BetterUp Manage: Pioneering AI-Powered Platform For Leaders
BetterUp公司最近在其Uplift大会上推出了一个名为BetterUp Manage的领导力发展平台,这一平台采用人工智能驱动的评估和个性化学习方案,彻底改变了专业发展的途径。该平台具有高度的可扩展性和可定制性,能够与Workday、Oracle和SAP等主要系统无缝连接。BetterUp Manage不仅为领导者提供服务,也支持任何寻求发展专业能力的个人。通过整合最新的人工智能技术,BetterUp Manage为传统的领导力培训行业带来了革命性的变革。
这次大会中,BetterUp还邀请了英国的哈里王子Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex 和亚当·格兰特,哈里王子是BetterUp的首席影响官。。。
This week I attended the BetterUp Uplift conference and I really was impressed. This is a company that exploded into the market with an innovative coaching and employee wellbeing network built around an assessment called the “whole person model.” Through a set of shrewd marketing and sales strategies BetterUp established a leadership position in this market, growing to a billion dollar+ valuation.
This success encouraged many competitors to form and now the market for AI-enabled, targeted coaching is large and crowded (vendors include Torch, CoachHub, Growthspace, Sounding Board, Bravely, and a new breed of AI systems).
Essentially what BetterUp did was democratize business and professional coaching. Before this trend coaching was a rarified, expensive offering reserved for under-performing leaders or high-potential executives. Today, with BetterUp, anyone can go through a meaningful assessment, get assigned a relevant coach, and start a coaching session in minutes. The system is well designed and easy to use and BetterUp’s coaches are all trained (most of the coaching vendors use a lot of the same certified coaches – they are not BetterUp employees).
As a corporate solution, BetterUp goes much further. The data collected through assessments is available for analysis (anonymized) so companies can find pockets of stress in the organization. You can look at assessments by team (minimum of 10 people), tenure, level, and other factors. This lets companies like Chevron or Cisco understand the issues new employees or new managers have, for example.
In the last few years the company moved into wellbeing by offering a solution called BetterUp Care, which targets benefits buyers. But the more strategic and interesting offering is the new platform I saw this week, now named BetterUp Manage (it was originally called Connect).
BetterUp Manage is the first highly personalized, scalable management development platform I’ve seen. It brings together AI-enabled assessment, personalized learning, coaching, and AI-driven narrative support. It’s quite an impressive product, much of it was developed by the team at Motive, who was acquired by BetterUp in 2021.
BetterUp Manage is an out of the box personalized leadership development solution. And you don’t need to be a “leader” to use it. The system steps you through the Whole Person assessment, then asks you questions about the types of soft-skills issues you face (many specific scenarios), and then gives you a customized learning path, week by week, along with a professional coach.
Since it’s built on an AI platform there is very little manual work behind the scenes so it’s enormously scalable. Large companies will want to customize it and BetterUp is prepared for some of these requests. And the system connects to Workday, Oracle, SAP to automatically understand your role and level.
The reason I’m so excited is this: the management training industry is a confusing, messy, red ocean. There are thousands of consultants, coaches, books, courses, and executive education programs. L&D executives have to constantly build custom solutions, evaluate vendors, and hope that an offering will stick. This pure complexity, coupled with the fact that every company is unique, has led to many specialized leadership development firms (and some big ones like Franklin Covey).
So what most companies do is mix, match, and custom-build leadership solutions. And they’re not simple: we developed a model we call the 4-E’s to understand this: Education (courses), Experience (developmental assignments), Exposure (mentoring and coaching from leaders), and Environment (a company-wide focus on leadership values and behaviors). All these elements play a role in developing leadership skills.
Companies like IBM, Cisco, and Marriot can afford to custom build these solutions, but many companies don’t have the focus. BetterUp Manage is a way to personalize, scale, and democratize this solution and leverage the increasingly important role of AI.
I met Alexi Robichaux almost a decade ago and his passion and energy still drives the company. While BetterUp is a bigger company going through the growing pains of any $billion valued growth business, the culture and passion for clients is clear.
