Three Most Common AI Use Cases in HR and Recruiting

HR and recruitment leaders have begun using applications of AI to improve HR efficiency and enhance employee experience. Gartner has identified the three most common use cases.

“There is a fair number of HR leaders who are interested in applying AI across areas such as talent management, HR service delivery and workforce management,“ said Helen Poitevin, research vice president at Gartner. “Our latest survey found that 23% of organizations who were already piloting or using AI, were doing so in the HR and recruiting domain. Often, organizations demonstrate the use of AI in the HR domain after having showed value in other business areas. In the human capital management domain, AI applications dominate in employee- and candidate-facing situations.“

Gartner has identified three common use cases of AI in HR and recruiting today.

1: Talent Acquisition

AI in talent acquisition is a use case that is frequently profiled negatively by the media, generally focusing on potential bias or discrimination. The fear is that, if a single AI agent takes over the full hiring process, it could make decisions without human control. Organizations with a very high volume of candidates, or those struggling to find specialists or other rare profiles, are likely to invest in AI technologies.

2: Voice of the Employee

Voice of the employee (VoE) analytics is the second most popular domain area attracting interest from HR leaders as they seek to improve how they monitor employee engagement. Instead of relying solely on surveys, HR leaders are also interested in detecting, analyzing and reporting on sentiment and attitudes as expressed across more employee communication channels. For example, they may look at employees’ social media feeds, or conversations and comments in internal collaboration tools. The goal is to identify what people are talking about positively or negatively, and which topics are most frequently raised. Some leading organizations use this kind of input to track the health of their corporate culture.

3: HR Virtual Assistants

HR virtual assistants are still in a stage of early adoption. However, the expectation is that there will be a unique front end for every imaginable HR process (such as answering queries by employees, delivering insights on talent metrics, or conducting process workflow steps). For HR organizations today, AI-supported virtual assistants usually mean chatbots put in place for customer contact centers or help-desk-related process flows. Organizations that have been successful in deploying these kinds of chatbots, and gaining strong adoption from employees, typically say that they have experienced a significant decrease in the calls to the help desk.