H
R managers at Unilever want their job candidates to play games—in fact, the global consumer-goods giant insists on it. But not just any game.
As an initial step in its hiring process, the company asks recruits to play 12 neuroscience-based games developed by artificial intelligence (AI) software firm Pymetrics to measure focus, memory and risk aversion, among other behavioral metrics.
Clear that hurdle and you get an interview—not with a live HR manager, but with an AI chatbot conducted via computer camera or smartphone. Developed by HireVue, the bot’s algorithm scans each answer for body language, keywords and tone. If the data suggests you’re a good match for the job and the company, then you pass go—you get to talk to a human being. That’s how AI whittles a sprawling field of thousands of candidates down to an elite few.
For chief human resources officers, AI and machine learning insights are proving to be game changers, not only in talent acquisition but in engagement, reskilling and retention—the full lifecycle of the employee experience. Today, 56% of CHROs say the ability to digitize HR processes will define their role over the next three years, according to a recent survey of 500 HR leaders. Just 6% surveyed believe that traditional HR practices will continue to be the status quo.
Already, CHROs who are early adopters of AI are seeing their investment pay off. They are 19% more effective at reducing the time HR spends on administrative tasks compared to peers, 16% more effective at hiring for a competitive advantage and 13% more efficient at reducing candidate screening times, a 2018 Harris Interactive Media and eightfold.ai survey reports.
The upshot: AI is transforming the role of the CHRO from an internal-facing administrator of human resource processes to a strategic partner in achieving business value through talent acquisition and management. The question, then, is clear and urgent: How can tomorrow’s CHROs use AI to thrive in a cutthroat business ecosystem where talent can provide a crucial competitive edge?
Fewer Needles, More Haystacks
Forget trade wars and the threat of global recession. Attracting and retaining talent is the No. 1 concern of C-suite executives, a January 2018 survey of 1,000 business leaders revealed. The source of this anxiety is twofold: Historically low unemployment and a perceived shortage of skilled workers. (Is the skills gap real? The question is hotly debated—but what’s undisputable is a severe mismatch between skills sought in job listings and those found on résumés.) And with the growth of the gig economy, the war for talent is growing increasingly fierce.
“The organization needs the skilled employee much more than vice versa,” says Thomas Cser, senior director of EMEA at ServiceNow. “And you can also choose to work as a freelancer anywhere in the world. You can travel to Bali and work from there just by opening up your laptop.”
Paradoxically, companies are inundated with more résumés than ever before, with roughly 250 applicants for each open position, according to Glassdoor. Of those, only four or five will actually get interviews and only one will be offered the job.
That’s where the talent “shortage” comes into play—and where AI can make the difference, says Margaret-Ann Cole, president of executive talent consultants Crenshaw Associates. “The talent that is applying to Google are in high demand because Merck and Target want those same people. They are skilled, they are agile and they understand the new technologies.”
For Unilever, AI tools like Pymetrics and HireVue have made the process of sorting through haystacks of applicants exponentially more efficient. The average time for hiring a candidate went from four months to four weeks. Time spent reviewing résumés dropped by 75%, and the rate of job offer acceptance increased to 82% from 64%.
AI assessment software from startups like Pymetrics, Entelo, HiredScore and PredictiveHire (among others) also promises to remove human bias from the process of weeding through résumés, ensuring greater racial, ethnic and “educational pedigree” diversity as well as gender parity.
For CHROs, AI presents an opportunity to not just hire the right person for the job, but the right team, says Matt Hendrickson, CEO of intelligent talent acquisition and management company Ascendify.
“In the past, you would say, ‘Hey, I need a developer,’” explains Hendrickson. “You’d write a job description, post it on Monster and hire somebody. Today you ask, ‘What team are they going on? What skill gaps does that team have?’ AI and intelligence can help make a smarter recommendation about the next person you hire based on dynamic teaming.”
Growing Talent In Your Own Backyard
The C-suite executives interviewed in the Harris survey share another major HR concern: The current approach to learning and development isn’t working. More than three-fourths (78%) agree that talent programs are critical to their success, but 56% say theirs are just not effective.
Can AI make a difference? Cole says yes—by giving a clearer picture of the skills your organization has today and will need in the future.
“A CHRO has to look at the skill sets of the pool of people they have and ask, ‘What skills do I need? How do you reskill them?’” Cole notes. “AI could give you a slate of individuals that you can utilize right away, or it could identify adjacent skills so you could train them to fill a new role.”
One company aggressively deploying AI to tackle its talent deficit through reskilling is AT&T, with its ambitious $1 billion Future Ready initiative. Its goal: to retrain 100,000 employees, nearly half of its workforce, in tech-forward skills like data analytics, cybersecurity and cloud computing, by 2020. The multiyear, web-based program features courses developed with Coursera, Udacity and top-shelf universities. Already the company has awarded 177,000 digital skills badges to 57,000 employees.
The centerpiece of AT&T’s Future Ready push is its online, AI-powered Career Intelligence portal. It helps employees chart a personalized road map for career transformation by looking at the jobs in demand within the company today and over the long haul, what skills are necessary for those jobs, and creates a curriculum within the portal to acquire them—it even projects whether demand for those jobs will rise or fall in the future.
Another way companies can step up to the reskilling challenge is to begin retraining on day one during onboarding, which itself is becoming a more digitized, automated HR process.
“In onboarding, AI is really changing things,” says Hendrickson. “The virtual assistant is doing more than having you fill out your I-9 form. It’s identifying the skill gaps we found in the interview and it’s proposing learning programs for you during your first 90 days with a checklist that you should get through if you really want to be good at your job.”
Retaining The Talent You’ve Got
Beyond keeping your workforce up to date with the latest tech, reskilling has another benefit: keeping workers happy and more likely to stay with the company, especially millennials.
“The one thing that employees care about more than anything—more than money, more than benefits—is career development and growth opportunity,” Hendrickson says, based on internal employee surveys. “If employees can’t develop a career path internally, then they're naturally going to start to look externally.”
As the gig economy expands and job hopping rises, talent retention is one of the major challenges facing CHROs today. More than three million U.S. workers quit their jobs each month. And 68% of workers have left a job within the first six months, according to a BambooHR survey.
AI can give CHROs an advantage in keeping talent in the fold. Surveys gather useful data on employee engagement, but algorithms can go beyond what workers say to uncover what they feel through sentiment analysis software like Glint and TINYPulse, which crunch feedback to discern core themes and feelings not expressed in surveys.
For CHROs, technology like this shows that the future of AI means more than just automating mundane human resources tasks. It means enriching the employee experience to keep the best talent fulfilled and on board with the company’s mission, including freelancers and future hires.
“It all centers around aligning your talent strategy with your business strategy,” Hendrickson says. “CHROs need to unify all of these different groups: our internal employees, the future people we want to hire, and the contract labor force that can help us shore up gaps on teams to help drive the company's business.”
Cole sees the biggest challenge for tomorrow’s CHROs as keeping themselves as adaptable and open to learning.
“The most important thing that CHROs have to be is agile,” she says. “They have to be committed to continuous learning because things change very quickly. What AI can do today is going to be very different than what it can do in 18 months because it’s moving that rapidly.”
CREDITS: 10'000 Hours/Getty
