Artificial Intelligence’s direct disruption can be felt in two industries that start with the alphabet H. Healthcare and HR are the two industries where AI has shown significant impact with impressive results. While we have seen how AI is rapidly transforming the healthcare industry, let us take a look at some of the changes driven by AI in Human Resources (HR).
We have covered the impact of AI across industries at ai.nl, but businesses are quick to agree that HR function is one of the first to adopt AI technology. As a result, the HR department is often able to share insights and learnings to help other business functions to adopt AI. This is possible because AI helps HR to solve business challenges, attract and develop new skills, make effective budgets, and most importantly, improve employee experiences.
IBM also applied AI in HR first and says that the technology company saw AI being used for candidate attraction, hiring, learning, compensation, career management, and HR support. In this article, we will answer why AI is being used in HR and how AI can be adopted by companies to make HR functions efficient.
Why AI is being used in HR
AI should always be understood as an accelerator, meaning it offers the ability to learn from a variety of data and improve decision making. Even in the field of HR, AI has the same impact and can be used to augment business operations. Here are four reasons why AI is being implemented in the field of human resources:
- Solving business challenges: AI can be used by HR organisations to deliver new insights and services at scale without increase in cost or headcount. It can also be used to solve persistent challenges like allocation of financial resources or allocating people resources for business strategy.
- Attract and develop new skills: The business environment is changing rapidly and thus organisations need to be agile to stay ahead. This is possible only when they hire talent with the right skills or have the ability to develop employee skills with respect to change in industry demand. With AI applications, HR departments are able to focus on both attracting and developing new skills.
- Improve employee experience: An AI application can be trained to offer a personalised experience to each employee as opposed to a standard one. With employees now getting knowledge about their employer from services like Glassdoor, it is common for them to expect a differentiated experience when they enter the workplace. With AI, businesses can build different experiences for each of their employees when they come to work.
- Cost Efficiency: AI can also enable HR to become more efficient with its funding and drive the organisation to focus on value. This efficiency can also translate to HR solving complex problems, business challenges, developing strategic skills or creating positive work experience.
How AI is used in HR
AI is now being used in HR across the entire talent lifecycle. From using machine learning and natural language processing to screen resumes to hire the right candidate, AI can be seen at every major function within HR. However, AI is now also being used to develop the talent and help them grow in an organisation. Here is a look at six use cases for AI in HR right now.
- Attract candidate: AI is now being used in HR to identify high quality candidates even before job seekers applied for jobs. One of the ways candidate attraction is evolving is with the deployment of specialised chatbots. These chatbots offer candidates the opportunity to ask questions that are interpreted using NLP. Candidates are able to learn more about the organisation even before they apply while skill matching algorithms to match skills in a candidate’s profile with roles within the organisation.
- Effective recruitment: Recruiters often cite time as one of the constraints when filling roles. In order to effectively recruit talent across different roles, they need to prioritise those roles and also differentiate among candidates competing for the same role. An AI algorithm can be used to predict the time for job requisition and used to determine the match between a candidate’s resume and the job requisition. AI can also be used to predict future performance and help recruiters make the job inclusive.
- Engagement: HR organisations can use AI engagement analysis to analyse social media content from inside the company. The technology can analyse unstructured content from annual surveys and pulse surveys, even social media chatter. While such a program can analyse hundreds of thousands of comments, it is recommended that this functionality is implemented with adequate privacy and security protocols. AI can also be used to inform managers about their team members.
- Retention: For every HR, the biggest pain point in their job is employee retention. The ‘Great Resignation’ wave in the US was a good example of employees walking out the door even with factors like the pandemic squeezing the job market. AI can be used by HR to make compensation decisions using a wide range of factors such as performance, market rate for the skills, and demand for a particular skill. They can even use AI to predict whether to compensate in base pay or in bonuses. With impetus on skills, AI can be used to minimise chances of bias in the compensation process.
- Skill development: One of the challenges facing businesses right now is not only retaining their existing talent but also upskilling them for the future of work. AI can be used in the context of learning to accelerate skill development at individual level. From developing an open learning platform integrating employee and learning data from various sources to providing personalised learning recommendations and content channels, the opportunity is one where employers can make learning easily available when and where the employees need using AI.
- Career development: The role of a recruiter is not just to onboard an employee but also help them grow in their career with the organisation. Often called as career coaching, it is a tool to create a meaningful work experience for employees and can improve productivity. However, career coaching can be time intensive and expensive. AI can be used to develop a personalised career coach to bring the benefits of career coaching to every employee and with technologies like conversational AI and NLP, it is easier to implement.