The advent of AI in the HR landscape has revolutionized how HR professionals operate. One such AI tool, ChatGPT, has been instrumental in boosting productivity in the HR sector.
This article will explore the best ways to boost efficiency and results using ChatGPT for ongoing HR tasks.
The 5 Best Ways to Use ChatGPT in HR
Artificial intelligence, specifically large language models (LLM) that do natural language processing, can generate, summarize, analyze, and process information with very little input from the user. ChatGPT, the famous LLM created by OpenAI, is a frontrunner in this space.
It’s pretty easy to use ChatGPT, much like communicating with an HR chatbot. When we consider this accessibility combined with the powerful processing ability of its generative AI, the tool creates ample opportunity for professionals to become more efficient.
The means by which Chat GPT can make us better at recruitment and HR can be divided into five buckets: Time savers, productivity boosters, insight generators, training and development aids, and employee engagement aids.
1. Time Savers
ChatGPT and other AI models can automate routine tasks such as answering frequently asked questions, drafting corporate communications, formulating interview questions, setting task lists for onboarding programs, and scheduling meetings. This frees up time in the lives of HR professionals to focus on more strategic tasks.
Here are some examples of time savers:
Candidate Screening and Initial Interviews
HR professionals can use Chat GPT to automate the initial stages of the recruitment process.
Chatbots powered by GPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer AI) can engage with job applicants, ask them relevant questions, and assess their qualifications based on predefined criteria. This helps in narrowing down the candidate pool, saving HR professionals valuable time that would otherwise be spent on manual screening and initial interviews.
Employee Onboarding FAQs
Chat GPT can create employee onboarding workflows and orientation guides for new employees.
HR professionals can also design chatbots or virtual assistants that provide information about company policies, benefits, and procedures. By doing so, these bots can answer frequently asked questions from new hires, reducing the workload of HR staff who would otherwise need to address these queries individually.
Performance Reviews and Feedback
HR professionals often have to facilitate and document employee performance reviews. Chat GPT can help streamline this process by generating standardized performance review templates or guiding managers and employees through the review process. This ensures consistency and saves HR professionals time in creating, distributing, and collating performance feedback.
2. Productivity Boosters
ChatGPT can assist in drafting emails, creating reports, and providing real-time suggestions for responses during customer chats, speeding up these tasks while ensuring consistency and accuracy.
Specific examples of ways ChatGPT can speed up processes are:
Policy and Procedure Communication
HR professionals often need to communicate updates or changes in company policies and procedures to employees.
Chat GPT can be employed to draft and distribute these communications efficiently. It can also answer frequently asked questions related to new HR policies and changes to existing policies. This ensures that employees receive accurate and timely information, which helps in implementing new policies or procedures swiftly.
Scheduling Interviews and Meetings
Coordinating interviews with multiple participants or scheduling HR meetings can be time-consuming. Chat GPT can be integrated with scheduling tools to assist in finding suitable time slots, sending out invitations, and confirming availability.
This reduces the back-and-forth communication and speeds up the process of setting up interviews and meetings.
3. Insight Generators
We can prompt ChatGPT to analyze large amounts of data and generate insights to help decision-making. For example, it can analyze recruitment metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of recruitment strategies. For example, recruiters can ask what candidates' skills need to be added to their resume compared to the job description.
Other ways Chat GPT can generate insight pertaining to human resources include:
Diversity and Inclusion Metrics
Chat GPT can track and report on diversity and inclusion metrics, such as gender and ethnic diversity within the organization based on current employee data. It can also provide insights into areas where organizational DEI efforts may need improvement, fostering a more inclusive workplace.
Compliance and Policy Insights
Chat GPT can continuously monitor changes in employment laws and regulations, providing HR with real-time compliance updates and new policy templates. It can also analyze the impact of policy changes on the workforce, helping HR assess and adapt to legal and regulatory requirements.
4. Training and Development Aids
ChatGPT can create interactive training materials and provide personalized learning experiences for new hires or employees who want to increase their competency levels. In addition to this, the tool can support training initiatives with strategic insight. For example:
Training and Development Recommendations
When employees express an interest in training and development opportunities, Chat GPT can assist HR professionals in recommending relevant courses, workshops, or resources.
By analyzing an employee's skills, goals, and job role, Chat GPT can generate personalized development plans, making it quicker and more efficient for HR to guide team members in their professional growth.
Organizational Skills Analysis
ChatGPT can support workforce planning and development by running skills analysis across an entire workforce.
It would accomplish this by collecting relevant data from various sources within the organization— employee resumes, job descriptions, performance reviews, training and certification records, and any other sources of information that contain details about employee skills, such as the company’s HRIS database.
