Industry Research - 3 Essentials for AI in HR Success and 3 Benefits You Can Look Forward to

Learn how to successfully apply AI in HR

New technologies can offer exciting benefits and competitive advantage for those willing to fully embrace them, but along with this potential comes a great deal of uncertainty: Where do I start? Will it work for me? What challenges should I expect?
 
By augmenting human decision-making, artificial intelligence (AI) technology can exponentially improve individual, team and organizational performance. And these potential benefits are far reaching, as AI can be used across a broad array of organizational functions, including human resources (HR).

Successful application of AI in HR requires some base level knowledge of how this technology works and how best to apply it. A simple primer can help you understand where to begin and what to expect on the journey.

New technologies can offer exciting benefits and competitive advantage for those willing to fully embrace them and put them to work. Artificial intelligence technology is no exception: with the potential to augment human capabilities and decision making and enhance individual, team and organizational performance, AI can help an organization compete at an unprecedented level. AI has applicability across a broad array of organizational functions, including human resources.
 
To help HR practitioners on their journey to AI, the IBM Smarter Workforce Institute turned to a true pioneer in this field, IBM’s HR function. Twenty senior HR executives who have been closely involved in AI adoption at IBM took part in carefully structured interviews to share their experiences and enable us to write this comprehensive guide to AI in HR adoption: The Business Case for AI in HR: With Insights and Tips on Getting Started.

Don’t start with the technology; instead start with the problem that is vexing your organization. And specifically, look for a problem that can be resolved with improved insight based on numerous sources of data. Once you have clarity on the challenge, ensure you have line-of-business sponsorship to champion the initiative and keep a focus on the desired outcome.
 

As is often the case when experimenting with something new, a pilot will help you test out AI technology and evaluate return on investment before embarking on an enterprise-wide adoption. The objective is to test out the viability of the AI application quickly, even if that’s on a small scale with limited functionality. A pilot might involve a business unit, a country, a practice, or a combination of all three. One AI application that is particularly well suited for a pilot is a chatbot, as they can be implemented quickly (in a matter of weeks).
 

Having the right skills on your team is essential for both developing and deploying AI. If you are developing your own AI, in addition to the necessary technical skills, you will also need people with knowledge of the business problem as well as HR domain expertise. This is critical for ensuring the proper use of people data, adherence to legislative requirements and an overall ethical approach to guide the implementation. For deployment of AI in HR, a key attribute for the HR team is “technical curiosity” – understanding how AI can be incorporated into the HR function, and asking questions such as who trained the models, what data were used for training the models, and whether differential outcomes are observed for different groups of people.

Understanding the potential benefits of AI in HR can help you identify the right technology to address your particular business challenge. From IBM HR’s experiences, we identified a number of key benefits, including the following:

Being a recruiter can be a challenge, with most organizations facing a shortage of talent and pressure to get the right talent on board and contributing quickly. AI can help by predicting how long a job requisition will take to fill based on historical data, allowing recruiters to reprioritize as needed. It can also be used to determine the match between a candidate’s resume and the job requisition, and to predict which candidates are most likely to perform successfully on the job.
 

The bigger your potential talent pool, the greater the chances of finding the right talent for your open jobs. However, engaging with large numbers of potential candidates, many of whom may not be right for your organization, is incredibly time consuming. AI chatbots can help.Interacting with a chatbot enables candidates to ask questions that are interpreted and responded to using natural language processing (NLP). Learning more about the organization before they actually apply means that candidates effectively self-select. From a recruiter and candidate perspective, AI enables better job matching and a better job search experience compared to more traditional approaches based on keyword searches.
 

Even the ideal hire is likely to benefit from skill development, and helping employees keep their skills up-to-date has become an imperative across nearly all industries and functions. But getting the right content to the right learner can be a challenge. In the past, finding content within a learning management system largely depended on how developers had described that content when they first uploaded it. AI tagging combines such metadata with other data from images, video and documents to help learners locate training content quickly, when they need it, facilitating knowledge retention and skill improvement.
 
To further your own skill development in the area of AI in HR, read the IBM Smarter Workforce Institute report, The Business Case for AI in HR: With Insights and Tips on Getting Started.

Sheri Feinzig is Director of the IBM Smarter Workforce Institute and Talent Management Consulting. She has over 20 years of experience in human resources research, organisational change management and business transformation. Sheri has a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology, has presented on numerous occasions at national conferences and has co-authored a number of manuscripts, publications and technical reports. She is an adjunct professor for New York University's Human Capital Analytics and Technology program and co-author of the book The Power of People: Learn How Successful Organizations Use Workforce Analytics To Improve Business Performance. Visit www.ibm.com Connect Sheri L. Feinzig Follow @s_feinzig