Oracle has announced new AI-based capabilities and UX features for its HCM Cloud product. The tools are meant to improve productivity of both recruiting and HR professionals while delivering a simpler user experience to employees.
The company’s thinking goes like this: HR needs new strategies and technologies if their organization is going to attract, engage and retain employees, especially at a time when both recruitment costs and employee turnover are increasing. Oracle’s new features are designed to provide simple but powerful solutions that can “proactively anticipate and respond to changing employee and workforce needs,” in the company’s words.
Besides offering workforce insights and operational efficiencies, the features improve connectivity from most any device and encourage collaboration, Oracle said.
Among the key features announced were:
- A “newsfeed” interface that allows employees to highlight the data and details they care about most. For example, tasks that need attention can be emphasized in an easy-to-read tiled format, an automatically updated analytics snapshot can elevate key business insights and company and employee-related news can be accessed without having to dig through email.
- A personalized cross-device experience that allows employees to take action based on company updates, personal feedback and goals, allowing them to be more productive wherever they are at that moment.
- New performance “check-in” capabilities provide employees with real-time coaching and feedback and helps them track goals.
- AI and chatbot recruiting capabilities help candidates to search for jobs and get questions answered directly through channels like Facebook Messenger and automatically alerts them to updates and needed.
- Onboarding features enhance collaboration between new hires, managers and the HR team to streamline the transition from “new hire” to working team member.
- HR Help Desk in the Cloud optimizes the management and security of employee relations cases with configurable actions. Extended knowledge management capabilities ensure consistent search and content based on security and versioning.
- A pre-built library of best practice controls, security dashboards and workbench capabilities help stop unauthorized access to sensitive HCM functions and data.
“We all now expect that enterprise applications offer the same easy, intuitive experience that we enjoy with digital services in our personal lives,” said Chris Leone, senior vice president, HCM Development, Oracle. “With the latest release of Oracle HCM Cloud, we are focused on delivering the best possible employee experience without compromising the security or performance of critical business applications. By leveraging advanced technologies to make HR applications powerful yet simple to use on any device, we can make work smarter, more enjoyable, and more supportive.”
The common element to these tools appears to be an almost “quiet” integration of AI into many tools commonly used by both employees and HR. This fits with what Gretchen Alarcon, Oracle’s group vice president for HCM product strategy, told the HCM Technology Report in an interview conducted before this week’s Oracle HCM World. While noting that AI is “in the buzzword stage,” she noted that Oracle “has had elements of machine learning in our system for four years. We’ve put it in where it made sense.”
