AR Transforming HR

[Note:This is an excerpt from my newsletter AR Business Week. If you like you can see the entire newsletter here.]

The first time I heard about using AR or VR to improve traditional HR remains the best.

Just over a year ago, the Golden State Warriors were competing heavily to recruit basketball superstar Kevin Durant. They wanted to do something different than other teams competing for Durant, so they turned to NextVRto create an immersive video showing the superstar a glimpse of life in the San Francisco Bay Area and gave him a tour of the Warriors facilities where the coach and fellow team members greeted him and talked about life as a team member.

I can’t say that is everything that did the job, since there were also millions of dollars being offered, but when I asked Kenny S. Lauer, Warriors vice president for digital and marketing, he told me, “It definitely helped. It was a way of showing Kevin that we all really wanted him and what it would be like. He was impressed.”

Sexy Recruiter

 Last week, I saw a close runner-up to the Warriors-Durant example. Instead of using immersive technology to attract a single superstar, Jaguar Land Rover partnered with Gorillaz, a very hip British female garage band to recruit 1000 talented, next-generation automotive engineers, even though it is mostly being viewed as an old-fashioned 2D YouTube.

The star is Noodle, the oh-so-sexy lead guitarist. Attired in business suit for the video, rather than her usually outlandish outfits, , Noodle stares into the eyes of beholders and defies them to “take the challenge,” of cracking code in the Gorillaz app. Those who succeed in the computer hacking challenge, will be fast-tracked into an automotive engineering job at Jaguar Land Rover.

The catch is that neither Noodle, nor the other band members are real. They are virtual, and the defiant stare into the eye of the viewer is coming from an unseeing virtual eye, which is difficult to discern at first glance.

This may not be as cool as netting a superstar, but it is a very clever way to attract the best and brightest of the next generation of automotive engineers, or so it seems to me.

I started asking around on social media for more examples of AR and VR being used to modernize HR, particularly in three key areas: recruiting new staff, on-boarding recent hires and training them once on board. I didn’t expect much, because like most folks I talked to, I don’t generally regard HR as a fountainhead for experimentation in disruptive technologies.

 I was surprised to find that there is a good deal happening, at least in HR, but mostly in special situations.

Hazardous Conditions

Andrew Gadomski is managing director of Aspen Advisors, a New York City-based consulting group that tracks large-scale talent recruiting, very often in categories where the work is under conditions that may be more daunting than recruits realize, such as mining, repairing suspension bridges or oil rig work. For clients, the HR problem is hiring applicants who really think they want the job until they actually get a taste of working 600 feet under below sunlight, or hovering that high above cold and treacherous waters on a steel cable. 

 Companies often recruit people, fly them many miles to show them a work site, and let them see a standard video that shows what a typical workday looks like. They get hired, employers invest in training them and then a few weeks later, after time and money is invested, a large number of new hires quit in their first 90 days of employment, after discovering the very real physical and mental challenges.

Barminco, an Australian mining company uses AR and VR in this way, but they also use VR to train employees in safety practices for the hazardous work they will face. ENI, an Italian energy company has a similar VR clip for oil rig workers as well.

In these cases, the employers want to warn recruits of the real difficulties ahead, and the standard Typical Day videos paint pictures of a rosier situation than reality will provide. So mining, energy and construction companies bring out recruits, put them in headsets and give them a real sense of the impact of working and great depths, heights or in the danger and isolation of an oil rig.

Andrew pointed to several companies who have been enjoying great success in recruiting. For example, the US Navy has to recruit about 100,000 new sailors annually. It is important that those who sign up understand what it is like to be submerged for days in a submarine, fired upon in a river gunboat or take a hostile beach at midnight.

To watch the VR clip here, Navy trainees wear headsets with stereoscopic sound that emulates gunfire, the whir of chopper blades overhead and the sound of being near a helicopter while mortar fire blasts from the shore. They wear haptic vests that let them virtually feel the weight of a pack and the feel of firing automatic weapons at virtual enemies.

While each of these examples seem exciting to me, I also think they are previews of what recruiting, on-boarding and training will look like in the near future. The use of AR and VR to train sailors on enemy-infested rivers is not unlike the way warehouse workers may be trained to manage logistics in more efficient ways. In fact some of this has already happened. They way Barminco is using AR to teach safety to miners is similar to the way Caterpillar is training factory workers to avoid dangers.

Likewise, I see the day coming soon when AR training is used to help all sorts of service, construction, logistics, repairs and medical personnel in the same way the BMW mechanic shown here is being helped to conduct a new repair for a car engine. It is similar to the way AR is used by Boeing to prevent mistakes in wiring the inside of airplane wings.

Into the Mainstream

But the question remains, how soon will everyday HR people start using AR and VR as regularly as they use the Typical Day videos today? I see this as far more than novel. Such practices will create better trained, more efficient, safer work forces. They are also likely to improve customer service and employee retention.

But how soon will such practices be in the mainstream? For that answer, I turned to Tom Haak, director of HR Trend Institute, a global HR think tank and consultancy. He told me that at conferences and among the Institute’s 25,000 monthly visitors, he is sensing a heightening interest, sufficient enough for the Institute to be building an online community to discuss tech such as AR/VR.

Elsewhere this may not be a big deal, but it is new and different in HR. Traditionally, he told me, HR departments are slow on the tech uptake, in part because HR cultures are not usually prone to experimentation. HR tech is more involved with traditional stack from companies like Oracle or SAP.

But now — like everywhere else that I am looking — HR sees that change is imminent, spurred by the likelihood that in just a few months Apple will enable 300 million people to use AR, making the emerging technology a promising tool for recruitment, on-boarding and learning. This is particularly important to recruiters who are entrusted to attract younger employees who are likely to hang out increasingly in AR/VR.

He’s right of course. I remember speaking to an executive from the San Jose Mercury around 2007. He conceded to me that Help Wanted ads were “going through a tough patch,” and blamed it on outsourcing of jobs to India. He denied the possibility that his paper was being hurt by a start up called LinkedIn.

The future is closer than many HR people may realize. To recruit, they will need to go where the people they wish to attract hang out. To train effectively they will need to use the most effective technology, and if they want to portray a typical day, then they need to immerse candidates, before they submerge them, send them up bridges, down mine shafts, or let them understand they won’t have much privacy in their cubicles