Why Slack is the AI-powered platform for work for Salesforce HR teams

Across industries, the competition for talent is fierce. According to Gartner’s 2024 Human Resources Priority Survey, 26% of CEOs say that a talent shortage is the most damaging factor to a business’s outlook. Human resource departments must work quickly and collaboratively to not only attract and onboard talented workers but also to retain them.

Even with the best people in place, HR teams are only as effective as the tools that they use to keep their processes running smoothly. That’s why Salesforce HR professionals use Slack to support the workforce at every stage of the employee journey, from recruiting and onboarding to keeping tenured workers satisfied and motivated.

‘Slack helps employees to find the information they need on their own, which is what all HR teams want, because that leads to more productivity,’ said Kim Strashovskiy, vice president of people services at Salesforce. ‘When it’s easy to be productive, the more satisfied and engaged employees will be, increasing their likelihood of staying and excelling within the organisation.’

Here’s a look at how Salesforce HR teams use Slack as their AI-powered platform for work, setting employees up to do the best work of their lives.

Put the hiring process into hyperdrive with channel-based collaboration

HR teams across Salesforce primarily use Slack channels to collaborate. A channel is a single space to share files and messages with everyone on a team, and they can be created for any project, topic and department.

‘Within human resources, there’s a tendency for teams to become siloed because of the different types of work and the different tools we use,’ said Sheima Mojtahedi, a recruiting solutions consultant senior manager at Salesforce. ‘Slack channels help us to stay connected because we can give quick updates and share resources in one specific place. Since channels make it easy to search through previous conversations, Slack is my personal knowledge base.’

For conversations involving confidential topics, recruiters rely on private channels. The only people who can access or find its contents in search are those who are invited into the channel. Recruiting teams, for example, use private Slack channels to communicate with hiring managers about everything from pay bands to interview logistics.

Salesforce teams often work with external agencies to source and screen candidates. Before adopting Slack, teams communicated with these agencies by email, which slowed down hiring processes and increased the risk of losing top talent to competitors. Slack Connect speeds up communication with these partners by creating a secure connection between Salesforce and external teams to access their best tools and collaborate in real time in Slack.

This set-up means that channel members can view all the conversations within that channel, eliminating the need to forward emails or search through cluttered inboxes. Faster and more organised communication with agencies leads to a more efficient hiring process, smoothing the way for Salesforce HR teams to secure top talent quickly. In fact, 87% of Slack customers said that Slack helps them to efficiently collaborate as a team and 65% said it has improved their ability to make decisions, according to Slack’s FY25Q1 Customer Tracking Survey.

Simplify and speed up HR processes

Salesforce recruiters rely on multiple tools to do their job, but constantly switching from app to app can derail productivity. Slack keeps people focused on work by bringing your best tools into the platform. There are more than 2,600 integrations available in the Slack App Directory that teams can instantly plug into their Slack workspaces. When HR teams bring information from tools such as Workday and Beamery Grow directly into Slack, it means fewer steps in the hiring process.

Salesforce HR teams speed up routine processes with a no-code automation tool that anyone can use: Workflow Builder. Workflows can be created to manage and organise a wide range of tasks in Slack, including:

• Sharing information with new teammates
• Submitting leave requests for approval
• Filing support tickets
• Asking for feedback from colleagues
• Facilitating Q&A sessions

Now Salesforce employees can organise tasks like these with Slack Lists. Lists convert conversations in project channels and direct messages into actionable steps. HR specialists can use this feature to make sure that no details are overlooked, all while working within Slack. When you can organise and respond to notifications in one place, you work faster with more focus.

When having a conversation is helpful to move work along, HR employees can replace the time it takes to schedule a check-in with teammates with Slack huddles. A huddle is a quick, informal audio or video chat that you can start from any Slack channel or direct message. Huddles also allow multi-person screen sharing, a dedicated thread for notes and emoji reactions. And if HR colleagues don’t have time for a huddle, they can catch up with Slack clips – short audio and video recordings that can be created and shared within Slack channels and direct messages.

Slack’s features have helped Salesforce HR teams to improve communication and work more efficiently, so they can spend less time on administrative tasks and context switching and more time hitting their growth goals and supporting employees across the company. And it’s not just Salesforce teams that are benefitting – on average, Slack increases employee productivity by 36%, according to Salesforce’s FY24 Customer Success Metrics.

Help new hires excel with a white-glove onboarding experience

Employees who are properly onboarded become more productive in less time. The Society for Human Resource Management reports that effective onboarding increases employee productivity by 50%. Workers who understand their roles and responsibilities can immediately contribute to their company’s goals.

That’s why HR support doesn’t end once a new hire joins Salesforce, as Jenny Simmons, vice president of onboarding and learning at Salesforce, knows. Her team is focused on managing the training and professional development resources for each worker throughout their employee journey.

‘We ensure that our employees are set up for success when they get started, whether they’re hired or acquired or promoted to a new role,’ Simmons said. ‘Slack is a big part of this work because we coordinate across a lot of different teams at Salesforce to make that onboarding happen smoothly.’

Within the first days of joining Salesforce, new hires are automatically added to Salesforce community channels so that they can actively participate in company culture and get the information they need to continue learning and growing. For example, the #broadcast-us channel is the single source of truth for US Salesforce employees to get updates on their benefits; and the #salesforce-marketing-celebrates channel serves as a hub where members post photos from team gatherings, advertise job openings and celebrate work anniversaries, which promotes a sense of community and engagement across the organisation.

Ensure long-term success for hires with an AI-powered help desk

At many organisations, it’s typical for an employee’s engagement with HR to taper off after onboarding. However, HR needs can arise at any time for employees. When HR documentation is scattered across different systems managed by various teams, employees waste time hunting down information.

These frustrating scenarios can be avoided with Slack AI – a set of generative AI tools that customers can purchase. Slack AI’s search answers speed up the time that it takes employees to find the information that they need by generating clear, personalised answers with citations whenever someone types a conversational question in search. It’s like having a savvy assistant who can sift through the full archive of your company’s knowledge and conversation history in seconds. According to Slack’s Customer Tracking Survey, regular users of Slack AI save 77 minutes per week.

Search comes in handy when trying to find Slack canvases, for example, that contain helpful content for employees, such as links to videos, workflows, files and channels. Salesforce HR teams curate, collaborate and share information in canvases about frequently asked employee questions, ‌such as paid leave policies.

As an enterprise grows, it needs an AI-powered platform for work that helps to accommodate an increasing number of employees, and integrates with thousands of tools and systems. Find out how Slack can support remarkable recruiting and a collaborative company culture at your organisation. Contact our sales team today.