As I’ve said before, automation is inevitable in talent acquisition. Automation can bring essential efficiencies and a vastly improved and personalized experience for everyone when done correctly.
The question shouldn’t be, do we automate; instead, TA and HR leaders need to ask what we automate and how we do it.
My guest this week is Brigette McInnis-Day, Chief People Officer at UiPath. UiPath has been at the vanguard of Robotic Process Automation for several years, helping companies automate systems and processes across different parts of the enterprise. Brigette has deep expertise in automation and HR Tech and highlights some critical areas that TA Leaders should pay attention to.
The first is using an enterprise automation platform to bring data, processes and quality of experience together across the entire organization. There is an assumption that TA tools will drive recruiting automation, and it is essential to understand that integrated company-wide automation strategies may dictate the pace of change.
Brigette also highlights some excellent use cases, including how UI Path has automated onboarding to offer a quicker and more personalized experience.
In the interview, we also discuss:
• How automation improves experience
• Why are HR and TA so hesitant about automation?
• How the employer/employee relationship has changed
• Automation driven personalization
• Thinking holistically and planning strategically
• The impact of automation on jobs and careers
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Eightfold AI. Eightfold AI’s market leading talent intelligence platform helps organizations retain top performers, upskill and reskill their workforce, recruit talent efficiently and reach diversity goals. Eightfold’s patented deep learning artificial intelligence platform is available in more than 155 countries and 24 languages, enabling cutting edge enterprises to transform their talent into a competitive advantage. For more information, visit Eightfold AI.
Matt Alder [00:00:57]:
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 585 of the Recruiting Future podcast. As I’ve said before, automation is inevitable in talent acquisition. Automation can bring essential efficiencies and a vastly improved and personalized experience for everyone. When it’s done correctly, the question shouldn’t be do we automate? Instead, TA and HR leaders need to ask what do we automate and how do we do it? My guest this week is Brigette McInnis-Day Chief People Officer at UiPath. UiPath has been at the vanguard of robotic process automation for several years, helping companies automate systems and processes across different parts of the enterprise. Brigette has deep experience in automation and HR technology and highlights some critical areas that TA leaders should be paying attention to. The first is using an enterprise automation platform to bring data, processes and quality of experience together across the entire organization. There’s an assumption that TA tools will drive recruiting automation and it’s essential to understand that integrated company wide automation strategies may actually dictate the pace of change. Brigette also highlights some excellent use cases including how UiPath has automated onboarding to offer a quicker and and more personalized experience. Hi Brigette and welcome to the podcast.
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:02:32]:
Hi Matt, thank you so much for having me today.
Matt Alder [00:02:34]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show.
Matt Alder [00:02:37]:
Please could you introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:02:39]:
Us what you do?
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:02:40]:
Sure. Thank you. I’m excited today because I really want to share just some of the new new wave things that are happening and things that I’m pretty excited about. My name is Brigette McInnis-Day. I’m the Chief People Officer for UiPath and for those of you who maybe have heard of it but need a little more explanation, it’s really the leading enterprise automation software company. So if you think about we’re headquartered in New York City, however founded in Romania as a truly global organization and we now have over 4,000 employees. But what I think is really exciting and why I wanted to come to UiPath was really how do we take and transform AI to life through automation and what that does for the future of work and as well as what does it do to lift and lift the HR space. But more importantly also how do we empower our employees and drive more engagement? It’s really about the work they do. That’s what attracts and retains people. And if we can do that in a way to remove mundane tasks by leveraging AI and automation, I think that’s the key ticket for HR and especially across all areas in particular as well. Talent acquisition. Acquisition is where many people are going to first. So that’s a little bit about the company, about me. I’ve been in the space almost 27 years, mainly in high tech and consulting for high tech, but also to be working in the business in HR tech as well at SAP, at Google and Cloud, as well as now at UiPath. And my first, first job out of university was, or graduate school, I should say was HR consulting and was really excited to really understand different companies and how to drive compensation rewards, acquisitions and performance management. But I fell into the dot com boom and have been in tech ever since. So a little bit about me and I live on the east coast of the US. I have two children, husband that we’ve been together for I think 30, 30 years and just excited for the holidays coming up as well. So everybody’s home and we’re excited to be together.