Remember that buying L&D solutions is not as simple as buying a product and turning it on. Every training solution, platform, or program you buy must be carefully aligned with your company’s culture and rolled out with care. Otherwise people simply say “another training program from corporate I can ignore.”
BetterUp, for all its startup-like innovations, has overcome this problem. Customers value the system, they get strong adoption from employees, and the company works hard to advise and consult.
It has always been interesting to me that very few content companies ever become very big (Skillsoft is the only one that never seems to stop). And the reason for this is simply the nichey, highly diversified needs of many industries and companies. BetterUp, as a platform-centered company delivering a high-touch solution, has the potential to break this paradigm. It has enormous potential, given the rapid acceleration of AI behind the scenes.
I consider BetterUp one of the “Trailblazers” I talk about with clients, and BetterUp Manage is definitely something to watch.
Oracle
2024年04月12日
Oracle
Will Chatbots Take Over HR Tech? Paradox Sets The Pace.在快速发展的人力资源技术领域,Paradox.ai 已成为领跑者,其先进的对话式人工智能平台彻底改变了招聘流程。通过利用自然语言处理和人工智能,Paradox.ai 提供了一个全面的解决方案,涵盖了从最初的职位申请到入职的整个招聘过程。该平台不仅简化了筛选和面试安排等繁琐流程,还提升了应聘者的整体体验,显著改善了招聘时间和招聘质量指标。
Paradox.ai 由亚伦-马托斯(Aaron Matos)于 2016 年创立,目前为联合利华、CVS Health 和通用汽车等大客户提供服务,实现了 90% 以上的招聘流程自动化。
Paradox.ai 凭借其强大的集成能力和大幅缩短招聘时间、降低招聘成本的能力,在人力资源技术领域充分体现了对话式人工智能的变革力量。
Chatbots used to be tinker-toys. You type, try to get help, but usually result in “please call support.” Well all this has changed.
Thanks to advanced NLP (natural language processing) and AI (retrieval-augmented generation) chatbots are entire applications. They can answer complex questions, search databases, and invoke transactions on your behalf.
Pretty soon we’ll be able to ask our phones “please find me a flight to Los Angeles next Tuesday morning” and the system will check your location and calendar, look at flights, and book you a seat.
Where is this going in HR? Well the leader in this space is Paradox.ai, a company that pioneered the application of conversational AI in recruiting. And their system “defines the category.”
Let me explain.
Recruiting Is The Perfect Market For Conversational AI
Recruiting is a goldmine for automation. When you post a job, applicants want to ask many predictable things: “How much does it pay?” “What are the hours?” or “What uniform do I need” or “What are the benefits?”
The recruiter, a person devoted to filling positions, has to answer all these questions and more. They have to screen candidates, schedule interviews, check for qualifications, and look at credentials, experience, and more. It’s time-consuming, error-prone, and filled with wasted time. (That’s why talent acquisition teams have many “scheduler” and admins.)
The average “time to hire” is over 45 days and often the process goes on for months. And throughout the experience the job seeker is left wondering “when will they call back” or “what else do I need to know?”
(CEOs cite hiring as the third most time-wasting process in companies, following emails and meetings, estimated at “40% wasted time.”)
Paradox uses Conversational AI to solve this problem. And because this is a “narrow but deep” space, the system does many things we can learn from in all our AI efforts.
Paradox was founded by Aaron Matos in 2016. Aaron’s vision was to transform the candidate experience, revolutionizing the way candidates apply to jobs. Today Paradox has become a complete Conversational AI Recruitment Platform (chat to apply, scheduling, candidate support, ATS, assessments, onboarding, career site, and more), serving clients like Unilever, CVS Health, Pfizer, L’Oreal, Nestle, McDonald’s FedEx, Compass Group, Disney, and General Motors.
The platform automates tasks such as screening for requirements, interview scheduling, reminders, offers, and new hire onboarding. And because it’s so easy to use, it helps companies radically improves time-to-hire and quality of hire. Based on my conversations with clients, Paradox can automate more than 90% of the end-to-end hiring process, saving hiring managers hours every week and increasing candidate conversion by more than 10 times.
