By now, every company is eager to utilize AI in their business processes to augment sales, marketing, customer service, and more. But can AI help in human resources (HR)? “Human” is part of the name, after all.
With the rate of AI development, decision-makers and investors seem to think so: the generative AI in HR market was $413.1 million in 2022 and is expected to grow to $1.67 billion by 2032. Businesses are finding ways to improve their HR processes with AI, and expect there to be growth opportunities for years to come.
So how exactly does HR benefit from AI? There are four concrete areas where AI can help HR professionals succeed.
- Recruiting and Hiring
Though this is treated as one HR function, there are two ways AI can help HR in recruiting: creating job postings and filtering through applications.
First off, a generative AI writing tool can help recruiters quickly produce job descriptions with industry- and skill-specific details. It can sometimes be an issue if a job listing is made by an HR recruiter without technical knowledge, resulting in a superficial job listing with nebulous details that attract the wrong type of recruit. An AI can draw upon previous job applications and combine them with company details to create a comprehensive job application using the right keywords to attract qualified candidates.
But once HR has attracted dozens of qualified applicants, how are they supposed to comb through each one and find the best candidate? Especially for more popular jobs in tech fields, companies only have a brief window of time before an amazing applicant is snatched up by a competing company.
By integrating AI into your HR department’s applicant tracking software (ATS) and teaching it what a qualified resume looks like, your AI can then screen applicant resumes en masse to find the most promising candidates instantly. This saves HR employees time and stress, allowing them to expedite the hiring process.
Of course, even if AI can help your recruiters write job descriptions or find candidates, it’s still best practice to reach out to the candidate personally and show them due respect. If you’re not sure how to write a cold email to a potential hire, here are some examples of how you can create personalized and attractive cold emails.
- Learning and Development
Another area where generative AI can help a company is by helping HR professionals develop custom learning and development programs and training materials for employees.
Each person is different, and each employee has different skill sets, learning styles, and difficulties when it comes to developing their abilities. While the optimal way to train employees is to create customized training programs, most companies can’t afford the time and personnel needed to have an HR employee personally oversee a single employee’s training. As such, companies tend to rely on one-size-fits-all training seminars or group classes, or simply pay for the employee to take a training course somewhere else.
With generative AI, HR can simply prompt the AI with the employee’s skills and struggles, and receive a tailored, detailed training program in return. Better yet, the employee can use the AI to receive more or less detail or change up their training, customizing it on the fly depending on how effective it is so far. The AI can also fill in for a teacher, providing definitions and answering questions to help employees learn new topics.
- Cost-Cutting
On a larger company-wide scale, AI in HR cuts company costs by automating simple and repetitive tasks, such as sending small emails or memos and collating information into a summarized brief. As we mentioned earlier, AI can also greatly speed up the hiring process and training and development program implementation.
This saves HR employees precious time, which they can then use to focus on more high-level strategic issues. As fewer HR employees are needed for the same quality of work, a company can then reduce the number of HR personnel on staff, reducing the company’s labor expenses.
- Removing Bias
Finally, implementing AI in the recruiting, hiring, and training processes can help HR departments overcome and eliminate implicit biases and stereotypes.
Human HR recruiters may have internal prejudices against certain genders, ethnicities, races, or religions that may taint their perception of an applicant or employee. Even if they’re not consciously aware of these prejudices, they can still manifest in decisions or comments that unfairly affect employees. In the long term, this may prevent diversity in the company’s employee body, or cause distrust in the HR department as a whole.
On the other hand, as a machine, an AI doesn’t have any of those implicit biases. By comparing their judgment to the AI’s, an HR recruiter can check their own bias in the hiring process, and offer the same level of care and consideration for all employees.
Employees may also feel more comfortable revealing their innermost thoughts and feelings to a computer that offers no judgment or criticism, meaning that AI chatbots could also serve as confidants to help improve employee mental health.
Rather than investing in human-run DEI training programs, it seems that generative AI might be a means to the same end, on top of all its other perks.
Conclusion
If you’re a business owner or HR manager, you might be weary about implementing AI into your HR processes. But there’s no need to fear. Instead, AI can improve and uplift a company’s HR operations by automating the recruiting and hiring processes, providing customized learning and development programs, cutting costs in HR, and removing bias. With careful application, your business can seamlessly integrate AI and HR to help both HR employees and other workers thrive.