How Can HR Help with AI Adoption in Organizations?
Many Human Resources professionals, including my fellow HR friends and I, are up on the latest trends related to AI and their impacts on the workplace. In the recent issue of HR Quarterly, Karla Thommen, SHRM-SCP, talks about how her organization “created a subcommittee to develop a company AI use policy.” (Zielinski, 2024) Some HR professionals are using Chat-GPT and other generative AI platforms to help them create job descriptions, automate candidate searches, prescreen candidates, and automate communication according to their desired qualifications.
According to a SHRM article from April 2024, 25% of organizations are “using AI to support HR-related activities.” Eser Rizaoglu, senior director and analyst in Gartner’s HR practice offers specific recommendations for HR Professionals when adopting AI. In addition to those already discussed above, Rizaoglu suggests learning best practices in the field, providing responsible AI training, and participating in industry AI groups.
Fenwick, et. al. stress the importance of using human resource management (HRM) practices to mitigate the challenges posed by implementing AI in organizations, including those related to ethics. One thing they suggest, is creating policies specific to the use of AI, that address transparency, and prioritize the protection of employees, including the employees’ rights to privacy and job security, and steps taken to eliminate bias. (Fenwick et al., 2024, pp. 9–10) Because of these ethical concerns in hiring with AI tools, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) rolled out their Artificial Intelligence Fairness Initiative in January 2023. In 2024, they came out with separate guidance around the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), and guidance around disparate impact with relation to the use of AI in the hiring process. (EEOC, 2024) I attended an employment law conference in June, and witnessed attorneys cautioning employers to question their AI technology vendors, ensuring they fully understand the algorithms in the AI technology they are using. If they were to receive any pushback, or the AI vendors were not transparent, they were told to dissolve those relationships because of the risk posed by the new EEOC guidance and enforcement.
In order to mitigate bias, SHRM recommends continued human review of AI-assisted decision-making, working with multi-disciplinary teams that include human resources and legal, asking candidates to opt-in to the use of AI through disclosures, auditing vendor practices, and keeping a close eye on data privacy.
AI can help organizations speed up the hiring process and allow them to efficiently process many candidates in search of the right person for each open position. Safeguards like HR policies can help decrease algorithmic bias, and increase employee transparency, leading to better engagement with current employees and higher quality recruiting results.
Please check out my other blog posts about the ethical issues of using AI for recruiting and hiring and new laws related to AI and hiring.
References:
Joint statement on enforcement of civil rights, fair competition, consumer protection, and equal opportunity laws in automated systems. (n.d.). US EEOC. Retrieved June 30, 2024, from https://www.eeoc.gov/joint-statement-enforcement-civil-rights-fair-competition-consumer-protection-and-equal-opportunity
Fenwick, A., Molnar, G., & Frangos, P. (2024). The critical role of HRM in AI-driven digital transformation: A paradigm shift to enable firms to move from AI implementation to human-centric adoption. Discover Artificial Intelligence, 4(1), 34. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-024-00125-4
Maurer, R. (2024, April 13). HR adopts AI. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/all-things-work/ai-hr-challenges-opportunities
Using artificial intelligence for employment purposes. (n.d.). Retrieved July 22, 2024, from https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/tools/toolkits/using-artificial-intelligence-employment-purposes
Zielinski, D. (2024, June 24). Revolutionizing HR with generative AI. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-quarterly/revolutionizing-hr-with-generative-ai
