AI Emerges as a Major Player in Restructuring HR Workloads
According to Eightfold AI’s 2022 annual Talent Survey, 78 percent of human resources departments in the United States use artificial intelligence to help them manage their employee records. Almost as high a percentage use AI to support recruiting, onboarding, payroll, and other key functions. Across the board, almost every HR department of any size in the U.S. plans to incorporate AI capabilities into its toolkit.
While the percentage of Kiwi companies using AI to power HR appears somewhat lower, it’s gaining traction.
According to the Human Resources Institute of New Zealand (HRNZ), based on a September 2023 survey of 100 member respondents, less than a third of NZ companies are deploying AI to any extent. The most common HR uses include analytics, processing the intake of CV materials, and creating staff development programs. However, as Datacom also reported in 2023, about 50 percent of all New Zealand’s CEOs over the 200 companies surveyed are using some form of AI in some fashion in their workplaces.
AI is certainly turning into a trusted assistant for more HR professionals worldwide every year, with talent acquisition one of the earliest — and today most widespread — applications of the technology. Making routine recruiting tasks move through the HR pipeline more efficiently is one of the premier use cases for AI.
A social media scanner
A good AI-powered application can parse information from LinkedIn and other professional social media sites to produce communications tailored to individual candidates, boosting positive engagement and increasing the chance of a response. AI can also create customized job descriptions and interview questions based on recruiter input.
LinkedIn supports several recruiting tools that can assist in building the best candidate pool. Based on recruiter input specifying the type of background desired at the granular level, AI can scour the platform in a fraction of the time it would take a human, identifying the most promising people to include in an outreach plan.
An in-house planner and organizer
Using AI’s ability to crunch data, HR professionals can also gather and analyze information comparing the success rates they’ve obtained through their various outreach efforts.
When it comes time to onboard successful job candidates, AI continues to aid recruiters in multiple ways. An AI program can help manage ongoing relationship-building with potential candidates and draw out actionable insights about past job performance, work preferences, and targeted training.
AI’s capacity to deliver real-time insights is also proving a game-changer for HR teams. Before AI, collecting data to focus on a particular problem could take months. So, by the time humans working at varying levels of proficiency had assembled their actionable intelligence, it was so out-of-date as to be hardly “actionable” at all.
With the AI systems now in place, talent acquisition professionals find themselves empowered to deliver timely solutions to pressing problems — and go on to build on those solutions. This is another sometimes overlooked contribution of AI to the HR landscape, in that this problem-solving efficiency translates into greater employee engagement, and thus to higher retention of the best employees.
Offering value-added employee experiences
The cost of inadequate communication and subpar onboarding is a big contributor to employee churn. It’s that turnover that ends up costing a company, not only in time, but in money: businesses likely spend about one-fifth of an exiting employee’s salary in replacing them.
AI can additionally generate insights into how to best align employee talents with job openings. Using an AI application, an HR professional can search across various metrics to see who among a company’s existing team might be the best fit for an upcoming vacancy. The right match there can open the door for a vacancy that can better be filled by outside talent.
With AI applications performing this array of front-line tasks, a talent acquisition professional can then devote more time to in-depth conversations with potential recruits. They can learn more about each prospective candidate’s strengths, task preferences, and training needs.
Some glaring — and well-publicized — early problems with replicating human bias in AI has put the onus on developers and HR teams to calibrate these applications better. Given a conscious emphasis on eliminating AI bias from the beginning, and staying alert for it as it may occur, recruiters have found that AI can serve as a solid partner in that regard. Resumés that may never previously have caught an HR team’s eye can now get the attention they deserve, opening new opportunities for candidates from under-represented backgrounds.
Interesting, too, is a recent Pew Research survey of U.S. respondents from the general public. Almost half said that AI offers an improvement on human recruiters in its ability to evaluate all resumés using equal criteria.
A support for small businesses
As number of companies have recently noted, AI offers as big an assist to small businesses as it does to large corporations. No longer does a sole proprietor or under-resourced founder have to feel strapped for time to interview, hire, and develop his or her team. With AI assistants accessible at a wide range of budget points, the owner of an emerging company can rest assured that their valuable time can be spent on the higher-level tasks while an automated system serves as the first line of organizational capacity.
