Why HR Teams Need AI and Automation to Scale New Challenges

Automation can save costs, improve decision-making, and deliver a superior employee experience. When combined with AI and Machine Learning, HR Automation could make way for a more human-centric employee value proposition in an organization. In today’s hyper-computing scenario, AI integration into human resources (HR) practices could build organizations better because these applications will analyze, predict and diagnose to assist HR teams to build better decisions.

AI’s influences could be felt across the entire HR space. It is already used to automate business processes, enhance potency, and reduce bias among different things.  In fact, McKinsey’s latest forecast of AI’s impact on the global economy is that it’ll generate $13 trillion in economic activity across the globe by 2030.

In a recent survey, PwC found 72% of executives believe AI can provide sizeable business benefits within the near future.  In another survey from IBM, 66% of CEOs believe AI will drive vital value in HR.  Some are already exploring those opportunities.

Advanced technology is speedily transforming the means businesses used to work. In this competitive atmosphere, where organizations are striving hard to be the most popular choice, adopting digital transformation to automatize, streamline and create the informed data-driven decision is imperative. With the availability of giant information and sources to store and process information, it is now possible to use data insights for multiple applications.

HR Technology News:  Altus Power Announces Appointment Of Melissa Boulan As Chief People Officer

Why HR teams need AI and Automation?

In addition to data-driven insights and predictive analysis for deciding, AI can enhance the candidate and employee expertise by automating repetitive tasks and streamlining the processes. It will free up HR from mundane administrative tasks, difficult excel sheets, and paperwork.

According to Gartner, hyper-automation and total experience are top trends that every HR Technology manager should keep in mind.

The saved time may be utilized in additional productive activities of building relationships with clients, employees, candidates and focus on strategies. In fact, to deal with times like COVID -19, organizations became open to adopting AI-backed HR tech solutions to boost the productivity and performance of the function.

Here are a number of some cases of AI in HR-

Talent Acquisition

According to the 2019 artificial intelligence in the Recruiting industry benchmark report of CEIPAL, SaaS supplier of staffing firms – two-thirds of all staffing corporations can adopt AI-driven ATS by the end of 2020, whereas 79% of enterprise staffing corporations (firms with more than 100 recruiters) can have done the same.

• AI can automatize the screening efforts of recruiters and find the best match from a pool of many candidate’s applications received through the one-click Apply button. It will rank qualified candidates on high based on a matching algorithm for resumes with data points from the job description or pre-screening questionnaire scores. Applicant Tracking System (ATS) backed with AI, ranks the potential candidates with high match scores for the recruiter’s manual reviews and saves on time by disabling irrelevant applications. Data Scientists recommend that ML models like Latent semantic analysis may be used to discover the similarity between two documents i.e. resume and job description through keyword match/similarity scores.

• AI will help to identify passive candidates who may show interest if reached out by the analysis of social media and online information associated with prospective candidates which can include information points like education, social media post, experience, skillset, recommendations, etc. The response of a candidate can be predicted by data scientists using artificial neural networks and Regression i.e. probability between zero to one. The best source/channel of applications for open requisition can also be identified.

Learning & Development (L&D)

With the new normal post-COVID-19 setting in, L&D has become the highest most priority of organizations for upskilling, reskilling, cross-functional skilling, and continuous learning of its employees to make them relevant in the uncertain future ahead. It’s intended toward building a holistic ‘Personal, Precise, and Proactive’ approach for employees.

How AI work in L&D?

• AI in combination with an effective Learning Management System (LMS) can help to create personalized learning tracks for employees based on their talent set needs.
• AI chatbots can be integrated into LMS which may answer questions 24×7 and provide real times automatic assistance during a training program. It can also list out training courses based on employee’s interests, skill gaps, or queries to form an enhanced learning experience.
• AI also can facilitate identifying and recommending a training program for an employee by analyzing ratings provided by similar types of employees to different training programs and choose the programs that a specific employee might like. Data scientists recommend the User item recommendation technique of ML using deep learning and word embedding for desired outcomes. It works on the same concept as in E-commerce/Netflix by generating recommendations of products/services to customers/viewers using ML. Training course recommendation is based on the highest predicted ratings that staff may provide to each of the courses not taken.

HR Technology News: TresVista Announces Well-Being Initiatives For Supporting Employees And Their Families Amidst COVID-19

Employee Engagement & Retention

Automation is a huge enabler in the employee engagement and retention cycle. Employee engagement is considered an important factor that drives employee productivity and retention.

• This can be increased through automatic virtual assistance for self-service employees. Whenever employees have any queries around policies and procedure for advantages, insurance, leaves, reimbursements, etc. they don’t need to write or ask HR but can refer the chatbots /virtual assistant instantly for human-like communication.AI backed chatbots have the ability to understand the natural language queries from employees and map them to document/guide of that various topic in form of direct links or short answers. This too may work on the similarity score concept of the Latent semantic Analysis technique of ML. this can prove extraordinarily useful in case of repetitive queries or FAQs and save time for employees as well HR.

• AI could also help HR practitioners track the pulse of employees through sentiment analysis via internal communication platforms like employee engagement survey feedback, chatbots, or internal post on any of the topics associated with work. The text used can be an indicator to assess whether the content of the message is positive, negative, or neutral. It will act as an alert just in case of low levels of employee engagement or motivation which could cause attrition and needs to be immediately addressed. It’s just like a natural language process technique.

Automation

• The streamlining and automation of the workflows facilitate reducing the time and cost. The repetitive and high-volume administrative tasks will be performed by AI tools leaving HR to concentrate on building meaningful engagement and relationships with employees and candidates. It also permits HR to boost its role as a strategic business partner than just transactional activities.
• AI-enabled automatic communication will help to disseminate needed information like policy changes, internal announcements, etc. among employees in no time.
• ATS backed by AI will facilitate the generation of automated messages based on the status of candidates and communicate identical to candidates and hiring managers thereby reducing the workload of recruiters. It can also automate the scheduling of interviews, send feedback on the status of candidature in the recruitment process.

Conclusion

Whether AI will replace humans with human resources function will be too huge an announcement to form today.

Let’s be clear about one thing: AI is a facilitator, not an entire solution.

AI, when used responsibly, will facilitate to give data-driven insights which coupled with human interventions will provide optimum solutions. The massive amount of input used for AI should be properly kept and managed as it has sensitive employee personal data which is usually kept private and confidential. The automation, operational analysis, and predictive analysis provided by AI techniques can definitely facilitate to increase productivity and performance of hr function, and contribute to enhancing its role as a strategic partner in a company.

HR Technology News: Benefitfocus Launches Series Of Workshops Focused On “State Of Employee Benefits”

[To share your insights, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]