How Can AI-Powered Search Accelerate Employee Onboarding

Employee onboarding is a critical process for any role in any company. Onboarding is the first experience for employees in a brand-new setting, making it extremely important to be a smooth and constructive process. Onboarding sets the stage for new hires to become productive team members and company contributors.

Traditional onboarding methods involved lengthy training sessions, overwhelming paperwork and countless clusters of information. To be candid, it was exhausting for new employees, human resource (HR) teams and others within the division.

The positive news is that artificial intelligence (AI) and search technologies are growing and becoming more intelligent daily. It would be a mistake for organizations to avoid leveraging it to accelerate the onboarding and training process. The benefits of AI-powered search include enhanced efficiency and a more desirable employee experience.

This article will discuss the core advantages of AI-Powered search and machine learning (ML) methods for onboarding new workers.

Quickly Access Knowledge

Quick access to relevant information is something many companies struggle with. Knowledge-access struggles delay all types of projects, research-intensive tasks and effective in-house training.

AI-powered search engines can sort large amounts of data from structured and unstructured data sources, which ultimately permits new employees to find the information they need quickly.

Companies implementing upgraded search systems with the latest AI attributes can centralize their knowledge and make it more manageable for new hires to locate company procedures, FAQs, role-specific guidelines, payroll packets and training videos.

More Personalized Results And Continuous Improvement

Everybody learns differently, and their paths to getting hired by a company look a whole lot different—skill sets are unique, and experience levels are staggered. User behavior helps train AI platforms and allows them to learn the best way to teach each hired individual. This is where the term "machine learning" comes from. Comprehending individual strengths and weaknesses allows solutions to recommend and feed users with personalized courses, modules and other training resources. The more personalized a system's approach is, the faster employee's skill development and understanding of notable information will be.

Real-Time Assistance

New techniques with AI-powered systems offer real-time assistance to new employees and existing employees looking to refresh their knowledge. These are often referred to as "virtual assistants." Natural language processing (NLP) leads systems to understand human language and generate responses accordingly. The most popular version of these are chatbots or any other virtual communication agent on organizations' websites and help sections. Immediate answers to employee queries can guide them through a variety of learning processes that potentially may have taken hours or days. Instead of waiting for help or emails from HR, the workforce can benefit and receive support whenever needed. Virtual assistants provide a 24/7 benefit.

Collaboration And Knowledge Sharing

Onboarding does not have to be isolated between the individual, HR and their manager. Collaboration and knowledge sharing is as important as any part of training. Connecting employees develops good culture and better workplace relationships. AI-powered search platforms are the foundation of healthy knowledge exchange between colleagues. For example, a new hire may need to know the relevant expert to speak with if they cannot find the necessary information within the knowledge repository. Connecting the new hire with experienced team members will give them a sense of connection and belonging. In addition, they will receive knowledge and access to shared resources.

What Now? Identify The Issues!

Overall, AI-powered search technologies have offered companies many new ways to accelerate the onboarding process and make it more efficient. Quicker access to knowledge, personalized results, real-time assistance and enhanced collaboration are just a few current benefits, but the future will surely produce more. The overarching themes are time reduction, increasing comfortability to new hires and generating greater onboarding production.

Initiating the hunt and eventual deployment of AI-powered technology for a positive onboarding process starts with identifying current issues such as:

• Too much paper or digital clutter.
• Slow development of new skills.
• Struggling to grasp company processes.
• Too many emails asking for more information.
• Lack of cross-departmental communication.

While AI-powered search can streamline and transform outdated processes for many companies, there are some organizations where implementation can be challenging and not the right choice. Systems are not always cost-friendly and can be very complex. If companies lack the resources, budget, expertise and infrastructure, it likely doesn't make much sense to deploy. Some or all of these reasons have been cited in smaller organizations for not pursuing specific solutions.

Data quality and availability can also be a popular reason a company may pass. Training an AI model relies heavily on high-quality and well-structured data. Companies with incomplete or inaccurate data may not want to deploy a search solution because the outputs may be compromised. In addition, there needs to be trust between the company and the system, with data privacy and security always being a top concern. Any doubt that sensitive information is not adequately protected could lead businesses to veer from deployment.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/07/19/how-can-ai-powered-search-accelerate-employee-onboarding/