E019 - Revolutionizing Employee Onboarding: A Tech Pioneer's Vision (w/ Tarek Kamil)

Join Erin Rice from Process Street in an insightful episode of the Employee Onboarding Podcast, featuring Tarek Kamil, CEO of Circle. 

This episode focuses on how AI and technology are transforming employee onboarding and enhancing workplace experiences. 

Tarek shares his journey in tackling employee engagement challenges and discusses the role of personalized onboarding. The conversation also touches on the future implications of AI in the workplace. 

This episode offers valuable perspectives for HR professionals and those interested in the intersection of technology and employee engagement.

Transcript

Erin Rice (00:00.878)

Welcome to the Employee Onboarding Podcast where we are unpacking great onboarding ideas and best practices from the world's top HR practitioners and thought leaders. At Process Street, that starts with our mission to make recurring work fun, fast, and faultless for teams everywhere. My name is Erin Rice, and I'm the People and Operations Coordinator here at Process Street. Today, I'm joined by Tarek Kamil. Tarek is a visionary entrepreneur recognized for his dynamic leadership and pioneering contributions to the tech industry.

He currently holds the position of CEO and founder at Circle, a groundbreaking platform designed to revolutionize the employee experience through the integration of unified communication, automation, and artificial intelligence. Tarek's entrepreneurial journey began with a keen awareness of the growing challenges posed by the ever expanding array of challenges and content directed at employees, which inspired him to create Circle.

Tariq is celebrated as an award-winning speaker, sharing his insights and expertise at prestigious events and conferences. His ability to inspire and educate audience underscores his stature as a thought leader in the tech industry. Wow, thank you so much for joining us today, Tariq.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (01:17.552)

I don't know who made that up for you, but if you can send me their Venmo, I will get them $20 because that sounded amazing. So thank you.

Erin Rice (01:26.958)

Yeah, well, you have a really great background and honestly probably could have spent a good five minutes sharing about all your accomplishments. So we're so excited to have you here.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (01:35.96)

to be here. I love this topic so yeah let's dive in.

Erin Rice (01:39.994)

Awesome. So before we dive in, I like to ask a silly question, you know, just to break the ice a bit. And around process street pizza has been a really big topic, which I hear you're a big fan of. So I have to know, do you like your pizza folded? Are you more of a fork and knife kind of guy?

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (01:57.496)

I love pizza so much and there's no way I could be patient enough to use utensils. So it is fold and get it in as fast as humanly possible. So definitely a fold guy. Thin crust. Hot. Although, I won't complain about temperature. So if it's left over the next day, that's fine too. Anything with pizza, I'm in. I love it all.

Erin Rice (02:00.302)

I'm sorry.

Erin Rice (02:25.682)

Awesome, so like thin, really large slice, New York style with the bubbles on top. I'm here for it, I'm here for it. Absolutely. Well, now what we really came here for employee onboarding. So I'd love if you could start off by sharing a little bit about how a passion for technology kind of evolved in your life.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (02:31.31)

Yes, yes, yes. You're making me hungry right now, Aaron.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (02:47.696)

Oh, it's been since as long as I can remember, honestly. I started writing software when I was really young, 12-ish. And it's this like, to an artist, it would be a blank canvas. So when I see a computer screen, it's blank. And the only thing that's limiting you is your imagination. You can go in and create anything. And I just found this to be fascinating that

You sit there, you think, you envision something, and then you bring it to life, and the problem solving involved with that. So this is just, fell in love with it at an early age and really never stopped. So that's been probably the single common thread in my career is how do you use technology to make the world a better place?

Erin Rice (03:38.166)

That's such a good thought. And that sort of brings me to my next question that AI is all the buzz. And a lot of what AI is bringing to the world is some concern. And maybe a little bit of nervousness around it sort of taking over. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (03:57.28)

I think, uh, it's like anything new.

in the beginning.

we're learning. Any new technology we are learning. Same thing, right? When we went from horse and buggy to automobiles, I think most people would say that was a good move for us. But in the beginning, I'm sure people were dying and people are getting run over and things exploding. So there's always learning in the beginning. And I think with AI, which has been around for a while, but it has really accelerated into

kind of every crevice of society recently, I would say within the last year, to a level we've never seen it before. And the level of sophistication that CHAT GPT and others are now producing is phenomenal and unlike anything we've ever seen before. So I would say in general, I think it's going to be super positive for humanity. I think...

the negatives and what I would worry about in the beginning is misuse, right? You've seen all the things and the headlines around propaganda and changing election outcomes through misinformation. Well, this is only going to skyrocket that. The other issue that I worry about with this is...

