The Human Resource department is a unique team that plays a significant role throughout an employee’s journey. The challenge at larger organizations is that a personalized, high-touch approach can take time and effort, and sometimes employees or candidates can feel underappreciated. Despite the humanness of Human Resources, technology is being quickly adopted to empower teams and engage the workforce. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology is a core component in any human-to-computer interactions and is being used from the first resume screen to the exit interview.

Introduction of NLP

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a computer’s ability to understand language in its spoken or written form. It is the component of artificial intelligence that can “listen” or “read” when a computer interacts with a human.

Natural Language Processing Examples

Any time you speak to a computer, it leverages NLP to identify the wording and, more importantly, the meaning of what you said. The most obvious example of NLP in action is when you are asking Alexa about the meaning of life or how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?  However, NLP is widely used in inconspicuous ways like analyzing product reviews to understand whether a comment is positive or negative.

NLP in Recruiting

Recruiters need to review hundreds, sometimes thousands of resumes for a single job posting. It is no surprise that hiring managers can spend hours filtering at the top of the funnel. NLP is saving precious time for analyzing in-bound resumes and screening candidates. In addition to saving time, NLP can help remove subconscious bias and increase diversity in candidates.

Generally, HR teams will be competing for the top talent and managers don’t want to lose the candidate. For more proactive tactics, NLP is used in chatbots to engage and provide immediate, real-time feedback and answers to high valued candidates.

NLP Recruiting Startups

Censia: Censia is on a mission to empower enterprise companies in matching opportunities to ideal candidates at scale. Their technology facilitates talent professionals to be strategic partners in their companies. Censia does that by equipping recruiters with artificial intelligence solutions that dramatically shorten the recruiting cycle, lower turnover, and automate the low-value, manual recruiting processes bogging talent teams down today.

Mya: Mya is an AI recruiting assistant that instantly engages candidates at scale with meaningful conversation throughout the end-to-end recruiting lifecycle. Mya saves 75% of your team's time by streamlining steps such as sourcing, screening, answering questions, and scheduling.

NLP in Interviewing

Nearly four out of five candidates (78%) say the overall candidate experience they receive is an indicator of how a company values its people. With that said, it’s no surprise that providing a quick and painless experience throughout the interviewing process is an easy way win over candidates. Rather than keeping candidates in the dark, NLP is used in chatbots to understand questions and ultimately respond quickly.

NLP-enhanced automated interviews have empowered hiring managers to pick up on any blind spots or human behavior. These tools can be used to improve the candidate's fit in the company by analyzing their words, speech patterns, and facial expressions, and help detect minor details one might have otherwise missed.

NLP Interviewing Startups

HoneIt: HoneIt makes it easy for recruiters to go beyond basic interview questions and scribbled interview notes. Their platform helps recruiters capture real-time candidate data and audio insights, to accelerate the interview process, make collaborative decisions and enable higher quality hires. By sharing a few audio highlights from a single phone screen, hiring teams can cooperatively review and assess candidates, to identify and hire the best candidates, before their competition.

NLP in Onboarding and Training

Onboarding is often overlooked, but don’t underestimate an effective onboarding. There are many studies that show how onboarding can improve employee retention, performance, and engagement.

NLP is used in chatbots (again) that can focus on answering any employee question about the company and job. Maybe it’s understanding what health benefits they have, or who to ask for an security badge.

For learning important skills or training on the job, NLP can digest written or verbal answers for analysis and feedback. In a common example, customer support agents can use NLP to analyze responses to their customers. Tools can analyze their responses to provide proactive and constructive feedback to improve future experiences.

Speech tools also use NLP to help managers become better leaders through their speaking style. These tools can analyze how much you talk within a conversation, how many times you say “I” instead of “We”, or how many times you make people laugh during your presentation.

NLP Onboarding and Training Startups

Ambit: Ambit improves human connection & empathy by helping new managers master communication and more effectively lead. As a spin-off from SRI International - the birthplace of Siri - Ambit leverages world-class audio AI technology to quantify verbal communication and use those metrics to provide insights, coaching, and behavior change. Today 60% of employers complain their workforce lacks sufficient interpersonal and communication skills.

NLP in Employee Engagement

Only 4% of company and HR leaders believe they are very good at engaging Millennials and other generations in the work environment. One approach is to be proactive through email, text, slack, or other communication tools. NLP is used to analyze employee responses for deeper insight into how the employee feels. This is then used for identifying at risk employees, evaluate engagement levels, and finding patterns across the organization.

NLP Employee Engagement Startups

Remesh: Remesh is an audience intelligence platform for engaging and understanding large groups of people- whether it be employees, consumers, or constituents. Remesh empowers researchers and executives to have a dynamic conversation with up to 1,000 participants- online and in real-time. The Remesh platform uses AI to understand, analyze, and segment the vast amount of open-ended responses pouring in- in a matter of minutes. Whether you’re using the platform to build winning products, craft messaging that resonates, or cultivate employee engagement, Remesh gives you audience insights that get you closer to the truth- faster.

Ushur: Ushur creates cloud-based software solutions that automate the customer engagements of large enterprises for more effective and efficient customer service, support and marketing operations, using software innovation to engage with customers on their terms.

RozieAi: RozieAi’s state-of-the-art language comprehension and context management technology helps brands scale the delivery of personalized care, delivering a single continuous conversation with an individual. Their technology enables organizations to deliver personalized customer service and analytics in a more robust and efficient fashion. RozieAi's solutions encompass applying Natural Language Understanding to deliver on automated customer service platforms or social media analytics. RozieAi can be your partner to build an intelligent social engagement system.

Eloquent Labs: Eloquent Labs supplies artificial intelligence to augment and replace live chat customer support agents, specifically targeted at eCommerce companies. Based off of the founders' experience in the Stanford Natural Language Processing group, Eloquent Labs’ AI agent is able to hold natural and conversational dialogs with customers fully autonomously, while also knowing when to back off to experienced agents for complex tickets.

NLP in Behavioral Training

Most managers have a difficult time delivering the bad news of letting someone go. At the same time, mishandling this situation can easily create a disgruntled ex-employee and have a negative impact your brand. NLP is being used in training modules for managers to measure sentiment, wording, and practice their communication in a real life situation.

NLP Behavioral Training Startups

Talespin: Talespin is disrupting the future of work through radical change in enterprise tools. By leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) Talespin is changing the way we engage, educate, and empower the next generation of the workforce.

Conclusion

Without NLP, many AI applications would not be possible or accurate, but NLP is just half the equation. Now that programs can understand conversations, startups are tasked to use the insights to bring value to the workplace.

Our Enterprise 2.0 program is dedicated to disrupting the foundational status quo of every company: HR, IT, Accounting, Legal, and Operations. Find out more here.

If you work for a corporation that is interested in meeting cutting edge Natural Language Processing startups tailored to your specific business goals, contact us here. 

If you are a Natural Language Processing startup with an amazing idea and great technology looking for an accelerator to grow, get investment, and find new clients, contact us here

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