Can artificial intelligence replace HR department? Amazon on future of hiring and talent retention – India Today

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only changed how we interact but also how we do business. At the start of 2020, almost all sectors were forced to operate from home, a scale unimaginable in the 21st century. Naturally, it forced companies to think out of the box and come up with ways for talent retention and acquisition. There have been a lot of talks about incorporating AI into the Human Resource Department (HRD) to look for the ideal candidate and to check on employees' well-being.

While that reality is still a dream, some are looking for ways to upgrade their Human Resource department, especially in this hybrid work environment.

To learn more about the future of talent acquisition and retention, India Today Tech spoke to Deepti Varma, Vice President, People and Experience Technology (PXT) at Amazon Stores India and EM. The senior Amazon executive also spoke about the role of technology in providing a better employee experience.

During the conversation, Varma even clarified that Amazon brands its HR department as PXT (People Experience and Technology Solutions). That's because the company does a "hypothesis across talent acquisition, talent retention, talent development" and then looks at data to find the best solution.

In 2022, how much relevance do you think traditional CVs and online profiles possess during a hiring process?

At Amazon, more than just the skills, we believe that we need to focus on whether the person is culturally fitting into the company. So, even before we start trying to look at skill, we first check whether the person would be able to align themselves to the culture. So, the traditional CV can do only a little justice with what the person would have to offer. I think there is a lot that we gather through a very intensive interview process that we have, and we kind of rely on that a lot.

Can you elaborate a bit on this process? Are you relying on technology or some kind of tool?

We use a lot of AI and have quite a lot of automated tools that we use in order to hire. In fact, as we speak, in the US, we are experimenting with 'no see hire', which means that without actually asking the person to come for technical roles, can we look at hiring people based on some of the simulations that we have made, and can we, try to reduce the dependencies on a recruiter. So we are trying to do a lot of these things, in fact, because the number of people that we hire is so many, we don't believe in a traditional way of scheduling interviews. All we use a tool to do that [hire] where the candidate as well as the person who's interviewing, their schedule gets matched and there is a schedule that gets popped up on its own.

Do you think a maximum dependency on tech like AI is ideal for this segment of business?

I am going to give my view and, it can be very different from what industry experts feel.

The short answer to your question is that both algorithms, as well as human decisions, can be flawed. It cannot be either or it cannot be too much usage of technology or too much usage of human intervention that would help us to scale in the future. But I feel technology certainly would be a great enabler for us to focus on the things that can be simplified in order for us to scale talent acquisition in the future.

And I'll give you a very simple example of that. Today, when you look at an Amazon.in website, no one goes around training you, this is how you need to show up at Amazon. So, the way we have used the technology is, that it should be simple and scalable. It should be intuitive, and you don't need to get trained on it. The way we want to use technology is that it should be simple, scalable, should have a good candidate experience because, for us, we always work backwards from the customer's need, but it should be something that should be an enabler rather than being something that we solely depend on.

Can you elaborate on some tools and techniques that Amazon uses for acquisition, data retention, and development?

I would start with something that we actually experimented during COVID time. We launched something called Alexa onboarding. We used Alexa to onboard our employees. And Alexa would answer a lot of questions. Because people wanted to understand about Amazon's culture, people wanted to understand about how should they navigate the ways in first 30 days. In fact, we got an Economic Times award for the experiment.

Then, during COVID times, we were hiring from campus, and we were hiring quite a lot. We thought, are we missing out on women-talent, so we launched something called as 'Amazon Wow', where we were trying to hire through technology. And this is a technology portal that we started where women, students from all across India, engineering college could apply.

There is one more thing which is very close to my heart, which I am sure you would have heard about is 'Amazon Connections'. And what Connection basically does is that as soon as anyone across the globe open their laptop early in the morning, the first thing - it just pops a question onto your screen to understand how you are feeling. Amazon believes that you should be checking how the employees feeling throughout the year. So, every day there is one question that gets asked to you on different aspects that are important.

No technology is perfect. How do you think Amazon can then evolve these tools that it is using?

If a technology can be used to proactively like if machine learning can be used to proactively assess if the person is having stress or may be going towards a situation where they could experience stress and you can proactively, just take care of that employee that would be more meaningful. And I don't think we've reached that stage. But

The vision is such that we would want to use technology to proactively predict what's coming. And how do we help the employee in order to handle that situation? So that is something we haven't yet been able to crack. But that is something that is one of the visions that we have that we should see. There are other places where we feel we could use technology more. This is just one example that I wanted to share.

(Conversation with Deepti Varma has been edited for clarity)

--- ENDS ---

Read more:
Can artificial intelligence replace HR department? Amazon on future of hiring and talent retention - India Today