But this innovation did not happen overnight. As you know, going to a candidate website and looking for a job is a frustrating process. There are often hundreds of jobs listed, a complex scrolling website and very hard to even determine what job to apply for.
You might argue that the website paradigm for job applications was never really a good idea in the first place. People don’t want to browse for jobs: they want to apply for a job that’s best for them. So the first thing Paradox did was create an easy to use assistant (Olivia) so candidates could ask questions and schedule interviews. And this meant that Paradox had to build integrations with every ATS and personal email and calendar tools out there.
Then, as companies started to use Paradox for scheduling, the company added more. Today Olivia, the chatbot, can integrate with background check vendors, schedule interviews, deliver assessments (Paradox acquired a conversational assessment Traitify designed for this), and function as an ATS … all from a mobile phone. In many ways Paradox can be “the integration platform” for candidates and recruiters, stitching together the messy systems behind the scenes.
This turned into a massive opportunity. Just as the Google Assistant or Siri hopes to be our single contact with the internet, Paradox partners with systems of record like Workday, SAP, and Oracle to bring conversational AI to any company. The company’s revenues have grown 11 times in the last four years, and are now nearly doubling each year.
For customers Paradox has been amazing. As the candidate pipeline speeds up (by an order of magnitude), clients get higher quality candidates with dramatically reduced staff. (Staffing administrators can almost go away.)
Consider high-volume hiring companies. These businesses (McDonald’s, Compass Group, Neighborly, FedEx, Disney) hire service-related workers on a regular basis. Their revenue is dependent on having enough people. With Paradox they can set up a “continuous recruitment process,” one that even hires people the same day they apply.
Paradox has become essential to these companies growth, often paying for itself in less than a year (through reduced hiring staff, reduced spend on job ads, and reduced turnover.)
Today, as Paradox built out its ATS, customers can rely on the platform to integrate front end tool (job portals and candidate support) to back end tools scheduling, ATS, onboarding) most of which are legacy. One of our clients has 27 recruiting tools and they anticipate replacing more than half of them with a platform like Paradox.
What about higher level white collar roles? Paradox works here too. General Motors uses Paradox along with Workday (ATS), (branded Evie) to redesign the process.
Interview Scheduling: Evie automates scheduling of phone screens and interviews between recruiters, candidates, and internal teams. This has reduced the time taken for interview scheduling from an average of five days to 29 minutes.
Candidate Experience: Evie interacts with candidates from the moment they land on GM’s career site until the completion of their interview. Candidates appreciate the immediate communication from Evie after they apply or complete an interview, and enjoy the autonomy to select and change interview times.
Efficiency and Cost Savings: The automation of interview scheduling has led to a major reduction in the cost of external contractors for coordination.
Career Site Interaction: Evie sits on GM’s career site, answering questions from potential candidates about jobs, benefits, and company culture. This interaction enhances the candidate’s experience and provides them with immediate responses to their queries.
Where Is Paradox Going
The company is perfectly positioned to continue its growth as companies look for AI solutions to improve the productivity and effectiveness of recruiting. And demand is high: the 2024 PwC CEO survey found that recruiting was considered the #3 “most bureaucratic process” by CEOs (following email and meetings).
The impact on recruiters? All positive. Clients tell us they can redeploy hiring staff to help recruiters focus on the most important part of their job: talking with candidates.
But there’s a much bigger story. When a job candidate is handled efficiently and effectively the process becomes a brand-builder for the candidate, improving quality of hire. Ambitious job seekers will not put up with (or wait for) a messy, confusing hiring process. So not only is the process faster and more efficient, the quality of hire goes up.
Companies are desperately looking for AI solutions that work. As Paradox has proven, when you focus deeply on the problem, conversational AI can be transformational.
Listen to my conversation with Adam Godson (CEO) and you’ll hear the details. This is where the HR Tech market is going.