NOVEMBER 20189As AR and VR technology goes through the technology maturation and adoption curves they will become less expensive, more adaptable and their uses will grow manifoldphysical aspects such as absence of gravity, sandiness of the surface, and lunar winds and more.Augmented reality, as the name suggests, takes the virtual reality or actual environment a step fur-ther by super imposing on the us-er's view, a composite image that the user can use to gain information about the environment. Think as-tronauts landing on the moon and their helmet overlaying a map of the landing site with directions to the exploration site, negating the need for the astronauts to carry bulky maps and manuals.Now back to planet earth and planet HR. The area where technology is most disrupting HR and seeing the most investment dollars is recruitment. AR and VR have huge implications for recruitment. On college campus-es and at job fairs, organizations are differentiating themselves by offering students the opportunity to experience the workplace by allowing them to interact with their office space using Virtual reality. Users can interact with the space from the comfort of their cam-puses, they can change the elevation view of the build-ing, choose which part the office to look at and feel first, be it the work spaces, fitness area or networking spaces and even leave comments as to what was missing and what they would like to see more of. Organizations can then use the sequence of exploration and time spent on each area to determine the candidates preferences.Some companies are even offering candidates the opportunity to experience team meetings and custom-er interactions using virtual reality to give them a sense of organizational culture and job expectations. Again, the employer can use information from the interac-tion to gauge the prospective candidates' fitment to their culture.Gamification of the recruitment and selection process is not new, but gamification is being rendered to be more effective by the use of AR and VR. There are products available in the market that allows potential re-cruits to go through a virtual reality based sales interaction with a po-tential customer. AR then over lays a choice of responses that a candidate can choose for a given situation, triggering a chain of further inter-action with the customer. At the end of the exercise, HR has valuable in-formation about the candidates critical thinking, emo-tional quotient and people skillsThe examples above can be extrapolated to numer-ous employee training and development use cases, with or without gamification. AR and VR have been used for years for training personnel for operating expensive equipment. Examples are flight simulators for pilots and augmented reality based schematic over lays for the control panel at nuclear power plants, reducing costs for the organization and the risks to workers.These applications can be extended to more knowl-edge based industries and the training and develop-ment of their personnel by enhancing the case study and hackathon evaluation approaches to make them more real, interactive and fun for the employee, while proving real time feedback and coaching.Leadership effectiveness and coaching can be made more effective by launching applications that allow the feedback provider or coach to click on the employee's name, there by launching not just a picture or live vid-eo of the employee , but performance and preference related information in large readable blurbs alongside on the screen, allowing the coach to provide more relevant and focused coaching, even virtually and ne-gating the need for them to toggle between screens or applications. As AR and VR technology goes through the technol-ogy maturation and adoption curves they will become less expensive, more adaptable and their uses will grow manifold. Again, it is difficult to imagine that there will be any facet of HR that will remain untouched and un-affected. The only limitation will be our creativity and openness to embracing the change. The Question now remains are, we as HR professionals ready and equipped to take on the change? Gaurav Saini
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