After more than 30 years of research, generative AI is a reality. We’re witnessing a rapid development of generative AI-powered tools and it’s changing what we know about AI in HR and the ways we attract, hire, and retain talent.
Here are five ideas to consider and keep top of mind as generative AI integrates with HR.
- Career and professional development. Career growth and retaining top talent has taken on a new level of urgency due to ongoing candidate shortages, skills gaps, and employee turnover. Generative AI has the highest potential in supercharging the space of learning and development. Companies are recognizing the value of on-the-job training and upskilling because there aren’t enough candidates that fit the strict criteria of skills and experience required for many jobs today. Tools, like generative AI, will allow companies to upskill a new hire quickly and inexpensively. Generative AI can also assist with career path planning. By using information about a person’s educational and professional background, current skill set, and desired next steps, it can provide a comprehensive development plan, such as suggesting curriculum, skills to learn, and references to educational content. Career development will be able to start before the new hire’s first day. When a new employee comes onboard, they will already have a clear path to acquiring the necessary skills and a broader picture of possible career trajectories within the organization.
- Sourcing and attraction. Chatbots are already offered by many career sites, but they’re limited to a few topics like available job openings, job application processes, and general information about the company. Generative AI will turn career sites into an engaging and interactive experience, akin only to being helped by a human recruiter with an unlimited time for answering a candidate’s questions. These new chatbots will not only help to engage more candidates and compel them to apply but will also better qualify them and prepare them for the job application process. AI can also be used to create more compelling job descriptions (a significant factor in attracting the right talent.) Yet, most job postings are bland, indistinguishable from others, and not targeted to a specific audience. Generative AI can take this unremarkable blurb—along with additional company and role information—and turn it into a much more compelling narrative. Plus, it can be targeted to relevant audiences. But keep in mind, everything with AI requires a level of review and validation from your people.
- Behavioral testing. Unlike hard skills and cognitive abilities, personality and behavioral assessments typically don’t have clear right or wrong answers. Generative AI can still be smart enough to understand this context and provide better results. For example, a personality assessment based on a boilerplate competency model could be easily “cracked” by generative AI. But the more advanced and less obvious the personality tools are, the harder they are to game. Personality models created by narrow AI learn from specific quantifiable KPIs rather than qualitative inputs, and the result of this learning is usually much more complex and impossible to guess by just reading a job description. Other advantages to a narrow AI approach include high predictive accuracy and low likelihood of biases.
- Screening and assessments. Technology vendors that incorporate AI must work diligently to control for bias and must be able to demonstrate why their no-bias guarantee can be trusted for things such as resume screening, skill testing, personality testing, and more. Ironically, AI detection could be the most needed contribution of AI regarding candidate screening, i.e., detecting if a candidate response is nothing more than a machine.
- Interviewing. The job of an interview is to establish a human-to-human connection. A good recruitment workflow should be geared toward using an automated, accurate, and unbiased tool for early vetting of candidates, reserving the interview step only for those who were identified as a good fit through this process. An entire interview process conducted by a bot continues to be a thing of sci-fi. But some aspects of a job interview can benefit with the help of AI:
- Interview questions. By providing the necessary context to an AI tool (like role, important competencies, seniority of candidates) interviewers will be able to get a lot of useful ideas about what to ask their candidates in an interview.
- Post-interview follow-up. AI can provide ideas about handling the response to different post-interview situations.
- Offer negotiations.
Generative AI in HR: Putting it all together
Here are the main impacts of the generative AI revolution for talent acquisition and talent management:
- The ability to attract and engage candidates will be vastly improved;
- Screening candidates on specific skills will become more challenging, but luckily less necessary;
- Screening candidates on cultural and personal compatibility for jobs will become even more important, and narrow AI will still be the tool of choice for achieving that;
- The recruitment process will have to embrace learning and development instead of deferring until post-hire;
- Highly personalized AI-assisted professional development will become an intrinsic part of employee onboarding and ramp-up.
This blog post is an abbreviated version of an article originally published by Cangrade, a UKG Partner. Read the full post here.