Matt Alder [00:04:55]:
Fantastic stuff. And you’re just the absolute perfect person to talk to about AI and automation because of your background and obviously because of where you work now. It’s been a massive topic for, well, for a long time, but certainly in the last year it seems that it’s all anyone wants to talk about. But there’s a kind of a big difference between talk, talking about it, actually doing it and understanding it. I mean, do you think that companies have a good grasp on what AI and automation actually mean in the modern workplace? And you know, are there reasons why you think people are sort of hesitant to, to actually sort of push forward, do it and adopt these technologies?
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:05:37]:
You know, Matt, I think you, you said it well, there’s a lot of talk, a lot of new information coming out every day. Probably not a lot of truth or actuality, right. In terms of what people are hearing about it. And so I think everyone’s hearing about it, but to your point and talking about it, but where’s the action? And for me that is, I’m all about the action part of the equation. And I do think, you know, you have some stats out there, you know, companies that are already in the AI space. And you know, saying that 90% of HR leaders say they’re going to move ahead with AI and at least one major area. But the reality, I think, and what I’m seeing is one is HR organizations are not sure where to start. They don’t understand how the AI and automation can relate to the current HR systems they have. And to really build that business case on how do they drive that? And I think sometimes there’s a conflict of interest, depending on how progressive the HR organizations are, to continue to bring the human in the automation and human into the overall, what we call human in the loop with automation because it’s not to replace the people, it’s really to enhance what we would deliver and how we deliver it. And I think that’s the big question. Each customer I’ve been with is how, how and where do I start and what does it mean for how do I bring my organization along? And we were at a, one of our global events for customers and there was no special track for the HR space. However, we, we hosted a breakfast. So just the story told us a lot and we were just, we were just not sure how many people would come. And a lot of the areas that are making progress are the centers of expertise that are driving AI and automation within a company. And they, they can live in different various functions. And we were on pins and needles, had three backup plans, like, hey, if 10 people come, this is what we do. Very intimate. If it’s that 75 people, you know, registered and then if it was more, not sure how we, how we break these out and drive it literally at 8am in Vegas, which, you know, that’s always a tough time for breakfast.
Matt Alder [00:07:57]:
Absolutely.
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:07:58]:
It’s like, well, let’s see what we get. And no one was literally there until spot on 8am so we’re sitting there going, wow, okay, we’ve got to figure out how we do this and how we deliver. And then over 150, almost 200 people out the door show up. I think the point is that the need is there. We have such a huge opportunity in the market, especially where we can reduce these mundane tasks. For example, HR, we can do 10 times faster onboarding, 40% more HR employee capacity by eliminating the mundane tasks. And it can improve candidate experience, employee experience and leader experience, everything from payroll benefits, all HR questions, and allow us to do the work we’re supposed to do. If you think about talent acquisition, keeping candidates warm, mapping the market, finding the talent that isn’t looking, building those relationships, that’s the space you want to play in. So I’ll tell you just from that event alone and we heard from a lot of COEs at that event and their number one thing was we need more HR people coming to these events because they’re resistant and hesitant to start more automation. And they said we need you to help them with their automation strategy and drive it from a HR domain perspective. So we were really blown away at the outcome and some of the other venues didn’t get the same outcome and we were pleasantly surprised. But it told us a lot. One is where do you start? Two is how do we get HR prepared for it and bring the HR team along? And three, making sure that we are supporting and articulating that business case on how to drive employee empowerment experience to lift hr, but more importantly the entire organization and potentially their customers.
Matt Alder [00:09:54]:
You mentioned that HR is very hesitant about automation. Why do you think that is?
