AI-powered technology is gaining more ground in our daily work and its potential to automate HR processes increased a lot lately. Recent studies show that in three to five years almost every job will interact with a bot, almost half of the accounting jobs will be replaced by robots and customer support will be completely replaced by bots. What about HR? 

This was the hot topic debated at the recent HR Executive Learning Breakfast event, where human resources specialists in Romania shared their experience with working with Artificial Intelligence. 

The use of AI in human resources brought together Sonia Bighiu Sonia Bighiu, Talent Acquisition Leader EMEA at UiPath, Tudor Petecilă, Talent Acquisition Manager at Orange and Ana-Maria Andrei, HR Manager at Provident Financial Romania, who were speakers at the 4th edition of the HR Executive Learning Breakfast - “HR Bots out of the Box” - organized by Romania-insider.com and Ideograf.

 Over 35 HR directors, general managers and entrepreneurs joined in the discussion at the JW Marriott Bucharest Grand Hotel on September 18, 2019. The session was moderated by Sandra Jitianu, business owner of Ideograf.

"In 2-3 years' time, the volume of work is going to double if not triple. Taking into consideration that natality is decreasing, the population is getting older, it is more and more difficult to find people with the hard and soft skills we need. The business needs to reduce more and more costs to remain competitive on the market.”  said Sonia Bighiu of UiPath. 

She also mentioned that new generations will not do repetitive and boring tasks, they'll want to add value, learn as much as they can in a very short period of time, be rewarded fairly, have balance and do meaningful and impactful work. ”If not through automation than how we going to cover this gap?", added Sonia Bighiu.

UiPath increased its team from 590 to 3,000 employees across the world in 2 years only, and during this period they measured the time their recruitment team spent with administrative tasks, which was about 60% along the candidate journey & onboarding. 

UiPath, which specializes in creating AI bots among others, has developed one able to complete all administrative tasks related to handling data of candidates in 5 minutes only, allowing the recruitment team to spend more time with the candidate. Sonia Bighiu showed how such bot works during the HR Executive Learning Breakfast. "Robots are not going to replace use, they are going to buy us time", she added.

Orange has implemented an automated Applicant Tracking System (ATS, which handles both the candidate journey - from approval of the job requisition up to the satisfaction survey for rejected candidates - and talent scouting inside the existing candidates database. Tudor Petecila, Talent Acquisition Manager at Orange, showcased this system which uses a predefined list of criteria and has a success rate of 7/10 CVs meeting the desired criteria. 

"Your implemented ATS can make the activity even harder if you don't design processes and work instructions clearly", Tudor Peticila warned. 

Robot Arya helps Provident Financial Romania with its onboarding and offboarding processes, doing background verification of candidates, creating and sending job offers for accepted candidates, creating new job positions in the company HR system, registering the new employee and creating the employment contract. 

Arya is an HR assistant who "is not picky and never complains", said Ana Maria Andrei, HR Manager with Provident Financial Romania, who talked about the experience with working with such a robot. 

The HR Executive Learning Breakfast event on September 18 was made possible with the support of Transearch International, JW Marriott Bucharest Grand Hotel, Maastricht School of Management in Bucharest and Sweeteria.   

 The next event in the series will take place on October 31 and will cover the employer branding topic. For additional details please contact Ms. Irina Chirileasa, irina@romania-insider.com.

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The HR Executive Learning Breakfast represents a series of monthly morning events that create a platform for a meaningful exchange of ideas & HR best practices. Topics of future events include motivation, mindset for success in organizations, innovation, organizational culture and managing performance, among others. The audience includes Romanian and foreign HR executives, directors, entrepreneurs who want further inspiration and knowledge on the HR front.

Romania-Insider.com is the most-read English – language news and features website dedicated to Romania, read by 300,000 unique readers from all over the world on average every month. It is published by City Compass Media, which also publishes a yearly expat and travel guide in English and a premium executive press review service in English.