If John F. Kennedy had been addressing the millennial crowd today and announced his goal of sending a person to the moon in 10 years, none of us would have been as shocked as those in 1961. If artificial intelligence had been known to mankind then, it would have opened doors to achieve such seemingly unimaginable feats. To create zero-accident-related motor vehicle deaths, researchers have seen the potential to manufacture driverless cars using AI. Another moon shot to eradicate diseases is to implement AI in healthcare. To hire new and upskill existing talents, companies are rethinking their talent strategies to include AI in HR. What could such moon shots be for medium to large-scale organizations? Well, a company might want to know the future skills that their people will need much before the demand for such skills becomes steep. Leaders might want to make data-driven decisions to do effective succession planning. The human resource team might want to know the non-tangible elements that increase workers’ productivity and improve the overall employee experience.
AI For More Competent Hires
For large companies that require careful shortlisting of candidates, a smart technology like AI can reduce vast amounts of time by interacting with candidates and sifting the best from the rest. Not just that, AI in HR can scan through each resume and predict the possible future outcomes such as duration of employment, people skills, best-fit roles, and future performance metrics. In a world filled with hiring managers with conscious and unconscious biases influencing hiring decisions, such an AI-enabled recruitment process can be an effective answer to workplaces aiming to be more inclusive and diverse. However, the AI needs to be fed clean, large and diverse data in order to reduce bias. Hiring managers must test the accuracy of it and only then implement such tools to make the hiring process more reliable and seamless. A suitable example would be Unilever who deployed HireVue AI-driven assessments and achieved £1M annual cost savings, a 90% reduction in time to hire, and a 16% increase in hiring diversity.
AI For New-Hire Inquiry Resolution
Most new hires tend to approach their hiring managers in the initial days in the talent acquisition (TA) team as they are clueless about the point of contact to answer critical inquiries. This is a phenomenon that almost every employee experiences during the first few weeks, leading to an additional burden on the TAs to handhold every candidate. Here come chatbots that resolve this challenge of now knowing whom to ask. Employees can pose queries regarding benefits, policies, allowances, and other company-wide programs and receive answers in real-time. The time thus saved by HRs can then be redirected to solve more complex issues. An example is IBM’s popular new hire chatbot. It is one of the busiest chatbots at IBM, answering 700 questions a day.
AI For Enhanced Learning Opportunities
Career coaching is one of the prerequisites for consistent employee motivation at the workplace. Incorporating an AI assistant can serve as a career advisor and can suggest personalized recommendations toward aspirational roles and responsibilities. Moreover, it can also help an employee or team track their L&D progress and send timely prompts to complete certain courses that have been undertaken.
Having invested AI in HR, tracking the return on investment on HR needs also needs to be a business imperative. HR leaders must establish the connection between AI applications and their expected ROI, even before the application/s is implemented. This is important so that organizations realize that AI is related to HR metrics which in turn is related to financial metrics. That said, it does not mean that companies should remove the human element from human resources all together. Adding the human touch makes addressing workplace stress and downtimes more bearable, something which AI is yet to catch up with.