The tool can even be used to design and administer employee surveys or questionnaires to capture self-assessed skills, career aspirations, and training needs. All this information is then compiled in a skills map for the sake of skills gap identification and to hedge against industry trends recruiters should keep in mind as they plan for future workforce needs.
5. Employee Engagement
ChatGPT can conduct surveys, collect feedback, and provide insight into the organization’s employee experience. Some practical ways it can be put to use for this purpose are:
Sentiment Analysis
ChatGPT can use natural language processing to analyze the sentiment and content of employee responses in pulse checks and engagement surveys. It can run the data from these assessments in seconds to identify common themes and concerns, as well as actionable insight that HR teams can use to improve matters immediately.
This automated process significantly shortens the lag between employees raising a concern and the point when it is addressed, further benefiting employee experience and engagement.
Personalized Engagement Plans
Chat GPT can create personalized engagement action plans for individual employees based on their preferences, strengths, and career aspirations.
It can recommend specific projects, tasks, or development opportunities that align with employees' interests and goals.
HR Tasks ChatGPT Can’t Do
While ChatGPT is a powerful tool, it’s important to remember that it’s not a replacement for human HR professionals. There are specific tasks, responsibilities, and nuanced HR processes that AI can’t add value to, such as:
Emotional Intelligence
Empathy, relatability, and compassion are often the factors that separate a positive candidate experience or employee experience from a poor one.
AI can’t understand, interpret, or respond to human emotions as humans can. This is particularly important in HR, where understanding, considering, and validating employees’ emotions is crucial.
In the words of ChatGPT itself, “I don't have emotions, consciousness, or the capacity for empathy. I generate responses based on patterns in the text data I was trained on, but I don't truly understand or feel the way humans do. My responses are generated algorithmically, so any appearance of empathy is simulated and not genuine. If you have any questions or need information, feel free to ask, and I'll do my best to provide helpful responses.”
Complex Decision-Making
The ways you can use ChatGPT in decision-making are limited to analyzing data and asking it for insights; it can’t make complex decisions that require human judgment.
You can certainly ask it for recommendations, but you can’t teach it to weight up risk and reward in the context of your organization the way you would— that’s just not how ChatGPT works. It is only capable of looking at the world in terms of the data it’s trained on.
Building Relationships
Building and maintaining relationships with employees is a vital part of HR, and it’s something that AI can’t do.
Take your hiring process, for example. While ChatGPT can be used for screening resumes, candidate feedback automation, etc., it can’t pick a perfect culture fit or convince a top candidate to take a job at your company. Your hiring managers and recruitment team are still your champions in this regard.
Use Cases of AI
A Fortune 500 software firm study revealed that deploying a chat assistant using data from 5,000 agents led to a 13.8% increase in the number of chats an agent could successfully resolve per hour. (Brynjolfsson et al. 2023)
As HR professionals with many repetitive tasks, such as answering questions about benefits and employee policies, this is exciting news. Preliminary findings show Chat GPT4 significantly boosts productivity and quality in various consulting tasks. However, it also highlights the limitations of AI, showing a decline in performance for tasks outside its current capabilities.
Overall, AI is a powerful augmentation tool but is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The graph below (Source: Dell'Acqua) highlights that AI improves performance and its dimension returns for low- and highly-skilled employees. The more skilled a worker, the less quality improvements were seen. For the time being, it seems that upskilling entry-level workers with AI will provide the most gains for companies.
IBM, a pioneer in AI technology, has long implemented AI in its HR department. IBM believes AI-based HR solutions can help organizations make more informed and unbiased decisions about talent management, compensation, and employee engagement.
By leveraging AI, HR leaders can gain deeper insights into employee skills, market rates, and other factors that impact workforce performance and productivity. This can lead to more effective talent acquisition, development, and retention strategies and improved employee satisfaction and business outcomes. (Guenole)
Last Thoughts on Using ChatGPT in HR
ChatGPT is a powerful tool that can significantly enhance the productivity and efficiency of HR professionals.
However, it’s not a replacement for the human touch that is crucial in HR. By understanding the best ways to use ChatGPT and the limitations of AI, HR professionals can leverage this tool to its fullest potential while still maintaining the crucial human element in HR.
Works Cited
- Brynjolfsson, Erik, et al. “Generative AI at Work.” Stanford & NBER, MIT & NBER, MIT, 2023.
- Dell'Acqua, Fabrizio. “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality.” Accessed 10 October 2023.
- Guenole, Nigel. “The business case for AI in HR.” IBM, 2018, Accessed 4 October 2023.
