Robot Alex will schedule 90,000 interviews with SAP job candidates worldwide this year at the SAP Services Business and Innovation Center in Prague, coordinating 9 out of 10 of all interviews. The aim of this project is to save time for the HR team, which the group estimates could be up to tens of thousands of hours, and also to increase the quality of HR support for employees. Photo credit: SAP Services
Czech Republic, 27 April (BD) – In total, over 800 people work on HR processes at SAP Services, taking care of the complete HR agenda of SAP employees worldwide. In the area of recruitment, employees spend thousands of hours a year coordinating dates for interviews with job candidates. This task will now be taken over by a robot, and last year alone scheduled 88% of the 100,000 interviews. This year, that is expected to rise to 90%, coordinating 9 out of 10 all interviews.
SAP Services claim that many of the candidates will not even notice they are interacting with an artificial intelligence, because Alex communicates and responds naturally. According to the group, time savings can be estimated in tens of thousands of hours. But the technology also helps improve the quality of HR support for employees. In fact, the machine helps categorize incoming queries, meaning employees can solve their current problems in much less time.
During the interview appointment process, the robot offers the candidate available dates in the calendar of the respective SAP manager. The efficiency of the recruitment process is gradually increasing as the robot improves. “The most important thing for us, of course, is that the move to automation means a 75% time saving compared to fully manual scheduling,” said Petra Kocianova, manager of the SAP Services recruiting team. “At the same time, we are focusing on efficiency in automation. The robot can currently schedule an interview in less than two hours on average, which includes the time it waits for candidates to comment on the offered dates, while continuously updating the manager’s available dates in real time.”
From the interviewer’s free text, it correctly places the query into one of more than 100 categories so that it can be answered in the shortest possible time. Last year, the HRdirect department processed over 130,000 queries, and expects to grow to 140,000 queries this year.
“Not only keywords are recognized, but also the structure of the query. The more queries the machine processes, the better it learns to recognize the right category,” said Iveta Chválová, Director of SAP Services. Correct categorization also seems to improve the quality of reporting, so HR staff know what employees ask about most in a given period and can plan department capacities accordingly.
Further development of this technology is planned for the future, with the machine directly recommending the correct answer to the HR specialist or referring them to relevant information in the knowledge base.
“The importance of SAP Services within the SAP Group is increasing as we gradually transform from an enterprise service centre to a People Innovation Hub. Instead of operational processes, we are increasingly focusing on innovation and expert services,” concluded Chválová.
