Module 7: AI Automation with a Real HR Pro | BambooHR
Hi. I'm your host Nick Scholz from BambooHR. We're gonna do things a little differently in this module. Let me introduce you to Jake Alsup, the director of recruitment and hiring at community counseling center, which helps people who struggle with behavioral issues, mental illness, and substance use disorders. In a recent chat with BambooHR's Mike Taylor, Jake shared a wealth of insights from his AI and automation journey.
We're fast forwarding to how he partnered with AI to boost his efficiency. People are gonna love this next section because we're gonna talk about the automations that you're doing outside of VampoHR. So we've looked inside. Now we're gonna take a little step outside.
Yeah. Let's take a look. So, this is the very first automation that I created. So I will say this took a good amount of trial and error on my end before I really found out what worked for me. So, yeah, wanna talk about thirty day evals.
You know, it's always important to get this, you know, the snapshot of how a new employee is doing. You know, we we put so much attention and focus on recruiting. We also need to retain those staff and ensure that they have the best experience too.
So we wanted to do a thirty day eval. Now what you see, here on the left, that is our original form. This was triggered through BambooHR. It was set up as an esignature document. And, this was prior to some of those onboarding updates that Bamboo has.
You know, whenever I first set up this form, this is before we could send out a task notification on the day it was due versus immediately with that new hire packet. And, because I couldn't put that date for when this was sent, I had to manually send out these thirty day evals. So not only did I hire anywhere from four to ten individuals every single week and have them do orientation, I had to ensure that I was actually sending these out by that thirty day time frame.
And that means setting up an email alert in Bamboo to remind me when a new hire hits their thirty day eval. So saw a little bit of that Bamboo automation in there. But in all reality, it was remembering to go in and after I've sent it to review that information, send it over to the individuals who needed to have it. So that could be our CEO to the supervisor to the supervisor's supervisor talking with that staff member, and then there was the reporting that's involved with thirty day evals.
Now if you don't do anything with the data, well, that's not really helpful. So I did have to go in and manually analyze each response. So that means downloading each document, manually extracting that information that was plugged in through the esignature request, and pushing that into a new report. And as I mentioned, I mean, we have a good number of staff that start with us each week. So the more we have, the more evals I have to do, the more time that it took. And, again, you know, the process that wasn't compliant.
I was struggling with being able to review this information, extract the data, and get it in on time to the CEO for those reportings that that she requested. And, yeah, it it took some time. It definitely took some time. I I really estimate, again, this is conservatively, but it was a three to four hour process each week.
And, I know I've mentioned this, but this doesn't include the time that I spent worrying about if I was effectively doing my job. And I'm sure you all might have had this a time or two. You know, you're in bed one evening trying to get to sleep, the brain turns on, and immediately you're shooting up thinking, did I send that email? Did I did I pull that information like I was supposed to? That report's due tomorrow. Gotta get up and let's knock it out. Without automation, this was fairly typical.
And and I didn't like that. As I said, I I really put a lot of emphasis on that efficiency and trying to make my job as easy as possible. So I've I've loved your curiosity too, you know, and your, like, desire to, like, fix, problems. Like, it doesn't matter what platforms you're using. There's always gonna be these little nuances, right, that can that can use a little fix. And so I love the way that you have found some stuff.
So maybe walk us through the the automated process that you have now. So glad you asked. Yeah. Before I dive into this specific process with automating these thirty day evals, you know, as as we mentioned, I had to talk about how I got there, which is that curiosity. We made the switch from your typical Office two thousand sixteen or whichever version it was to Office three sixty five, sixteen or whichever version it was to Office three sixty five back in two thousand nineteen.
And as the office techie guy, my coworker's words, not mine, I had asked IT if I could check out some of these applications that are available in Office three sixty five. You know, I'd heard about Microsoft Teams in the past. You know, I know that Microsoft has a a variety of applications, so they they gave me access. And this is when I found out about Power Automate, which screenshot showing you here.