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:09:59]:
I think a couple of things. One, we hear, well, I already have these HCM solutions or an ATS applicant tracking system. Why do I need anything else and why shouldn’t I just wait for X solution to come out with AI? They say they’re going to. The difference with automation and AI depending on especially what we offer at UiPath. It’s not just about one process, one bot robot, right? It’s about the platform. And if you think holistically as a leader in the HR space, you’re looking at the entire it’s the one function that completely supports the entire organization, has the viewpoint on every people topic and has all the data on people, right? You can put our UiPath platform across all your technologies. Everyone’s got fragmented tech, everyone has shelfware, everyone has just mediocre reporting or whatever it might be and are not getting the right information at the C suite. They’re not actually be able to improve the experience across all areas. And so if you wait by every solution you have to bring out the automation, you won’t excel, you’ll make small improvements, but the platform is where you can pull across hr, finance, procurement all the way across and layer in generative AI. You can use content on almost any topic that you then tweak and keep your human in the loop. And it just accelerates us and allows us to do much more value added work. And I think we have to get out of the old mindset of we have an hcm, that’s all that’s out there in the market and we’ll buy some other pieces that link to it. We’ve got to think more platform, more holistic and then build out and, and fill in the gaps where we, we know we need to improve and really, truly lift us in the space from an HR perspective and be less fragmented. I think that’s the difference in the thinking and that’s what I’m seeing in some of the conversations with customers as well.
Matt Alder [00:12:06]:
No, absolutely. And I suppose to, to zero in on some of the things that you’ve, that you’ve said there. I suppose two bits to this, I mean talk us through some of those examples that, that you mentioned perhaps in more detail. What are the things that the HR does that talent acquisition does that can be sort of automated for the better in this kind of way. And do you also think that it’s an opportunity for HR to demonstrate its value and leadership in the business? Because that’s something that HR professionals are always trying to find ways to do. So. Yeah, just interested in your thoughts on that.
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:12:38]:
Yeah, absolutely. Matt, I think we know we’re in this profession because one, we love what we do and we also feel like we have the best jobs in the organization. And at the same time your point is we have every touch point on people, on talent and I believe a people force organization makes the difference for everything. And to your point, if we remove this work, I think the one thing people are worried about is around human in the loop and keeping it there. But what we’re seeing is just a little bit more detail on this is we’re seeing employees are expecting organizations to remove this work. They’re not coming out of university saying please, please let me grind and work my way up, Please, let’s make sure we’re leveraging the best technology so it’s a different relationship with employee to employer. And just let me give you some examples, right? I think a couple things, you know, if we in terms of some of our experience with a global e commerce company that uses UiPath, it supports over a million interviews during COVID saving 3.4 million in HR, talent acquisition and recruiting costs alone. And I guarantee you the candidate experience was improved. That’s a huge impact. And we all know during COVID we had to overnight go to virtual and still made huge progress and continue to have one of the biggest hiring year couple years during COVID that we’ve seen. Another example to be more specific too is a global manufacturing company using UiPath AI and automation to process more than 500hr related documents per week and really removing that workout. And this is just the beginning if you think about holistically across the organization. A couple other things I think are important in talent acquisition space. AI is a really great tool. I talked to a customer the other day and they said we don’t have a job. You know, job architecture, it’s like, well you have, you post jobs every day, right? You can get that information using automation. You can look at all the job descriptions, you can make them consistent, you can build a job, job family, job architecture, job codes, all of that from that work. And then you can simply build career paths from it just by leveraging the automation and using the information you have. Sure, you need to make sure it’s accurate and update it, but it’s a heck of a lot easier than doing all that manually and trying to do that around the world. So these are just some things that push us way advanced in the space on things that pull us back. And quite honestly you have HR departments that say I need to keep fixing the basics, but if you only focus on those, you’re never going to innovate and you’re never going to excel. So you’ve got to prioritize and do both. I think some other things in the TA space for us is really around interview scheduling. I know companies spend a lot of time and money on just interview scheduling and that experience building job descriptions, communicating to candidates, keeping them warm, answering their questions and concerns. And the entire onboarding product, the pre, pre process and onboarding process for us is automated. It’s automated but it’s personalized. So you know every training you need to do, all the templates for you and your manager in terms of how to really ramp up and your time to readiness is increased and all of background checks as well are done via automation. And so and I can talk about a little bit what that means, but the specifics around that feeds out every connection point you need on background checks. And it allowed us 90% reduction in time to complete all background checks and follow ups and the TA operations specialists no longer need to manage it at all. So these are the things and the specifics and I think we’re just, I think we’re just starting right in some of these areas.
