HR Jobs AI Says It Can Do (And Which Ones It Shouldn’t)
May 1, 2023
6:00 AM
By OrgChart Team
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series by OrgChart, focused on how human resources professionals and leaders leverage artificial intelligence. View the full series here.
The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in human resources (HR) has led to a major shift in the traditional HR landscape, bringing significant opportunities for improved efficiency and decision-making, along with notable challenges and risks. As AI continues to permeate HR functions, it’s essential to be aware of the safest uses of this technology and the riskier practices that HR professionals need to approach with caution.
AI has made inroads into various industries, and HR is no exception. AI presents tremendous opportunities for HR professionals to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and generate actionable insights from vast data. Yet, it is essential to recognize that AI should assist human decision-making, not as a replacement.
In this article, we’ll explore several HR jobs that AI can perform effectively and highlight areas where human intervention is crucial, providing a roadmap for the responsible and strategic use of AI in HR.
First, let’s dive into the HR jobs AI is already doing.
AI offers several safe applications in HR, including automation of administrative tasks, people analytics, learning and development, and employee wellbeing. AI can enhance efficiency and decision-making without significant risks in these areas, provided that data privacy and ethical considerations are duly followed.
Automation of Administrative Tasks: AI excels at performing routine, mundane tasks, freeing up time for HR professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives. With AI, you can automate tasks such as scheduling meetings, sorting resumes, or processing leave requests can be automated safely without compromising employee privacy or security.
People Analytics: AI-driven data analysis can provide valuable insights into employee performance, engagement, and attrition trends. When conducted with a clear framework for data privacy and ethical considerations, this use of AI is a safe and effective tool for strategic decision‑making.
Learning and Development: AI can personalize employee learning paths based on their roles, performance, and career aspirations. AI can safely enhance training effectiveness and employee growth by carefully managing data and respecting privacy.
Employee Wellbeing: AI can aggregate and analyze data to identify stress patterns, workload issues, and other factors impacting employee wellbeing. Ensuring anonymity and privacy in this process can help maintain a safe environment.
Riskiest Ways HR Pros Are Using AI
While AI presents notable opportunities, HR professionals need to be cautious about specific uses of AI, such as decision-making in hiring and promotions, performance evaluations, employee surveillance, and predictive analysis of employee behavior. These applications can result in unintended biases, privacy invasion, and ethical issues if not properly regulated.
Decision-making in Hiring and Promotion: While AI can help sort through applications and identify qualified candidates, relying solely on AI for hiring and promotion decisions can lead to unintended biases and discrimination if not correctly managed.
Performance Evaluations: AI systems can analyze productivity data to evaluate employee performance, but these systems risk missing nuances in employee behavior and output, leading to inaccurate assessments.
Employee Surveillance: AI tools can track employee activities for performance management or security purposes. However, such practices can lead to privacy invasion and ethical issues if not carefully regulated.
Predictive Analysis for Employee Behavior: Predicting employee behavior, such as the potential for leaving the company or the likelihood of success in a new role, can be fraught with ethical and privacy concerns. Handle these predictions carefully to avoid unfairly influencing decisions about an individual’s career.
Recruiting and Hiring: AI, specifically conversational AI like ChatGPT, can assist with writing job descriptions, resume screening, answering candidate questions, scheduling interviews, and drafting interview questions. In talent acquisition, the initial phase often includes routine tasks that AI can handle effectively, thus making HR professionals more efficient.
Employee Onboarding: AI can help HR teams provide new hires with information on company practices, policies, benefits, and procedures. It can facilitate parts of the onboarding process, such as identifying necessary and helpful documents and ensuring compliance, thus reducing the manual workload on HR teams.
Employee Engagement: AI can help craft and analyze pulse surveys and other feedback mechanisms — especially summarizing replies to open-ended questions — offering HR teams critical data points about employee sentiment and engagement.
Performance Evaluation: AI can help with the preparation and analysis of performance reviews, aid in collecting feedback from colleagues, and help with defining and refining goals, making the process more efficient.
Training and Development: AI can assist in developing training materials, answering employee questions, and managing career progression. It can act as a teacher’s aide, ensuring your training curriculum covers employees’ needs based on their roles and trajectory.
Compliance and Policy: AI can help HR by analyzing company policies and compliance requirements to identify gaps, which can often be mundane and time-consuming for human HR personnel but is necessary nonetheless.
HR Data Management: AI is excellent at data analytics. It can help HR professionals organize and assess data more efficiently and effectively, with the assistance of the human touch to protect data privacy.
Despite the robust capabilities of AI, it is essential to recognize the areas where the human touch is irreplaceable.
Jobs AI Shouldn’t Fully Handle
Talent Acquisition and Employee Onboarding: While AI can handle administrative processes and aid in crafting inclusive, professional messaging, human interaction is crucial in relationship building. HR professionals should maintain relationships in such a way as to ensure employees and candidates feel welcome and included.
Employee Engagement: HR professionals should follow up on surveys and feedback. Once AI has provided the necessary data points, HR can consult AI to determine the strategies for action based on these insights but should ultimately make the decisions with the right humans in the conversation.
Performance Evaluation: AI can aid in the initial stages of performance reviews and in crafting helpful, professional positioning around improvement areas, but the follow-up and guidance require human delivery to provide the mentorship and training employees need.
Training and Development: While AI can help craft a curriculum, the in-depth learning, simulations, and advanced training you conduct require human involvement to ensure a comprehensive understanding and check learners’ application of essential concepts.
Employee Assistance: While AI can provide resources and basic support, human interaction is essential when dealing with sensitive matters such as mental health. Human empathy and understanding are crucial here — while HR pros may use AI to assist in messaging, nothing replaces the human touch when employees need assistance.
Diversity and Inclusion: With strong prompts, AI can assist with developing diversity and inclusion programs, but it cannot fully grasp the nuanced understanding required to foster a truly inclusive environment. Every staff member must be behind these initiatives for them to succeed.
Artificial intelligence holds significant potential to transform human resources, making processes more efficient and data-driven. However, it is crucial to strike a balance between leveraging AI and maintaining the human touch that is inherent to HR. The future of HR lies not in replacing the human element, but we hope HR automation tools aid in creating an HR function that is efficient, inclusive, and above all, centered around the human experience.