I was looking at Power Automate because I had these ideas about ways that I could create workflows that I didn't have to touch, that would just automatically do what I needed to do. And, from there, I just started started browsing. I got curious. I started looking through these templates and as you can see, I have data collection right here pulled up. When I saw data collection, I was like, oh my gosh. This would be perfect for some thirty day evals that I'm sending out and I'm not being compliant on.
So I just started playing around. I started browsing around and I found one that had Microsoft forms to Excel and then another one that was Microsoft forms to Microsoft list. And it was that curiosity that helped me find my way to these automations. That and a lot of Googling and the utilization of Microsoft Learn, and then once these learning language models started coming up, utilizing those AI resources too.
And Moe, I do wanna mention, I just saw your your comment in the chat. From my understanding, Zapier is, in that same breath as Power Automate. So that can be used as for those workflows and automations as well.
Sorry for that little segue there. With the with the Microsoft Learn platform, with Power Automate now and the updates that Microsoft has done regarding Copilot, you know, we talk about AI. That's the awesome thing about it is that now in Power Automate, you can actually use Copilot as you're setting up your flows. You can go in there and type in what you wanted to do, what solution you wanna accomplish, and it'll actually give you a recommended flow and will pull these pieces up.
For those who don't know what Copilot is, do you wanna just give them a quick Yeah. Yeah. So Copilot, in my interpretation, is Microsoft's version of AI. You know, it's their Gemini. It's their chat GPT. And, us being a Microsoft Office shop here at Community Counseling Center, thankfully, I've got a little Copilot icon right here on the bottom of my taskbar. So I am definitely using that daily, and it has been a huge resource for me when trying to develop these workflows as well.
And so Jake's like the ex well, I'm calling you an expert because you've done all this before. So, you know, in the Microsoft, I'm sure there's other solutions in the Google realms that you could probably find too, but, yeah, we're gonna keep going through this. But, if you wanna connect ever with Jake, you can do it in that, HR Heroes Slack channel, and he can talk you through some of the stuff. But let's keep going. Alright. Sorry.
Yeah. For sure. So I I wanted to give just a brief overview of what a flow looks like whenever it's set up. So, again, using Power Automate, this is a workflow application, most basic sense that's available on the Microsoft Office three sixty five platform. And the onboarding task for our new employees. That onboarding task gets sent over to them seven days before their thirty day anniversary thirty day anniversary. They complete the survey, and then Power Automate walks through these steps that you see here.
Now we are gonna talk a little bit more detail about this. So going ahead and moving on, this is the the generic survey that I send out. So send the survey, employee answer these questions, takes around eight ish minutes at the most to complete these. And upon finishing the survey, it will then trigger the flow. What do I mean by flow? This.
So this is what it looks like when you're setting up in Power Automate. So essentially, what happens is we have our trigger. So the trigger is when a new response is submitted to our first thirty day evaluation, Power Automate is then going to grab the list of responses and get these response details. So it's going to tell us we're gonna tell Power Automate what the form is, first thirty day evaluation, and those list of responses. Now it goes a little bit deeper than that, though. After we get that list of responses, I actually like to get more information about the employee. And, again, this is part of our section three when we talk about integrations, but we are able to pull information from Okta, which syncs and uses BambooHR, as the the record keeper.
So with that Okta integration, it pulls the information from the employee's profile. So we have the responders email here, which is telling Power Automate, hey. I need to get John Doe's information.
We're then gonna capture the manager information by using the employee's email address, and we're gonna update that list item that we have. All of our all these survey responses, they're going to Microsoft list, which just allows me to easily view each response in a card format. You can use this for Microsoft Excel. You can have it sent to Google Sheets, Google Docs.
And there's a lot of different use cases as far as where you want that information stored. But, again, I wanna see who their manager is, and we're gonna update that within the card. After it's run through these and updated that information, now I wanna find out what the survey responses were. So this is where the create item comes in and this is one of the the really important pieces to this Power Automate flow. It's going to I'm gonna tell it where I want this information stored, the name of the list it's being stored in, and then, basically, we're playing a matching game. The nice thing about Power Automate and since it has my list of responses, all it is is a matching game.
