How tech startup Genies uses chatbots to onboard employees

AI’s influence on HR appears to be growing, especially when it comes to onboarding.

Some 69% of HR pros used AI in their onboarding processes in 2022, according to a survey from talent acquisition platform Eightfold AI, and 81% of HR pros have “explored or implemented AI solutions to improve process efficiency within their organization,” a report from research and consulting firm Gartner found.

The HR department at Genies, a tech startup that creates digital avatars, is aligned with those figures. Since 2022, it has used two chatbots built from OpenAI’s GBT-4 technology to educate employees about its predominantly Gen Z users and guide them to HR resources, according to Makena Jordison, the company’s chief of staff.

All aboard. In an effort to ensure its platform is catering to its target audience, Genies has spent time educating its new hires on Gen Z. Since releasing its first chatbot, this process has been made much easier.

“We’ve created a bot that you can talk to, that can train you up, and then give you a bunch of information on what's happening,” Akash Nigam, CEO of Genies, told HR Brew.

Employees can either ask the chatbot specific questions—“Who’s really relevant [to Gen Z]? Why are they important? What is Gen Z? What did they like this week?” said Nigam—, or for a Gen Z-focused news digest, and “when you converse back and forth with the Gen Z [chatbot,] it will literally talk like a Gen Z person, so it’ll throw in ‘slay,’ or something like that, which is amazing,” added Jordison.

Nigam said it’s helped new employees get up to speed faster, and the increased familiarity with Genies’s target audience is foundational to the development and design of its app and avatars.

Jordison told HR Brew that the Gen Z chatbot doesn’t replace all of the education that happens during the onboarding experience, but it does replace some of the repetitive meetings that many new hires may have had to endure during the first few weeks on the job.

For instance, instead of meeting with the marketing team to go over what appeals to Gen Z, Jordison said, for example, employees “easily plug whatever they're working on in, or any questions, into this chatbot, and it’ll tell you what doesn't line up with the characteristics or traits of, like, a Gen Z girl.”

Bot at your service. After the release of its first chatbot, Genies created a second chatbot from GPT-4 to streamline another aspect of onboarding: sharing company info. This chatbot houses company documents, policies, and holiday schedules.

“Instead of having to scroll through Notion or Google Docs,” Jordison said. “You can literally say [to the chatbot], ‘What are Genies’ holidays?’ and, in two seconds, the list of the holiday calendar is a message back to you.”

After deploying these chatbots, the work of the company’s HR team isn’t done. They work with, what Jordison called, “AI gurus” throughout the company to help employees learn to use the chatbots in ways that will benefit their work.

“We don’t just take whatever this bot is [saying], and are like this is it, we’re going to launch this right now to the public…We definitely use it as a guiding principle,” she said. “We’ve definitely learned that some things can be helped with AI, and then some things it can’t.”