How will AI transform HR? The future of talent management

The Impact of AI on Talent Management: Transforming HR for the Future

AI, or Artificial Intelligence, has arrived. We see the term everywhere, and it’s becoming more and more commonly referred to in the business world, which makes sense since AI has huge implications for the workplace. As innovators and decision-makers, it’s important to understand not just how AI functions, but also what it means for different areas of the marketplace and how it ultimately affects the ways employees live and work. This is particularly true for AI in human resources, or the future for people management assisted with artificial intelligence. 

What Can Artificial Intelligence Do?

While we’ve all had some degree of exposure to artificial intelligence (consider voice assist Siri in your mobile or Alexa in your home device), experience with artificial intelligence at work varies depending on your organization.

Example of AI at work

If you work with or alongside customer service and support, for example, you’ve likely seen artificial intelligence used in chatbots that assist with commonly asked questions or help customers more quickly have their queries addressed.

Some areas of the workplace require more complicated or creative artificial intelligence, however, and are therefore just beginning to demonstrate their potential. 

Ultimately, opportunities for artificial intelligence at work revolve around opportunities to replace tasks that usually require human intelligence with machine-learned artificial intelligence. The point of this is not to replace human cognition or have a robot-run organizational economy, but rather to allow human brains to focus on the tasks that require higher levels of thinking and nuance and reduce being bogged down by everyday tasks. 

AI and HR

Human Resources as a department and profession has historically required high degrees of complex human thought. This is because working in people management usually involves blending workforce needs with organizational growth, business goals, and economic factors. Doing so requires a broad understanding of many moving parts within an organization and also a soft touch, understanding the psychological needs of your people.
 

It’s no wonder AI has taken a little longer to permeate the day-to-day of HR. but the wait is over – artificial intelligence is here to assist with many different aspects of modern talent management. 

Where AI Can Assist HR

If you are thinking about the future of human resources and how artificial intelligence can help reach those goals, the question remains is how exactly can artificial intelligence be applied to people management in a way that is truly helpful? The answer is, in a variety of ways that permeate recruitment, engagement, and future business development. Additionally, AI in HR is now being used to help assist with diversity and helping to reduce human-based biases towards racial, gender, and societal equity. We’ll explain…

1. AI has become an important part of strategic HR recruitment.

AI  plays a role in recruiting by using artificial intelligence to automate time-consuming, repetitive tasks while offering personalization and data insights throughout the hiring process. What does this look like? For your current employees, it means being able to take stock of current skills within the building, or knowledge already present within the organization that might be underutilized. AI can use natural language processing to automatically extract skills from every type of information imaginable — from job data and learning modules, to school transcripts and CVs, to public profiles on LinkedIn, GitHub, and more. From there, skills are compiled and organized, so now HR understands what is housed within the organization, where there are opportunities for growth, and where recruitment externally might be necessary.

2. AI can also help engage or, rather, re-engage your people.

This can take place in two directions: one, by allowing your people to take ownership of their career path within the organization and see current and future opportunities and position themselves for those roles, allowing them to grow in their careers before they seek opportunities elsewhere. Secondly, AI can help empower HR to engage employees by having the internal data necessary to pair people with opportunities based on their skills, capabilities, potential, and passions. This allows HR to open up career pathways with linear and non-linear options and career moves based on job architecture and where you need employees to go, as well as where they are interested in going.

3. AI can help the executive team make better business development decisions based on employee data.

Traditional workforce planning can be quite analog, tedious, and time-consuming. When workforce planning is not current, it can lead to decision-makers being out of date and vulnerable to shifts on an organizational or market level. AI for HR can provide a 360-degree view of your workforce that enables you to see the full picture of all the skills in your organization and prepare you for anything. From there, you can start planning for the future with data to support those decisions and move in a direction that combines the skills you have, the opportunities in the marketplace, and be aware of the skills the organization needs to acquire to get there.

4. Lastly, the new frontier of AI for HR is particularly exciting as it can help address diversity and equity-based hiring decisions.

While HR and people development aims to be as equitable and demographic-blind as possible, the downside of soft-touch, human centric people management is that all of us are vulnerable to internal biases in decision-making. This can be as simple as remembering a more outgoing candidate for a position and encouraging them to apply versus a quieter candidate that is even more qualified. As such, blind hiring and recruiting continues to be top-of-mind for HR leaders in trying to find ways to be increasingly equitable and prioritize diversity in their promotion and leadership pipelines. Because unconscious bias can sneak into any talent decision particularly when there’s a lack of current data, bringing AI to the table can help to eliminate these little differences that lead to less diverse and equitable organizations. AI for DEI works to specifically eliminate bias from your talent data, giving you an equal, skills-based view of your talent ecosystem.

The Future of AI for HR and Talent Management

AI has become increasingly digital and data-driven over the past two decades. Instead of a huge pile of papers, most organizations manage their candidates, current employees, promotion, and retention efforts digitally and within an internal database. The future of Talent Management speaks to this by combining all of these efforts into one hub, where HR professionals can see everything at once and have a 20,000 foot view of everything happening within the organization when it comes to their people. Simultaneously, this collection of data and information in one place only helps to assist AI-related tasks because now the skills, needs, priorities, and action items of both the organization and its people are in one place, providing a ripe environment for AI to be efficient and truly helpful in the process. 

When it comes to AI as well as an all-in-one data management platform for HR, leaders and decision-makers should consider the long-term goals and necessities of the organization. Because the truth is, new systems and new ways of working take adjustment, and are only truly worth it if they align with the needs of the organization tomorrow. This means taking potential vendors and software solution partners to task regarding the types of insights you need at an individual, team, and organizational level to fill skills gaps and plan for the future. Long term this should also align with your employee retention strategy, an increasing concern for today’s employers who are experiencing unprecedented talent turnover, and create an ecosystem of flexibility that strategically builds learning opportunities mapped to the skills the organization needs and the careers your people want. If your HR software can bring this data forward, incorporate useful AI assistance, and help to create a culture of learning and motivation, this will help create a turbulence resistant business plan that helps the organization grow long-term, regardless of changes to the marketplace.

Learn more about the outcomes AI can deliver with our Buyers Guide to Workforce Intelligence.