So I'm gonna come in here. I'm gonna put in the submission time, what their email is, hire date, job title, and then the answers to the various questions they have on the survey. Now once Power Automated has rolled through this list, it's captured all those survey responses, put it on my Microsoft list that I have, I then wanna share this information. This is where that that time savings also jumps in for me because I did struggle with being able to pull all this data out and then send that over to the supervisor or to their supervisor so that way they can see just how this employee is doing.
So that's where this next step comes in because not only do I wanna send this to to the hiring manager, to the supervisor, I feel it's important to also include their supervisor too. Not only to address any issues as they may come up, but more importantly to highlight and to really recognize when a manager is doing well with an employee. You know, we talk about having employees and then the recognition they need to receive, but I feel it's just as important to also really recognize whenever a supervisor is helping this new hire feel comfortable, feel confident in their job, and and I guess a slight plug setting them free to do their best work, you know, in that position we've hired them for. So we pull in the supervisor's supervisor here.
I want to grant access to, the list item that was created. So, again, the whole point of this flow is so that way we have it in a nice easy to see format. Now this is a really important piece though because we have the recipients here and these two fields are the manager and their manager. But it's important that we set up the appropriate access level Because the number one thing I would not want to have happen is to grant access to one supervisor so they can see every staff member's thirty day evaluation. Not secure by any means. So you do have to ensure you set this up as a can view access level.
It's all we want, can view and specific to this survey response or ID. Now after I grant access to this item, need to let them know about it. So send them an email. That's the last part of this flow.
I send an email to the supervisor and the supervisor supervisor, put in the subject line title, which is the employee's name, has submitted a thirty day eval, and it's gonna include a link for them to click, and it'll take them directly to it. Can't see anybody else's. I do wanna mention, since we are providing this view access though and granting them access to these individual thirty day evaluation responses, it does compile. So if I have supervisor Susie who has hired, you know, three, four, five people over the past six months, she can actually see all of those thirty day evaluations for her staff, but wouldn't be able to see anybody else's. Now that was a very, very quick overview of a power automate flow and how I created this for for my thirty day evaluations.
Actually, because of the the success with the thirty day evals, I ended up creating new ones for sixty day evaluations, ninety day evaluations. And we'll talk a little bit more in a moment about some exit interviews too. Now that you've done these time saving automations, what do you think the time is that you've that you've saved? Yeah. Easily two hours every week. Because, again, with the amount of staff that we hire at community counseling center, I'm doing orientations every Monday. So pretty well every Monday, we're gonna hit a thirty day eval that would need to be sent out. So not only am I saving time there, I'm saving a ton of time from having to manually pull out this information from these PDFs that are done through esignatures and also extracting it and being able to report on it, You know, instead of having to manually copy and paste or manually pull out a screenshot and extract the text, heck, if I want to, I can put it to Excel.
And then even the other day, I can copy paste these into, again, Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT. Can you run a quick sentiment analysis on these survey responses over my thirty day evals? So that's, again, using AI in order to help me save time with these automations. But, again, two hours every week, I'd say, is an easy, easy amount of time saved. And I'm gonna harp on this a lot today, but also the time saved and not worrying about it when I'm at home as well.
Yeah. Love that AI tip and and the ease of or stress distress. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. That's awesome. So we're into our we're gonna go into part three here.
Let us know how we're doing. Give us a thumbs up if you're liking it so far. Let's look at the second automation you've done outside of Bamboo, and this is very similar to the thirty day evaluations for new hires. Walk us through how you did exit interviews before your automation. Yeah. So, again, really similar process. We were using a a PDF, an esignature document within Bamboo, and this was tied into the off boarding tasks.
So, of course, if you're familiar with off boarding task in BambooHR, and if you're not, stick with me. Whenever we go and have somebody who resigns from their position, I will initiate the resignation process within Bamboo. After initiating the resignation and putting that data in, jump over to off boarding, and then assign those tasks to the relevant staff members and billing, accounts payable, HR, IT. But also, I we had a a task specific to the staff member who was leaving. We wanted to hear, you know, what was the reason? Why were they leaving? Ask those questions so that way we can improve upon them. So fairly straightforward on that end.