Matt Alder [00:16:49]:
I think that’s really interesting, that onboarding example in particular because you’re talking about automation, but you know, you mentioned personalization there in terms of the experience and you sort of mentioned several times sort of humans in the humans in the loop. I mean, is that an example? Because I suppose the fear that people have about automation is that it cuts humans out, it becomes driven by machines, there’s no empathy there. All those kind of things but it sounds like actually it’s the opposite. Talk to us about how humans fit into that process and how automation kind of, I don’t know, makes that easier.
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:17:25]:
Yeah, I think a couple of things, we take an example, like your entire recruiting process all the way pre, all the way fully through and we map it out by what the human does today, right. An individual human being and how many touch points they have. Let’s say you have five interviewers for every interviewee and you just multiply that and look at what that, that process looks like. And if you tie it up to everything from offer, offer, letter, contract, all those pieces and you overlay automation and AI on that, you can shrink that by about 30 to 40%. And you can put where you have humans in the loop so that you want to make sure that something isn’t passed through based on your automation. And you can have humans reviewing the shortlist, you can have humans reviewing the final contract, you can have all those pieces. But it uses the human being for their higher level thinking and the work that they do versus all of managing the triaging between the whole process. And I think that’s where the experience is different. So that gives you the opportunity to put humans in the loop in a lot of these areas. And then there’s some areas where with data integrity, this is one of the things we hear from HR a lot is that garbage in, garbage out. Right. But we have set up for our all of our data in HR and we have 75 points that we look at to make sure our data is accurate. But there’s always a screen that goes, looks and looks at certain spots as well. So it’s about how you build the human in loop where you feel that to your point, the empathy, the interaction and how do you make sure there’s personalized messaging or connection all along the way. I talked to all the senior leaders to come into the organization just about a month in just to hear what their onboarding was like. And you know, regardless of their, you know, level in career or time and experience, they’re so impressed with the fact that we have our rocketeer that does the onboarding and they’re so impressed with the engagement and how it’s so much self service but it’s really accurate. They get their information, they’re not lost and they don’t have to go to five or six people to find something. And the experience has always been very positive. And we talk about this is our underlying automation and how we craft it and how we tailor it to. You could do it for different functions. The onboarding is different for sales versus engineering and the feedback is really great because you’re talking to people who’ve been in the industry for a long time, but they’ve never engaged this way as well. The other piece I think is a wonderful one. We have to show the human side of how we can progress. We like to name our automations and one is called Athena and this is the mentoring matching automation. What it does is I went in to test it and I go in and say here are the areas I can be a mentor on. Or I could go in and say as I want to be meant, be meant, be a mentee and go into the areas and in seconds we’re matched and we set up the meeting. You, you know, I’ve been staying with this one person and then they’ll send me more and more and I have to say, can you take on more? And I have to say yes or no. And it gives you that ability and it’s like we’ll check in with you later. Right. So it keeps you in that connection. If I had this throughout my career, can you imagine the amount of mentorship and the lack of program management that you have to have on this when it’s just really built with your people as well? So these are some of the things that you can use that same automation on. Other things like career matching, job matching, all those types of things as long as you articulate your needs. So I think it’s. The possibilities are pretty endless. And we do what we call art of the possibility with our customers as well as internally and hackathons to get the ideas because the people who are doing the jobs are the right people to identify what should be automated. And that’s where the humans are, the ones that should be directing it and leading it.
Matt Alder [00:21:50]:
Going back to what you were saying right at the beginning about platforms to do this and get humans where they need to be, you need to think really holistically and be. And be very strategic about it, don’t you?
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:22:02]:
You do. And one of the things I always ask too is as part of your people strategy, of course you link it to the business strategy, right? How are we going to lift and be a high growth organization is one of our key areas as the stage of the company we’re in and our opportunity. And we have a five pillar strategy and one major pillar is being a role model in HR automation for the company and also for our, you know, prospects and customers. And so that strategy means that the entire organization are part of hackathons are part of the overall case and the value proposition. And we’re out in front of customers having these conversations. So. And I’ll tell you, I’m really impressed by many companies and what they’ve progressed in. And their HR departments have been given some tough requirements. They might not be able to grow and invest in certain areas. And they have been able to deliver outsized outcomes because of their ability to embrace automation and AI. And they’ve empowered one of our great customers. They said if you automate yourself out of a job, you get promoted. So it’s a different way to think about how the future of work will be and, and how we should be thinking about automation. Do we write job descriptions for automation? Right. Do we, you know, are you. These are the things you don’t do because it’s all automated. Right. So I think it really is a great time for HR to be putting it in their people strategy, linking it with their hrs, their other tech needs, and building that business case as part of the business strategy. Because you can articulate not only the impact from a HR perspective, but you’ve got to also articulate the impact it has on leaders, employees and candidates. And that’s where I think the big lift is and the differentiation of why someone would want to come to the company or stay with the company. Because we value the work you do and try to minimize the work, that’s going to be a detractor to your overall success.