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (05:29.652)

introducing things that are factually incorrect, where it, because it can just regurgitate what it's been taught. So if it thinks this is true, it's going to regurgitate that. And the problem with that is people take that misinformation and then they post it online. So you get this very cyclical effect of misinformation becoming fact faster than it has

So without putting some guardrails on this, yes, I think there could be some pretty nasty, negative consequences, but like everything else, the automobile was eventually worth it.

Erin Rice (06:13.43)

Yeah, for sure. So how do you sort of see AI playing a role in employee onboarding?

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (06:22.248)

So we do a lot of that today. We've been talking about and using AI from the beginning. So this is really 2013. So 10 years ago, my idea was a lot of the work that's done within organizations is very manual. It's very choppy, it's very siloed. And it is more about the person generating the process or the communication, not about the recipient of that. How does it make me feel?

And so how can we use technology to personalize that experience? And so when you think about onboarding, a lot of what happens with organizations is they really do a good job of the employee employer brand. So through kind of talent attraction and how they market themselves and how great it's going to be to work here. And then the employee.

right, gets the job, the candidate gets the job, becomes an employee, well, here is your first real opportunity to show that's really who we are. And so a lot of times they say, we're really innovative and it's all about you, and then the person gets hired and it is not about them at all. It's a horrific process, it's slow, it's a lot of paperwork, it's cumbersome.

Erin Rice (07:43.106)

Ha ha

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (07:50.368)

And so we've just lost trust with that person. We've said, this is who we are, but the first time, you know, we talk about the words versus actions. What you put on your candidate attraction website are words. What you do are the actions. Actions are who you really are.

And so when we think about how could we make this better?

There's so many ways. The first thing we need to do is be able to tailor that experience to that individual, meet them where they are. So things like, I know you're gonna be working remote, right, maybe most of the employees are in Atlanta and you're in Cincinnati, awesome. How do we make them feel part of this throughout the entire onboarding process? How do we let them know?

how do we make sure that they're receiving the right information at the right time? Right, to that individual, the idea of mass onboarding is going to be like mass communication. It's not effective. It really misses the mark. The problem with personalized onboarding, or personalized anything, is really hard to scale. So I always like to give super...

simple examples because I'm super simple. So that's how my brain works. But if it was just me and you, so we start a company and we hire one person. It's easy to onboard them because there's two of us, there's one of them, we've got them out number. It's like parents and children. There's only one of them. So it's easy. We can manage that, take them to lunch. We walk them.

Erin Rice (09:22.232)

Thank you.

Erin Rice (09:39.292)

Right.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (09:44.784)

through, here's what we know, here's what we don't know, here's your role, ask us questions. That is hyper-personalized onboarding. That does not scale at all. Once you start getting above three, four, even five employees, this does not, it breaks down. You don't have the time to do this. We don't have the time to really learn about what their interests are and their career aspirations and we don't know what they know and what they don't know. It becomes very difficult.

That is where AI fills the gap. We know personalization is the answer. Hyper-personalized anything is always the best. The problem it introduces does not scale at all. Okay, AI fills the gap. That is how you deliver both. So personalization at scale.

Erin Rice (10:40.118)

makes perfect sense and then with the automation and all the tools out there, it really does help you streamline those recurring tasks.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (10:51.18)

In theory, yes. If it's done, I mean, that's what everybody's looking for. But ideally, if you fulfill your employer brand promise out of the gate, you now get another checkbox in the they are who they say they are column. And I'm sure there's research out there. The more you trust your employer, the more likely you are to stay. And the cost of attrition is very high.