Again, we send over this PDF. Yeah. They they go in and answer the questions as typical. Once they finish up this this document, it get then gets sent to our HR director who receives the questionnaire for review to send any any particular information to our CEO to address issues that come up. However, with exit interviewing, we also want to ensure that we're reporting and analyzing this data. And with esignatures than BambooHR, they're saved as PDFs. So to analyze each of these responses and to put them into our quarterly reporting, all of these answers had to be manually extracted, manually put into Excel.
The comments and, whys and all the information had to be pulled out by hand, put into or reviewed, then put into a new report to be given to our our CEO for each quarter. So similar to the thirty days, a lot of that hands on work and manual time spent in pulling out this information or extracting the data from our exit interview questionnaires. How about time savings on this one? What did you get? Four hours every quarter. Because with with the time cost here, you know, if we saw an issue right offhand to where somebody submitted their exit interviews, like, oh, we gotta address this, you know, we could easily pull out that PDF and just send it directly to our CEO. But it came to a lot of time whenever we were doing these for our quarterly reporting.
And, yeah, easy four hours spent on just pulling out the various terminations or resignations, I'm sorry, that happened within the quarter. And, again, extracting the data, manually tallying and creating the charts, doing a very brief sentiment analysis, trying to which is just me reading and trying to determine the trends and then sending it over. So, yeah, easy four hours every quarter.
So that was a day spent, half a day spent on just trying to pull out this information to prep for the report that we had to provide to our CEO. Love it. So now walk us through how you created the automation and what it looks like now. Yeah. So the the great thing about Power Automate is it does allow you to copy existing flows that you have.
So I I started out with that with the exit interviews to where I I use that same formula, that same process when it came to the thirty days, but I found it wasn't quite as effective for me with the exit interviews. Because if you notice from that screenshot of the PDF, there's more options for people to select. There's more multi options that people could could click as far as the reason why they left or some of those factors that attributed to the resignation. So I found that whenever I initially did this flow, when the answers for those multi selection check boxes were being pushed into my list, it it didn't work out.
It was all jumbled together. I I couldn't figure out what was going on with it. So that's when I turned to Copilot.
I turned to chat GPT, these AI tools, because I was scratching my head. You know, I did some some googling from the Microsoft support side, and I found some information, but it didn't really answer what I needed to do in order to separate these reasons for separation out. And you may be able to see on your screen this first purple, the reason for separation. By using these AI tools, I essentially just told the system, like, I want you to act as a power automate specialist.
You are knowledgeable in all things Microsoft Power Platform, Power Automate, and I have some questions for you. And I I asked, you know, how can I separate these multi selection checkboxes out? And it gave me the response. It gave me what I needed to put into my power automate flow, what trigger, what action, and, that's where these little these purple pieces come in because it allowed me to set it up to where it, whenever it transferred over to my list, it had reason for separation being pay as a nice little circle icon and then another one for, you know, if they left because of family reasons or whatever the case is. Now looking at this one specifically, we're still going in that same that same aspect, that same mindset. You know, when a new response is submitted, we're gonna get those response details.
This reason for separation, it essentially just breaks up each reason into its own separate piece, Figuring out who in the world submitted this, we're going to create the item and list, get the supervisor, update that information. Again, initialize variables, that way we ensure that we have each of those, check boxes broken up into individual pieces. And get item is going to be how we're gonna send this information to the relevant individuals. Now if you notice, I don't have an email in here. Instead, I'm using Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Shop, we use Teams pretty frequently.
So we have two different messages that are being sent out, and these are happening in in tandem. So these are happening happening at the same time to where my HR director and supervisor, she will get notification when an exit interview is completed, and it includes a link to take her directly to that interview response. I'm gonna get one as well. And we also have a secondary that goes to our HR compliance specialist too. So that way she can review that information for her reporting because she is pulling the their data out so that way we can report on those each quarter.
