncertainty, and doubt. But the idea is starting small, like Q&A. You know, it’s, it’s very audible. People can see the answers and start internally. So let’s say executives and HR people start using it, see how it’s doing things accurately so they build trust, and then you bring it to your larger audience of employees. Now, then maybe you expand that to your customer support calls, your customer center have customer calls, and they have questions about returns and policies. But starting somewhere is the, and you have to start somewhere to build the trust and understand how it will help you. Then, it’s very easy to say, “Let’s expand horizontally within another part of the organization doing the same thing or going vertical and doing more orchestration capabilities.” So it’s neat because HR isn’t the job. Part of their job title is like culture, helping people understand and be happy employees and improving their work-life balance. This will actually help with that, right? It seems like a logical place to start or at least evangelize out to the rest of the organization.

Scott King: Seems logical to me. Well, appreciate it, Chris. I love this conversation. If anybody has a question, you can obviously reach out to us on probably LinkedIn, which is easiest because we live there. Or you can go to Krista.ai, poke around, let us know who you are, and we’d be happy to help you. So until next time.

Chris Kraus: Thanks.

Thanks.