Erin Rice (10:52.438)

Hahaha

Erin Rice (10:56.482)

Yeah.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (11:19.968)

So out of the gate, you cannot fail here. It is, I think, much more important, this employer onboarding process, than most organizations understand.

Erin Rice (11:32.906)

Yeah, for sure. Can you give us some examples of how maybe your company has integrated AI into some of those tasks to scale?

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (11:42.112)

Yeah, so we have a platform called Broadcast, and it's really more about how do you deliver a modern employee experience, modern employee communication, modern employee engagement throughout an organization. So how we think about it would be the idea of most onboarding or any communication is we kind of send something to you. A lot of it's email-based. So there's so many problems with that.

It's immediately outdated. What if you're not on the distribution lists? All of it. You're sending to a super congested channel and PS, this new generation entering our workforce, they're not big fans of email. They just didn't grow up with it, right? So as we bring younger employees into our ecosystem, this becomes a bigger and bigger problem. The way we always did it,

Erin Rice (12:27.087)

Yeah.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (12:39.816)

is not the way we should always do it going forward. So how we think about it would be.

let's let AI do the work. So we're going to give it the building blocks of onboarding. So what I mean by that is you might have pieces of content, let's say, that everyone needs to see. I don't care what your role is. I don't care your location. You need to know, get the welcome message from the CEO. Everyone gets that, regardless. And then maybe we have content that

hyper-specific to you by job function. Great. And that's all going to live in a library. We have content that's hyper-specific to a location. Oh, we see that you're in Cincinnati. Here's deals and discounts we get in and around Cincinnati, even though all your colleagues are in Atlanta. Well, that would be cool, right? That should come to me because I'm in Cincinnati. I should get other content that comes to me because.

of my job function, I should get content that comes to everyone, benefits related content. But the power of AI is to just give it the building blocks and let it build the experience. So as the person's coming through, we have attributes attached to that individual. Who you are, where you live, who you report to, what your job function is, all of it. Well, it should be polling.

appropriate pieces of content based on those attributes and build a hyper-personalized onboarding experience, meaning content that's delivered to that person in the channel of their choice. Who says it has to be an email? Maybe they want that to be delivered on the internet or Teams or Slack or mobile. Like that's just how people expect to consume information today. So...

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (14:38.296)

Kind of sum all that up, I would say the building blocks, the ingredients of this beautiful onboarding experience would be it is super tailored to me, it scales, it's built by, in this case, AI, and I can consume it in the channel of my choice. So we're not overly dependent on email. And if they want email, that's great, but.

For those that don't and they want to live in Teams or Slack or somewhere else, we should be able to deliver it there as well.

Erin Rice (15:12.734)

Yeah, and not only, I don't know if I shared this, but I have a long history in education. And so the other thing that I'm hearing you sort of tiptoe around is like learning style. Like some people don't learn by reading an employee hen book that's 25,000 pages long. Like a lot, none of us learn that way really, right? And so using AI, I know we can dump that information and turn it into a video or turn it into a song or turn it into a thousand and one other.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (15:29.36)

I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Erin Rice (15:41.794)

pieces of content that could be consumed in the way that individual needs to consume information to actually retain it.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (15:49.48)

That's exactly right. And there's a time and place. So even if we deliver it to someone based on some linear process of it's day three and they should get this because they're ready for it, they might not be ready for it. That's not personalized. And that's okay. Could there be triggers that indicate based on something that you've done, you are now ready for the next thing? Sure, just like personalized learning.

Why are we advancing to the next chapter in math if Erin's not there yet, right? She doesn't, hasn't really mastered long division. Why are we moving to the next chapter? Because it, you know, it's what they always tell you and they scare you to death in school is it builds on top of itself. You can't fall behind. Onboarding is very similar. And so could there be trigger points to say based on something you've done, something you've checked, that you're ready for the next thing?

We feed it to you when you're ready, versus us making some guess, day three, they should get X. Who says it's day three? What for you it might be day one? For me it might be day five. All of that is around this idea of getting to know that person and letting them be an active participant in the process.

