How are companies leveraging AI in their HR department?

To help you get a glimpse into how HR departments are leveraging AI, we asked business leaders and HR professionals this question for their best insights. From using chatbots for applicant engagement to creating bias-free communication, there are several ways that companies have been leveraging AI that may inspire you to implement AI into your organization’s HR department. 

Here are 10 ways companies are leveraging AI in their HR department:

• Use Chatbots for Applicant Engagement and Employee Resources
• Automate the Screening Process When Hiring
• Save Time On Repetitive Tasks
• Improves Communication Features for HR
• Conduct Employment Background Checks
• Send Out Employee Engagement Surveys
• Use AI to Match Employee Training Based on Feedback 
• Leverage AI for Productivity
• Allows For Employee Self-service Benefit Selection
• Using Ai to Measure Change Fatigue
• Create Bias-Free Communications

Use Chatbots for Applicant Engagement and Employee Resources

Leveraging chatbots within your organization can help HR not only prior to a new hire but also with current employees. First, the use of chatbots to engage with candidates during the recruitment process as well as for screening and assessing candidates during recruitment will make the job of HR much easier.

Current employees can use company chatbots to look up information such as company policies or best practices and also for employee self-service, such as changing benefits or requesting time off. Chatbots are one of the easier forms of AI to leverage within your HR department.

Ronald Kubitz, Director HR & Recruiting, Forms+Surfaces

Automate the Screening Process When Hiring

More and more, companies are implementing automated assessment platforms to measure the skills of candidates and check who is qualified, long before the interview stage. The best candidates can be fast-tracked through to the interview stage, and the unqualified candidates don’t even make it to the interview. This frees up countless hours of time for recruiters and ensures top candidates don’t drop out of the pipeline along the way.

Dale Cullen, Senior Content Specialist, DevSkiller

Save Time On Repetitive Tasks

There are so many HR tasks that are not only repetitive but are time-consuming and can prevent HR from performing their jobs efficiently. Automating tasks such as screening applicants, using time stamps, automating onboarding, days off, and other requests gives the HR department more time and energy to focus on employee engagement, improving work culture, working on providing better benefits, and accordingly improving the work environment and outcome.

Nicole Thelin, Founder, Low Income Relief

Improves Communication Features for HR

One of the most important features to look for in new HR technologies is the communication feature(s). With remote work still on the rise and with employees clocking in from all around the world, having a feature that can keep employees engaged with each other, with company culture, and with HR, in general, is an absolute necessity. 

When considering a new HR technology, ask yourself whether it has the potential to expand company communications in any new or creative ways. Does it make it easier for employees to move through HR processes? Does it aid in creating new communities amongst employees? Does it find solutions to already lacking communication issues? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, it may be a great HR technology to add to the stack.

Karim Hachem, VP of eCommerce, La Blanca

Conduct Employment Background Checks

Many companies today are leveraging AI-driven software in order to more conveniently and responsibly manage employee background checks. This is traditionally one of the more time-consuming and sticky parts of HR work, especially as the legal intricacies of hiring remote candidates has become a common issue across many sectors. AI background check programs provide a significant benefit to HR departments in their candidate sourcing and filtering, and some of the best programs out there also help companies streamline their hiring process in useful ways, too.

Anthony Martin, Founder and CEO, Choice Mutual

Send Out Employee Engagement Surveys

Gone are the days of hunting down employees in their offices or between breaks to distribute printed surveys. Today, Human resource departments can enjoy the convenience of using AI technology through platforms like Jotforms and Survey Monkey to share links and collect employee feedback. These integrations allow HR department teams to send surveys with prescheduled deadlines, without having to worry about their forms getting lost. Since these forms are shared through links, teams can also send reminders to their colleagues by email or Slack messaging to ensure all data gets submitted on time. Artificial intelligence is changing the game for internal communication.

Brian Nagele, CEO, Restaurant Clicks

Use AI to Match Employee Training Based on Feedback 

One of the more intuitive ways I’ve seen the role of AI grow in HR is with the ‘matching’ of employee training requirements based on their internal feedback. 

Essentially, the internal AI provides training resource ‘matches’ in relation to employee feedback based on areas they’ve identified for development. With AI, the level of ‘matching’ is incredibly nuanced and ensures that employees are given exactly the right training materials when they require it versus providing a bulk of training resources during onboarding that doesn’t necessarily reflect the training requirements of the individual employee.

James Taylor, Founder, Digital Tool Report

Leverage AI for Productivity

As remote work continues to trend bigger and bigger, ensuring productivity is key. Using HR technology to understand and improve productivity is the new necessity for adding new programs. In terms of deciding which features will work best for your company, consider where your company stands with productivity. Has it been at the forefront of company focus for a long, or is it something the company is just now beginning to hone in on?

If you have an understanding of your company’s productivity already, then you may be looking for features in HR tech that can help you identify areas for improvement. But perhaps productivity has just come into the company view, so you would be looking for an HR tech that can help you understand where company productivity is already at, in order to move forward in the near future. Whatever stage you are at in productivity improvement, there is HR tech that can help take you further and should be the selling point of any newly adapted technology.

Chandler Rogers, CEO, Relay

Allows For Employee Self-service Benefit Selection

At our human services agency, we recently began using AI to assist our 220+ employees with benefit enrollment. Through our HRIS, employees are able to log in to their self-service account and learn how the various choices would impact them. The module includes scenarios related to premiums and helps to determine which choice best works for them and their dependents.

By utilizing this AI service, it alleviates the need for HR staff to manually enter the selections. This reduces the potential for data entry errors as well as gives the employees a sense of ownership on their benefit selections.

Shelly Chapman, Director of Human Resources, Vera French Community Mental Health Center

Use AI to Measure Change Fatigue

Change is coming at us faster than ever before, but no one likes drinking from the fire hose. Employees talk (ahem, complain) about so much change and that it never stops. This is what is known as “Change Fatigue”. People don’t love frequent change. In fact, most avoid it at all costs. As work rapidly changes to meet industry and market demands, employees are becoming increasingly tired. This is resulting in an increase in attrition and decrease in engagement, both of which come with a hefty price tag for any company. To address this, organizations are investing in change management software and leveraging its AI to glean strategic insight into the volume of change across their enterprise, who is impacted by change (and by how many changes), and utilize change-related data to make informed decisions around how to best manage it all. As a result, companies are able to pinpoint areas of change saturation, pull the necessary levers to lessen change fatigue, and holistically manage change.

Kate DeGon, Founder/CEO, ChangeSync

Create Bias-Free Communications

AI assistive technologies like ishield.ai helps companies create bias-free communications. HR teams are using such tools across internal communications software like Slack or MS Teams. These apps provide a real-time 1:1 learning opportunity to the employees in eliminating bias towards gender, race, culture, etc from all internal communications. Due to the rise in remote/hybrid working and explosion of online communications, training alone is proving to be ineffective, hence HR Teams are deploying AI assistive technologies.

Kesavan Kanchi Kandadai, CoFounder & CEO, ishield.ai