Developing rapidly and gaining steam, AI is finding its way into more and more business applications each day. In particular, it has seemingly unlimited potential to streamline how HR professionals do their jobs, with the biggest and most immediate impact being felt on the recruitment side of HR. “Your imagination is the limit, really, of what it can do,” says Kevin Wheeler, founder and president of the Future of Talent Institute. In recruitment, for example, ChatGPT can help HR communicate with job candidates and write interview questions. It can also be used to create engaging job descriptions (which, Wheeler points out, isn’t a strong suit of many recruiters and hiring managers).
The general public isn’t totally sold yet on the use of AI in recruitment, though. One recent survey found that 41 percent of Americans reject “the use of AI in reviewing job applications,” and 71 percent “oppose AI use in making final hiring decisions.”1 Additionally, equity concerns figure prominently in discussions about the use of AI-based applications in HR processes. Earlier this year, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) held a public hearing in which it explored “ways in which AI and automated systems in the workplace might support or hinder diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) efforts.”2
Concerns about accuracy and bias aren’t entirely unwarranted. Joe Atkinson, chief products and technology officer at PwC, points out that the data from which generative AI pulls can “reflect or incorporate human biases because they’re made up in large part by the outcomes of countless human decisions and actions.” There have been some big misses in this area. For example, Workday is currently being sued because its AI-based screening tools “allegedly disqualify applicants who are Black, disabled, or over the age of 40 at a disproportionate rate.”3 Amazon’s (now shelved) experimental AI-based recruitment tool “did not like women.”4 Because AI is trained on existing data,” Wheeler explains, when Amazon’s AI examined the history of the company’s technology hires and saw that they were almost all men, “it made an assumption that Amazon only wanted to hire men.”
AI developers are learning from those mistakes, though, and are looking for ways to increase AI’s ability to mitigate some of the human bias inherent to resume evaluation. For example, Wheeler says, “we know already that if you submit two CVs—one with an African American name and one with a European name—the European name will almost always get preferential treatment.” AI can be instructed to evaluate the skills a candidate offers and to not look at their name.
In addition to candidate screening, AI can foster equity in other key areas of the workplace. When it comes to fair pay and promotions, for instance, it “might be able to do analytics and interpretation” on an organization’s big data and “do more of the analytics associated with who’s getting promoted and how long they stay and what pay levels are,” says Tracy Brower, sociologist and author of The Secrets to Happiness at Work. (However, she adds, the company still needs HR professionals “to think about what questions we should be asking.") AI can also help improve employee learning and development. For example, AI can identify current employees who already have the skills needed for new roles and connect them with those opportunities. AI can also search for “parallel skills,” Wheeler says, by looking at “what things could an employee do (even though they don’t do them now) that their skills might match for.”
AI can be used to improve the efficiency of HR teams in several ways. Automating routine tasks such as writing procedures, policy manuals, and FAQs can give those teams more “time to do more high-impact work,” says Atkinson, and “create opportunities to completely reimagine how employees are supported” by enabling HR staff to be more creative, innovative, and strategic. He points out that AI can also free HR staff from addressing some of the more routine and basic employee requests, which has the added benefit of empowering employees to quickly obtain the answers they need (there thereby reducing their frustration). Additionally, Wheeler adds, AI technology can also help onboard new employees by sending out routine communications before they start and answering common questions they have about the company, the CEO, the organizational chart, or the company handbook.
Although AI offers HR a “big advantage” by creating a starting point for these documents, Wheeler points out that an HR professional is still needed to personalize the content. Brower agrees: “HR pros have a critical role to play in looking for nuance and figuring out through editing what’s best for their culture, how they can best communicate all of that, [and] how it’s best positioned.”
Undeniably, AI can help HR teams be more efficient, but there are concerns about its potential to replace humans and eliminate jobs. “We need to be reassuring people, upskilling them, and preparing them for that next thing that they may not already be doing today,” says Brower. “If routine tasks are offloaded to AI, then those people could be doing more coaching with leaders instead, engaging in talent strategy work, or coming up with new and creative ideas for hiring, because the talent shortage is here to stay for the next seven to ten years.” Some of those fears may be unfounded, though. In 2020 the World Economic Forum estimated that by 2025 AI will displace humans from over 85 million jobs but create 97 million new ones —a net increase of 13 million jobs.
Wheeler compares the arrival of AI to the arrival of bulldozers, which wiped out thousands of jobs in the construction industry but also created many new ones. “Some of the guys with shovels learned to drive bulldozers, and some learned other skills in that field,” he says, “and I think the same thing is going to happen in recruiting. Yes, it will take some jobs, but we will continue to need that HR professional role in potentially expanded or different kinds of work.”
Atkinson says we’re far away from the day that any technology (including generative AI) can fully replace a human being. “In a world in which employers are still competing to attract and retain the best talent,” he explains, “sustaining the human connection—particularly with HR—is likely to be more important in the future, not less.”
1 Lee Rainie et al. 2023. “AI in Hiring and Evaluating Workers: What Americans Think.” Pew Research Center website, April 20, www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/04/20/ai-in-hiring-and-evaluating-workers-what-americans-think.
2 EEOC. 2023. “EEOC Hearing Explores Potential Benefits and Harms of Artificial Intelligence and other Automated Systems in Employment Decisions.” EEOC website, January 31, www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/eeoc-hearing-explores-potential-benefits-and-harms-artificial-intelligence-and-other.
3 Annelise Gilbert. 2023. “Workday AI Biased Against Black, Older Applicants, Suit Says (1).” Bloomberg Law website, February 22, news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/workday-ai-biased-against-black-disabled-applicants-suit-says.
4 Jeffrey Dastin. 2018. “Amazon Scraps Secret AI Recruiting Tool That Showed Bias Against Women.” Reuters website, October 10, www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-jobs-automation-insight/amazon-scraps-secret-ai-recruiting-tool-that-showed-bias-against-women-idUSKCN1MK08G.
