How generative AI can impact the employee journey

Depending on who you ask, generative AI is our salvation, the apocalypse, an industry-changer or a fad. One thing’s for sure, since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, it’s been the talk of the town. What does it mean for HR? Here are five emerging use cases to check what generative AI can – and can’t – do for HR and your employees.

You can’t browse LinkedIn or Facebook without seeing a raving review on what generative AI can do: writing an impeccable essay on the French Revolution, giving surprisingly useful relationship advice, creating a science-based workout programme … With the correct prompt, just about anything goes.

Boasting such a broad skill set, the applications of generative AI are expanding in various directions, and the world of HR is no exception. As 6 in 10 European companies are investing in HR digitalisation, an increasing number of them are also looking at ways generative AI can lift the digital employee experience, while lightening the workload of HR pros.

#1 AI-based recruitment

With publicly available information about people’s job histories, skills, competencies, studies and achievements scattered across the web, certain AI tools have plenty of fodder to find top recruits. They connect the dots and make sense of it. Moreover, you could also use new AI-based HR tech to create job postings that hit the mark. By analysing employee biographies, work histories, workplace tools and related materials, you’ll end up with more engaging and compelling job postings  – ones that accurately reflect the position’s profile, as well as the company’s DNA. 

#2 Automated selection

One of the more time-intensive tasks for recruiters is to pre-screen candidates and schedule interviews. These tasks can already be completed using existing AI tools or scheduling software, but from now on, you could add other elements to the mix. Generative AI tools can, for example, write on-point pre-screen questions. In the near future, they’ll also be able to complete live interviews or tests, and assess the responses. This speeds up the selection process and gives you more time to give personal attention to the best candidates for the job. 

#3 Effective onboarding

Once hired, you can use tools like ChatGPT to proactively provide new colleagues with up-to-date information and must-know resources. Generative AI is able to analyse and synthesise months of work in a matter of seconds, and will translate it to anything from 10 key takeaways for someone’s specific role and experience level, all the way to comprehensive yet personalised starters’ guides. The result: your onboarding is based on actual work, rather than guesswork. Besides that, AI-powered chatbots can also answer questions and provide support to new hires as they assimilate into the organisation.

 

#4 Personalised learning and development

Generative AI can design highly tailored learning paths for your employees, based on their roles, skills, aspirations, hobbies, learning preferences, etc. Combined with role and skill data, you can intelligently match internal candidates to opportunities they might not have identified for themselves. Basically, a generative AI tool can say: this is where you are now, and based on your strengths, this is where you could be and how you’ll get there. Needless to say, this type of personalisation in the digital workplace leads to increased employee engagement and productivity.

 

#5 Meaningful performance reviews

Having access to a year’s worth of an employee’s work, meetings and other output, generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard can be a great asset in your HR tech stack. This can easily identify themes and recurring patterns, analyse employee sentiment to predict possible turnover, adjust expectations about certain roles, help to set new performance goals, and much more. This way, managers have more meaningful conversations during performance reviews and, ultimately, better empower their teams. Employees, on the other hand, can use generative AI to write comprehensive reviews based on a series of bullet points.

Despite its potential, generative AI is not a silver bullet for HR. There are various pitfalls to keep in mind:

• It can only analyse existing data sets, so biases and errors in the data may be magnified.
• It is not (yet) capable of fully understanding and correctly interpreting human language.
• It poses significant data security threats, since HR data is often sensitive and confidential.
• It lacks the creativity, ingenuity and empathy of humans who can approach challenges in unique ways.

In other words, new tools still need the right oversight. Always remember that tech, AI-based or not, is primarily an enabler for HR professionals to leave a bigger mark on the employee journey. Although they can clearly take over some HR tasks, they’ll never take over HR jobs.

Many tech experts have hypothesised generative AI’s implications for HR. To be fair, it’s still very much a wait-and-see kind of thing, but it seems that when used correctly and with the right guidance, it can truly revolutionise the employee journey for the better. Generative AI can already perform amazing tasks. Heck, this whole blog post was written by ChatGPT – not really, but we got you thinking there for a second, didn’t we? Our advice: keep an open mind and inject generative AI into your HR digitalisation journey when it adds clear value.