Impact of Disruption on the HR Function: A Strategic HR Function

We have been discussing innovations in the HR Tech space. Key benefits include a reduction in costs, raising productivity and improving employee retention amongst many others. Overall, one of the biggest advantages is that it helps HR become far more strategic. A strategic HR function entails increasing employee productivity and using HR to implement strategies over a period of time with the agenda of creating an organization ready for the future.

Strategic Human Resource Planning: Essentially, it is the process of identifying and facilitating HR to meet a company’s given objectives. This requires the HR to; have a strong knowledge of the job requirement, the job market; be able to tell a good fit for the company’s culture from a bad one; forecasting and succession planning; building a strong relationship with line managers and keeping employees appraised in order to reduce turnover, to name only a few aspects of strategic HR planning. Therefore, the modern HR leader needs to embrace AI. Artificial Intelligence can take on some of the repetitive and tedious tasks and complete them in a jiffy. For example, an AI assistant called Amy and Andrew Ingram can take over an HR manager’s schedule and streamline all their to-dos in the most efficient way possible. It can send meeting requests, suggest optimal meeting times, notify others when one is waiting for them, all without even so much as writing an email.

Strategic Performance Management: The most common hurdle that HR faces in performance management is miscommunication. Communications from top management can be more streamlined with the use of AI, which can also facilitate a more interactive platform for directives to be exchanged. It would also help HR to avoid losing candidates with great potential to more responsive competitors. One example of AI that helps in such a task is Mya, a chatbot that answers questions and provides support, feedback, and live updates to candidates in the hiring process. Another area AI can help immensely is keeping track of the morale in the organization. IBM Watson is working on a predictive model to evaluate attrition tendencies, which may help do away with the phenomenon altogether.

Recruitment and Selection: There are a number of ways that AI can help with recruitment and selection processes, as seen by the application of candidate sourcing software such as Ideal, which is capable of screening thousands of resumes and adding only the best fits into a company’s Applicant Tracking System (ATS). What’s more, AI can even do the initial screening of candidates with zero probability of bias and an even more adept neural network than humans.

A strategic HR function is a key to an organization’s productivity and survival in the coming times. We have been discussing various aspects of the impact of disruptive technologies in the employee and talent space in the past weeks. This is the sixth and last article in the series.