So this is just, again, a very brief brief look, when it comes to, yeah, comes to that exit interview time savings or sorry, exit interview flow. Love it. We have a question here saying, can you share the code to power automate tool? I was gonna say connect with you on HR Heroes Slack channel. Is that the best way? Yeah. Absolutely. You'll find me there in HR Heroes. You can also at me, while in there, and my name should pull up, and I'd be happy, yeah, to send the information over to you.
And just a reminder, in the docs tab is where you can find the link to that HR heroes Slack channel. Cool. So let's talk about time savings again. Yeah.
So, easy, you know, we'll only spend about ninety minutes or saving ninety minutes every quarter here. This might should be a little bit higher actually now that I think about it because in reality, this process these days, the process takes about thirty to forty five minutes in total to export all of our exit interviews for a quarter into Excel or if you're familiar using Power BI as another tool too, run a quick analysis. And then we do have a word document that we're using as far as doing our reports for each quarter. So we just plug in that information.
Now if I was a little bit more knowledgeable on some DBA and some of those more macros within Word and Excel, I'm sure I could automate this down even further. But, I mean, going from forty minutes or sorry, four hours down to thirty minutes, you know, for these, I'd say we're looking at easy ninety minutes of savings every quarter and a good six hours every year. But, again, in reality, we have so much better access to this data than we did before, and the benefits to having this access are greater than the time savings, to be quite honest, because we can make those changes faster when we see them.
Nice. And Charlotte has a question. You know, let's say they didn't they weren't doing much of this at all, and then are is there some steps they could take in BambooHR to have some automations around this area? Of course. Sorry.
I didn't mean to cut you off there, but that was the first thing that came to mind. So approvals. Anything else? Any any additional information on approvals you'd give or just have them look that up? And I I would just encourage looking up, going to the, actually to HR the learning piece, the support for BambooHR and the learning, oh my goodness, functionality that you all have in the support side.
But even on that end too, I I feel that utilizing email alerts, pushing these into your onboarding tasks as well can be really beneficial. And that's how even with surveys. You know, you can pull SurveyMonkey, Microsoft forms, whatever survey tool you might use now.
Take the link, toss it into an onboarding task for your new hires. You could even set it up as a as a document or as esignature that you send out and they can copy and paste it in. I do feel that there are some some options out there even if you're not using the various, yeah, automation systems that are available. Because I know, again, cost times. That that also comes into play too.
Love it. K. I'm supposed to kick off this next section, but my screen, slides are here, so I'm gonna have you help me kick it off. Gotcha. Yeah. So, for this one, we wanna talk a little bit about employee notifications. So this is more so about reminding reminding employees about certain benefits, about utilizing time off, birthday time off.
You know? So we do have some of these various benefits that are available. Specifically, staff can take off for their birthday. During their birthday month, they get a free company paid day of ETO or earned time off. We also send out had to send out information about employee of the quarter, reminding staff to nominate their employees for employee the quarter, those coworkers, and also sending reminders about new job openings and employee referrals. You know, prior to setting up this automation we're gonna talk about, and these are all manual processes too. And again, with anything manual, remembering to go and send them out is is definitely a piece because we're spending a good amount of time.
All these emails, all these reminders, I mean, it was a time it it was using up a good amount of time before where these automations were implemented. You know, with employee of the quarter, we're spending probably two hours total every quarter. Time off reminders, easily, maybe an hour every every week, every other week.
Employer referral emails took up a lot of time as well. So, again, being a little little maybe conservative, we'll say two and a half hours every week as far as remembering to send out these notifications. And, again, instead of having to go in, remember what I need to send or just completely forgetting, I set up an automation. So similar to Yeah. Doing sorry. Michael. I was just gonna say, yeah.
Let's let's see the the what the automation looks like. And just as a heads up, we got, like, ten minutes left. So Yeah. Yeah.
