Artificial Intelligence in HR
Artificial Intelligence is all about creating smart algorithms that mimic the human brain and make use of data to reach logical decisions, provide insights and predictions.
AI is playing a significant role in the field of Human Resources. HR deals with building, maintaining, and improving human relationships in organization. The constant need for human touch in each of the HR processes make way for the implementation of AI. AI is revolutionizing how recruitments are done, training is imparted, and data is used to derive people analytics. It is helping HR professionals smartly automate repetitive actions while allowing them with the bandwidth to focus on more strategic tasks that need human intervention.
“AI is an accelerator – it allows us the ability to ingest a variety of data and provide context to a decision-maker or employee or business leader. It allows us to deliver the right intelligence in the moment and achieve Personalization at scale.” Tom Stachura, Vice President Talent Solutions & People Analytics, IBM.
Some Interesting Stats:
Gartner reported in 2017 that AI will automate 1.8 million people out of work by 2020. While most people made a fuss about the number of jobs lost due to automation, they failed to note the point that the same report also mentioned that AI will help create 2.3 million jobs by the same year. That’s an addition of 500,000 new jobs.
A study by McKinsey in 2017 revealed that just 5% of US jobs could be automated fully, and that around 60% could be partially automated. The point is, AI is not going to eliminate the human workforce. Of course, many tasks will be automated and many will get redundant, but a future-ready workforce will thrive in the end. The human intervention will always be required at the end of the funnel. Human work is only going to be more productive with the assistance of AI.
Now that AI has already made its way into the HR technology space, let’s see how it is reinventing HR Tech for good.
5 Ways Artificial Intelligence is Reinventing HR Tech
1. Cognitive-supporting Decision-making
IBM surveyed around 6000 executives in 2017 and came out with the report “Extending expertise: How cognitive computing is transforming HR and the employee experience.” An important pick from the study was that 66% of CEOs believed that cognitive computing could drive significant value in HR. More than 50% of HR executives seconded with this. 54% of them believed that cognitive computing will influence key HR roles.
IBM proved the point by demonstrating how cognitive engines could actually help professionals arrive at key day-to-day decisions in the organization easily. Tasks such as determining the mood of an employee before and after a client call can be assessed and it could be decided if s/he needs a break or is fine to continue. AI could also help detect anxiety in the tone of the employee for the employers to look into the depth of the matter and resolve it before it harms the well-being of the staff or the organization. This is just one example; Human Resources can utilize similar capabilities to take care of a lot more such aspects.
Companies have been collecting customer and employee data for many years. But even though they have understood what to make of customer data to quite an extent, it’s not the same with employee data. With customer data, organizations can understand trends, gain insights, and predict future consumer behaviors. But sadly, HR teams are still in a fix as to what to track and how to use the information to arrive at insights. AI will help gather insightful data for the HR departments to make data-driven, intelligent decisions.
2. Enhancing the Recruitment Process and Time-to-hire
We are still very far from the goal of making the entire recruitment process devoid of human touch. But Artificial Intelligence has gone a long way towards making the process faster and simpler and no one is even thinking of completely automating the recruiting cycle.
52% of recruiters say screening candidates from a large applicant pool is the toughest part of recruitment. An AI-enabled program comes in handy when the recruiters and HR professionals need to go through and filter candidates out from a stack of hundreds and thousands of resumes. Recruiters can make use of AI to carry out labor market analysis, skills matching, competency identification, and bias detection in job descriptions. AI will keep biases from entering the hiring process at any instance. Furthermore, HR executives can use chatbots to communicate with candidates before scheduling interviews and provide answers to their common queries. This cuts down a lot of time and efforts and reduces time-to-hire.
The introduction of AI in the recruitment process has positively affected the candidate experience and recruiter efficiency at the same time.
3. More Efficient Training and Development
Any organization needs to keep its workforce updated with the latest skills and expertise in order to thrive in the ever-changing digital landscape. With AI by the side, training and development methodologies have modernized considerably.
Companies can employ AI in conjunction with AR and VR to train their staff and stay ahead of the competition. HR teams can personalize training content as per the individual requirements of the employees. This is a win-win situation for both the employees and the organizations which further contributes to positive employee experience and job satisfaction.
4. Voice of the Employee Analytics
Gartner says Voice of Employee (VoE) analytics is going to be a key area that will interest modern HR departments. HR leaders from across the globe want to improve the way they monitor employee engagement. For instance, companies can analyze survey data, or social media behavior of its employees to check their positive or negative sentiments towards certain aspects of their workplaces. For instance, if employees are talking about long working hours, companies can take necessary measures to look into this and prevent employees from further developing negative emotions because of this.
So, other than getting information from surveys, firms can utilize several other communication channels too. VoE platforms use AI technologies that employ a variety of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and textual analysis techniques to study sentiment and get insights from text-based answers. This is going to be a major tool for HR departments in the days to come.
5. Employee Retention
Artificial Intelligence has the capability to completely transform how the HR department functions. Whether it is about recruiting, employee engagement, communication, talent management, benefits assessment, training and learning, AI is making a mark everywhere.
In addition, AI can also assist with employee retention. It can detect the possibilities of employees leaving the firm by checking information related to pay-scale, employee experience, attrition rate, time in role, performance, etc. It can understand from their browsing patterns, outgoing e-mails, and keystrokes if they are looking out for opportunities. This makes way for HR teams to look into the possible causes of employees leaving, and take preventive measures to avoid that happening. Employee retention is a problem for 57% of companies, and implementing AI in their HR functions would surely help the cause to a great extent.
While AI will cut the mundane tasks out of the HR operations, more and more tech-savvy professionals would be needed to supervise the acts. AI systems may be good enough to carry out the tasks, but they would not be able to think outside of the box and make intelligent decisions.