Custom avatars have always been a thing, but now, they’re even more important. Why? Well, because now you have the AI technology to give them a personality and an advanced function. One of the fields where this could make the biggest difference is HR. With that in mind, let’s check out how custom avatars can transform the recruitment and employee engagement industries.
Avatar recruiters
A lot of people have anxiety when it comes to talking to a real recruiter. Now, this isn’t a problem, right? After all, why would you want a candidate who can’t stand the pressure? This makes sense if you’re hiring a salesperson… or a firefighter.
There are a lot of people who would crush it at their post if they could move past the hiring stage. Their anxiety just gets the better of them.
With a custom avatar maker, you’ll have an easy job creating a non-intimidating recruiter whose personality even matches the values of your company. You have a chance to pick a generic character that serves as a perfect cultural fit. You can make them as communicative as you want, as formal/informal, and more. By just interacting with this character, they’ll already be able to tell a lot about your business.
By having an avatar recruiter, you’ll give them a chance to really show you what they’re made of. You’ll give them a chance to show you just how good their performance gets when they can just focus on the test/task and ignore the fact that they’re being evaluated by an actual human in real time.
The alternative to this would be to make your recruitment process heavily text-based. This, however, is monotone and archaic. You won’t feel very tech-savvy, and your candidates will have a hard time going through your choose-your-adventure-style tests.
Other than that, the avatar-assisted process is so much quicker than the text-based one. During the recruitment process, you’re already on a tight schedule, and time is money. With the help of an avatar recruiter, you can cut this time shorter.
Already, avatar recruiters are a great asset for any HR department, but that doesn’t stop there.
Personalized employee onboarding
No one can deny that the best way to provide a new employee with onboarding is to assign them a mentor. There are, however, a few problems with this idea.
First, it means taking one of your veteran staffers from their regular tasks and putting them in charge of this new hire. It will diminish their productivity, and even though they’re helping someone out and doing a huge favor for the team, they might find it boring.
Second, just because someone is good at what they do and a great fit at your company, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll be a good mentor. A mentor needs to be communicative, open, and accepting. They have to be patient.
You see, one big advantage of a FAQ page over a real mentor or customer service representative is the fact that it always delivers the same results. Sure, a good customer service representative or a good mentor is always better than a text-based resource, but what about a bad one?
An avatar gives you consistency!
It’s always as good and as accurate. Moreover, you don’t have to worry about how much you’re distracting them from their core tasks. An avatar has no other task, and it can remain at your disposal for as long as your new hires need it.
As we’ve already mentioned, a recruiter can reflect company culture and be a perfect culture fit, but it’s even more important for an onboarder to do this. Most commonly, the mentor is the first actual contact that a new hire has with your enterprise. Therefore, what they hear there, they’re likely to keep as their own opinion. This way, you can guide (if not control) it.
Employee engagement with virtual space
More and more people are working from home. Even if they’re not full-time remote employees, they’re, at the very least, hybrid workers. Therefore, it’s important that you consider employee engagement with virtual space.
Even their coworkers are people who they’ve never seen and, more likely than not, people that they mostly interact with through their screens. If the responses are the same, is there really a difference if they’re talking to a real HR representative or an AI?
Here’s more food for thought. HR representatives, even good ones, have their own biases. They can try to be equal to everyone, but they’re only human, and they’ll subconsciously like some people better or find some scenarios (excuses) more believable.
With an avatar, you’ll be able to provide them with a representative that treats everything and everyone equally. This way, their virtual interaction with HR will run as smoothly as possible.
Another thing you need to take into consideration is the fact that these tools can reflect personality and mood. This will help it pass a Turing test, which means that your coworkers, for the most part, won’t even be able to tell that they’re talking to an AI.
A custom avatar can also be used to make a meeting more lively. This can allow people to create their own avatars that can attend meetings in their stead. They can feed them answers and talking points. You would be surprised at how autonomously AI chatbots can respond after that, and with a good custom avatar, it will feel like a real person is attending the meeting.
The thing is that people already waste too much time in meetings.
Gamification of a training program
An avatar can be designed as a learning module. If you ever played a video game, you know that the tutorial process is run by an avatar. In some scenarios, it’s a clear VA (virtual assistant) with no misrepresentation of any kind.
Another thing you can use avatars for is creating customer profiles. Adding a face and a personality for a customer creates a far more life-like training scenario. This way, you can turn everything into a simulation and with little effort.
Avatars are an amazing way for you to get an actual visual representation of progress. In fact, if you make each of your employees an avatar-based profile, you can upgrade it to give them a visual sense of making it in the world.
If you’ve ever seen ads for those games on Facebook (the Lvl 1 Crook vs. Lvl 99 Boss types of games), you might have a rough idea of what these things are supposed to look like.
The most important part of it all is the fact that training is a continuous process, and there’ll never come a time when you won’t need it. So, the sooner you improve it, the better, and these avatars may hold the keys. Therefore, integrating AI into HR training programs could lead to more seamless employee development.
Employee wellness and mental health
Only since AI, such as ChatGPT, have people noticed what kind of a problem we have with opening up to humans. Even with a real therapist, people have trouble expressing some of their darkest, deepest desires. It’s even worse when it comes to opening up to your boss or your coworker. This is why having avatars in wellness programs makes such a difference.
Even when there’s a real person behind it (sort of), it’s easier to speak to an avatar than an actual person. Think of it as a confessional, where you cannot see the person on the other end, which allows you to be more frank and more open. Just like with the confessional, this tool will not break your trust. It won’t judge, and it won’t hesitate to give you an answer.
The best part is that, since it’s programmable, it could provide unique assistance to each individual person in your employ.
Gradually, it can build trust and openness, but not in the way you think. We’re not talking about trusting that you can open up to a tool. We’re talking about trusting in its capacity and capability to help.
This tool is also great for helping people feel accepted and represented. It breaks down cultural barriers and allows the expression of diverse identities, even in environments that would be seen as a tad more homogenous.
Custom avatars are game-changers in the HR industry
The thing you need to understand is that no matter what HR task you think of, there’s a way you can improve it with an AI-powered avatar. It can give you better hiring, onboarding, and training, less biased evaluation, and improved mental health nurturing of your staff members. In other words, custom avatars can give you end-to-end support far more effectively than you initially thought.
