How can Artificial Intelligence impact the HR industry?

For as long as we can remember, philosophers and scientists have been studying the intelligence and reasoning of humans. Our passion for knowledge always leads us to the question: “How can we use what we have learned about ourselves to improve our lives?”

We have returned to this question more recently following the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), which was created to mimic our own intelligence. This technology promises to improve every aspect of human life, especially the business field. The interaction of human and machine-based intelligence is best observed in our human resources (HR) departments where the impact of this new technology can improve daily recruiting, assessment, onboarding and management practices etc.

Is AI technology going to put HR staff out of work? AI promises to transform HR departments, but is it going to be only an extension of technology, offering to revolutionize key HR responsibilities?

Think about the situation in talent acquisition where you end up with a smooth-talking employee that hardly ever lives up to their initial promise. Humans are not immune to making mistakes in these decisions. AI promise to refine this process by relying more on analytical processing of data. AI technology is immune to stereotypes and the impact the applicant’s race, gender or ethnicity can have on the outcome of employee screening. On the other hand AI can not replace the ability of humans to sense the attitude of candidates and evaluate their soft skills, which are just as important as the technical ones.

The most time consuming procedure of HR departments is looking through terabytes of data from candidate’s resumes and social media accounts. Because of this, HR professionals sometimes cut corners in order to get the job done in time, which leads to cracks in the recruiting procedures. This can put the wrong people in the wrong place in the company and can lead to the unnecessary expense of running the hiring process again. This problem may become redundant thanks to the analytical capability of AI that allows it to screen huge amounts of data about several candidates at the same time. As much as AI can shorten the process and can be a great help for humans, hiring managers should still be able to screen the final results, just as if the people were screened by recruiters.

A lot of the time employees have questions that the HR department must answer. This can be time consuming and even exhausting at times, but AI technology can remove this task from our workday. Now, with chatbots companies can record frequently asked questions that employees tend to have. This way, instead of asking HR, people will go to the chatbot and save a lot of time for the people in the department to concentrate on more important duties. AI promises to improve our lives a lot, but will it be able to remove the human aspect? There are situations where human relations are so unique that they can’t be programmed in advance. In those cases only a real person can respond properly to the questions.

The time saved by having AI handle some daily tasks can be measured in days or even months, and HR professionals can use that time for live interviews, shortlisting, performance analysis and many more tasks.

AI can surely make improvements to daily routine processes, but will it ever be able to completely replace humans?