Matt Alder [00:24:14]:
That’s really interesting. And I suppose this is a final question. I just want to kind of expand on that point a little bit because you’re expressing it as a very, as a very positive thing. But there will be people listening who are fearful for their career and how their job will develop because of automation. You know, what do you think this sort of looks like from an individual’s perspective? Are we going to have to rethink work? What’s going to happen?
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:24:40]:
Yeah, I think that the human experience is at the core of everything we do and we should keep it there. And from there we should look at how do you, how do you really want to drive from a people perspective or an HR perspective? What’s the role of a leader in regards to their people aspects? Do they own their people topics? Are they empowered to make decisions around them and really look at what are the detractors and drivers of engagement for your company? And from there, I think really setting out to address the fear, talk about it, especially as an HR organization first and understand what those fears are and what that looks like in addition pilot and test out things with the organization. There’s always some first movers out there in the organization and you can get them to embrace different things and get the feedback what works, what doesn’t work. And keep using that approach because the more they work and experience, I find with employees and leaders, they wouldn’t want to be a part of it and they want to have their fingerprints on it. And once you start doing that approach, it can change significantly. What we do is I talked about with our HR team, almost 70% of our overall we call it our people organization. Arty is a citizen developer. They’ve been trained already on how to build automation and they are already identifying the work that can be automated within their team. Our finance organization is even way farther ahead in these areas and working with it as part of that overall finance organization to drive those initiatives. And what we see are more opportunities are coming up that because of the automation, not less. And I think that’s the difference as well. And you know, most companies really struggle with silos or sometimes several teams are doing the same work. You hear that a lot. That’s where a lot of the dissatisfaction comes from. And this allows us to look at processes end to end. We have technology that looks at processes, documentation has the ability to give you a recommendation of where the highest yield will be on automating an entire end to end approach. So that’s what we do with customers. We go through an assessment with them very quickly and it tells you the top ones and then you pick out how much you can manage with your resources and how you drive that. So it’s a really exciting way to bring your teams together, be inclusive, seek to understand these end and approaches. And then you’re, you’re taught you’re touching many matrix organizations or overlap. And it’s a much more highly collaborative way to build out the future of work together as you use these other technologies. So that’s how we work. That’s how I look at it. And many of the examples talk about their work life balance. They no longer have to run reports at the end of the quarter or end of the month. They sit there for days. Things from a payroll perspective would take someone a whole week, takes five minutes and it’s accurate. And so I think these are the areas where we know in HR there’s always more work that can be done than we can. I’ve worked in the business roles, I’ve worked at HR and it’s the busiest I’ve ever seen. It’s mostly in hr. And when people come from outside in the business into hr, they say, wow, I never knew how much there was to do on the people side. And I don’t fear it that we’re not going to have enough roles. I fear if we don’t embrace it, we’ll stagnate and the business will move ahead without us. And that’s always my fear. So we’ve got to build that strategy. We’ve got to bring people along and understand the why and the change and really start showing the impact across the entire organization because it’s here and it’s only learning and getting smarter from an AI perspective. And we need to embrace it because we’ve got a huge opportunity and potential in our space. So I’m excited for it and I think everyone has the opportunity to know how to start, leverage the opportunity out there and also bring their team along to be part of the solution.
Matt Alder [00:29:05]:
Brigette, thank you very much for talking to me.
Brigette McInnis-Day [00:29:07]:
Thank you so much, Matt. I really appreciate all of your experience and the space you’re in. And thanks for having me and listening to a little bit more about our opportunities at UiPath. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:29:20]:
My thanks to Brigette.
Matt Alder [00:29:22]:
You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
