Artificial intelligence is everywhere today and businesses across different sectors are drawing in massive benefits by incorporating technological innovations into their routine processes and operations. For HR, automation is rapidly transforming traditional functions like recruitment, training and benefits administration. What was until a few years back a standardised role of recruitment and employee engagement, automation is redefining the HR role to drive efficiency and effectiveness for the future of work. 

Innovation in recruitment

As far as sourcing and hiring are concerned, the inception of cognitive recruitment solutions and its foray into the HR sector has ensured that HR managers are leveraging the potential of AI to make smarter, faster-hiring decisions. As a result, the role of HR is getting altered, moving from the conventional tactical tasks to a more structural, efficiency-based screening evaluation. 

Programmatic job advertising enables human resources to specify the exact demographics, skills and characteristics required in a candidate. This ensures that the job is seen by the right people at the right time and reduces time per hire. Wonderkind is one such platform where recruiters can generate hiring campaigns based on different parameters for channels like Facebook, Instagram stories or Google Display. 

Selective hiring is an important aspect of human resources to hire high-potential talent. Thanks to artificial intelligence, multi-assessment platforms like myInterview are bringing candidate’s personalities to the forefront, ensuring the perfect fit for a company. Candidates can be pre-screened through one-way video interviews over this cloud-based platform. 

Automation in training and development

As a growing business, the training and development of employees need to be scalable and efficient. It becomes imperative that regular training is offered to the employees to perform to the best of their abilities. However, the inherent administrative work involved is often a manual process and time-consuming. 

That is where an L&D (Learning and Development) program makes a difference. Self-paced, automated training allows businesses to impart knowledge to the employees as effectively as possible. In the age of technology and advancement, employees can easily access the resources from different devices which further boosts engagement across the organisation. 

Advanced Workflow by Nintex is a learning management system that can be easily integrated with the human resources information system to assign appropriate training for employees and also, track their progress. It also reports the success rate to the HR to conduct additional training if required. 

Chatbot for support solutions

HR departments all over the world have to face a myriad of requests and questions from the employees on a daily basis. Be it related to their leaves, benefits or new initiatives being rolled out by an organisation. By using an automated chatbot majority of such questions can be easily answered that not only takes off the burden from HR but even reduces errors and enhances employee satisfaction. 

For example, Jane, a chatbot created by Loka is capable of answering a variety of HR questions in real-time. Other than that, the chatbot has also been designed to proactively reach out to employees regarding the benefits they may not be aware of. Also, the ability of the chatbot to use real-time analytics for employee issues helps the human resources to find a solution to such problems quickly without letting it go out of hand. 

Way forward

There is no doubt that AI will successfully and rapidly transform human resources. As AI takes hold, HR managers will be required to master technology to best function in the new, rapidly growing environment. Though there is fear that automation will take out jobs and leave a lot of people jobless, organisations need to keep humans at the pinnacle of the agenda. After all, people are always at the heart of businesses and they are the ones to drive transformation through automation.

This article was first published in August 2021.