Human Resource Executive - October 16, 2017

Park, Calif., that’s striving to build a futuristic “hyperloop” transportation system.

Talla “just took away all those mundane repetitive tasks,” says Edward Chen, head of HR at rLoop. At any given time, rLoop has 200 to 1,000 volunteers in more than 20 countries. That’s a lot for one person to onboard. So Talla welcomes new team members, suggests training, then says, “[I]f you have any questions, ask the bot.” Over time, the bot will be trained to answer the same kind of questions.

“If someone asks a [new] question
[and] the bot doesn’t know how
to answer that,” Chen says, “I will
respond. But the next time the bot will
be trained to answer that question, so it
really helps me to focus on something
more strategic.”
Another HR tech tool that uses
NLP has been developed by Scout,
a New York startup that promises
to find job candidates who may be
overlooked by traditional recruiting
software. Older systems simply search
resumes for keywords from the job
description. But if your resume is
written in a way that doesn’t fit the
job, you’re not going to get a call—
even though you may be the smartest
person on the planet.

It’s easy for resumes to be written differently. Say that “smartest guy” is a gal—or an ethnic minority. Not everyone uses language the same way. And not every overlooked resume is a case of linguistic discrimination; sometimes the problem is a simple synonym.

Scout CEO Andres Blank gives an
example: “We say ‘sales development
representative,’ ” he says. “ Many
times, it’s called an ‘inside salesperson.’
Sometimes it’s called a ‘sales
representative.’ Sometimes it’s called
an ‘SDR.’ And sometimes, salespeople
Scout brainstorms new keywords,
creates Boolean search queries and
scores the candidates it finds online.
Blank says this differs from traditional
technology because Scout collects
feedback from “the client and improves
This is where the “intelligence”
part of the technology comes in.
It’s one thing for software to simply
regurgitate words you’ve given it,
searching for them over and over
again. But artificial intelligence with
NLP can recognize phrases you haven’t
provided and even generate words on
its own.

Learning Company Values

Then there are new NLP tools that go beyond simply streamlining human resource work. One is Growbot, which was developed by a San Francisco-based start-up of the same name and aims to encourage— and measure—peer recognition within an organization.

BY TERENA BELL No one wants to replace your HR staff with robots. At least that’s what Rob May says. He’s CEO of Talla, a Boston-area company that developed a “chatbot” that interacts with employees via chat programs such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. May’s company is one
of many artificial-intelligence start-ups
that seeks to shift some tasks from
workers to technology. Talla promises
to take over routine HR chores such
as helping employees change their
tax withholding or retrieve vacation
balances. Talla, May says, doesn’t want
to eliminate your people—just their
busywork.

Whether your team consists of 10 people or 10,000, busywork is very often a big part of the HR job. Inevitably, those in the profession get bogged down in people asking about vacation accruals and 401(k) plans, and “all these things that are just … repetitive … ,” says May.

As a result, HR isn’t able to spend its time on the issues that really matter to the business.

Talla isn’t alone in the effort to eradicate HR busywork. Several new HR tech products now use “natural language processing” to understand— and communicate—as people do. Commonly referred to as NLP, the technology uses machine learning to, among other things, recognize different phrases that express the same meaning.

For example, one employee may ask: “How do I get my partner on the health plan?” Another says, “My husband needs insurance.” NLP enables Talla’s platform to know these sentences mean much the same thing.

Making It Easy to Use

Of course, there’s nothing new about using technology to streamline routine work that’s performed by HR, points out Josh Bersin, principal at Bersin by Deloitte. But NLP can streamline it even more.

“Some of these chatbots are doing
relatively traditional stuff,” Bersin says.
“But they’re doing it in a very easy-to-
use way.”
Among Talla’s customers is rLoop, a
Silicon Valley nonprofit based in Menlo