Erin Rice (17:11.378)

Yeah, I'm curious how you think that personalized onboarding with the support of AI will impact their sort of ramp period and their ability to contribute.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (17:24.976)

Wow, I think that's a great question. I think if organizations understood the math of getting people to productivity faster, 5% faster, 10%, 30%, massive savings to your bottom line, is they're doing work more quickly. And it's the same thing. I love that you mentioned your background in education. It's the same thing.

Trying to put all students on the same path doesn't make any sense. They don't learn the same way. They need different times to absorb different things. So we should let them, and again, same reason education doesn't scale because we try to do mass. If it was personalized, we could let people go at their own pace. So I think you will see increases in time to productivity. I think the more important metric is retention.

If you measured what is the retention rate of employees that have been with us for six months or a year or whatever, what percentage of them stay to five years? My guess is if this was their first experience with you and it was all tailored, that your retention would increase dramatically. Those cost savings are probably even more significant than productivity.

Erin Rice (18:52.658)

Yeah, I would definitely say that's true, especially the time to hire in the man hours, because a lot of the hiring process can be automated and a lot of it can't be.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (19:02.201)

Mm-hmm.

Yes, that's right. 100%.

Erin Rice (19:07.798)

That's interesting. So taking a step back from, you know, before we hire this individual, um, we talk a lot about like pre onboarding and what that looks like. How do you feel AI plays a part into the pre onboarding before that offer is made?

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (19:25.496)

I think it's all connected. I think, oh. I think it's all connected. So as people are asking questions, as people are setting up interviews, as they're getting feedback based on different stages they are in the interview process, how do we interact with them? How do we deliver that communication? Who's involved? How do we synthesize what we're learning about someone? And...

Erin Rice (19:27.071)

Sure I understand.

same.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (19:55.06)

Almost just as importantly, do you know through AI what successful employees in that role even look like? You should, right? We can gather all this data, we can understand, these are the characteristics of people that have been in this role prior, and they have been unbelievably successful. Maybe they've moved on to other roles within our organization. So the idea of even having to guess

what's important in this role, we shouldn't be guessing. We have real data that you can use AI and other technologies to set the goal. This is what it looks like. And we could even prioritize for this role, I need you to be strong in problem solving. That's number one. Then communication, then collaboration, then whatever. We could even weight them based on actual employees that have been in our organization.

So there's so much opportunity to kind of revamp all these different areas within an organization around people, all the way from talent attraction to engagement to retention, really the whole life cycle.

Erin Rice (21:13.694)

Yeah, definitely. We talk about case studies with clients, obviously, as a software company. But internally, we talk about them as well with top contributors and what that profile looks like and what makes them successful. And AI plays a big part in that and to help determine that. There's a lot of tools out there that help us be successful in that area. That's really great information.

So I know we're getting close to time. I have one question that I like to end with. What would you say is one thing that a company can do to create a wow moment for their new hires to help them get that buy-in and really be a part of the business from day one?

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (21:59.596)

So that is a great question. I think if it were me, it's wow comes from something I did not expect and I Don't know how this would scale But I think it would be not your boss Taking you to lunch or coffee or whatever kind of expect that I think it would be

someone in the organization that maybe was in your role and has become successful. So to be able to say, Susan was in this role and now she's a VP, she started her career here. Susan wants to take you to lunch to talk about her career path. That would be a wow moment for me, that they're so connected to me and they're setting this vision of where I could go here.

And you probably will get a mentor out of that interaction as well. But Susan probably, sadly, doesn't even know that I've started. So that's where you really want to wow. And this could be a situation where 2 plus 2 equals 5. That would be a wow moment.

Erin Rice (23:17.162)

I love that, thinking about that inspiration and not just that day, but also next week, or in two months, or in six months where I'm like scratching my head, did I make the right decision? All of those times that relationship would be impactful.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (23:29.43)

Yes.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (23:33.836)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And these are low-hanging fruit things. It's just like if people really understood the value of these little changes to process, I think they have such a big impact, but somebody has to kind of own that and want to make it better.

Erin Rice (23:55.006)

Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Well, Tarek, this was amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. And yeah, we wish you all the best with your company circle.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (24:01.289)

Oh, you're welcome.

Tarek Kamil | Cerkl (24:06.404)

Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on, and it was great to meet you.