So with these, we'll do it really quick. Wanna be mindful of our time for sure. You can set up instead of automated, and action based flows in Power Automate, you can set up recurrences as well. So, one of these is gonna be the employer referral and new opportunities that we have.
So set up a recurrence and send an email. Two steps. Easy peasy. On the parameters, you can set up how often you wanna send it. So for this one, I send it once a week on Mondays at seven thirty AM every single week.
Might get a little old, but, again, we're ensuring we're getting that information in front of the staff members. And, here's the email that we're sending. I can designate it to be sent to all users.
The subject is gonna be agency openings employee referral reminder. Give them the link, give them the information, save it, and send it. Now another good use for AI here, I had to use this because I honestly I don't know much, if anything, about HTML.
Don't know how to code, not my strong suit necessarily. So I did use AI and, these these chat chatbots in order to figure out how do I set this up so that way it doesn't look like a plain text email. And we do a lot of email security and phishing training here. So, I had ensured it actually looked okay. So I did use AI and asked, hey.
I need to send this email out to staff. Can you format this in a way and provide me with the HTML code that I would need to use so it looks good? And thankfully, it gave me exactly what I needed so it didn't look like a robot sent it out. And, this is the last little bit. You can actually send or designate who you send it from.
So I have it send as my email address. And if somebody replies to it, though, it gets sent over to our employment mailbox. So a group mailbox that both myself and my recruiting assistant have access to so we can each manage, any referral questions that come through. Now on one of the other, email, oh my goodness, automations that I have set up, I actually have the birthday ETO reminder set up as it's sent from our HR email address here at CCC. Granted, the first few times I got sent, I had a lot of questions questions asking if it was a phishing attempt because they had never seen the HR email address send an email before.
But now, again, every month, the beginning of the month, I send this email out reminding staff, hey. You have birthday ETO that's gonna be used. Be sure you use it or you do lose it. So this is just another one of those examples as far as sending out automation or using automations for those email alerts that might be without or outside of BambooHR.
Love it. So you got some more time savings here for us? Yeah. Two hours every week. I I think that's the the easiest way to put it.
We're we're sending it out automatically. I don't have to touch it. And the the the fun thing too is seeing, these e these emails come back to me if somebody replies and that is, oh, thanks for for sending out that reminder. You know, I I completely forgot until I got that.
Or even with the thirty days, having a supervisor email me and say, oh, thanks so much for sending me over this this list and the survey response. Yeah. You're welcome. You know, have a good day. But in my mind, I'm just thinking, yeah. Thank me probably, you know, two years ago or so, because I haven't touched that. I haven't had to to actually manually send those out.
So, yeah, I would say two hours every week and just having not having to remember to send out email notifications. What do you do with all your extra time? So always a word of caution. You know, when you free up work time, it is very easy for all that free time to be taken up by something else. But, you know, in reality, though, it does give me the opportunity to to do webinars like these, to be able to participate in the HR heroes Slack channel. But I think more importantly for me, it allows me to get home more quickly.
It it gives me that work life balance because this isn't just time saved at work, but time saved at home. That mental burden has been lifted with some of these projects, and I don't have to worry about sending that email. And I can focus on spending that time and having fun with my boys. So that's really important for me, but it does allow me to do other work projects too. As an example, back in June, I was able to host a conversation with some of our other clinicians and talk about men's mental health and, upload that to our company YouTube channel.
So, again, it saves that time, but it can easily be replaced by other things too. I hope Jake and the modules in this course overall have inspired you to explore all the ways AI can make your HR work even more impactful. And remember, the right way to use AI is whatever way works best for your processes and your company values and mission.
To get even more resources on how to grow your skills and support your business, check out BambooHR's AI resources. And if you wanna get more advice from Jake and other fellow HR pros, you can sign up through the HR heroes community page. Time for me to say goodbye and for you to make more HR magic happen.
Of all the cheap tricks… Ten easy magic tricks you can do at home. Okay. So first, you hide the coin. BambooHR's all in one software makes your life easier and helps you take your HR game to the next level. So be sure to check out our additional content and resources below.
2024-09-13 10:08
