In today’s era, Artificial Intelligence is omnipresent. From sending personalized shopping recommendations to helping us get to the right destination, AI impacts everyone. Be it large organizations or individual consumers, it has revolutionized the technology industry like never before, and its prowess in powering data-driven decisions is facilitating speed-to-value, helping organizations become faster to market and stay competitive.

Almost every industry has adopted AI-driven technologies to streamline its processes and to improve its functional efficiency, including Human Capital Management. Human Capital Management, or HCM, has been greatly transformed by AI. It has shifted HR functions from routine administrative tasks to scouting, attracting, and retaining the best talent, thus becoming a strategic asset to the organization.

AI in Human Capital Management encompasses several technologies like Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Big Data to enhance business value during each stage of the employee lifecycle. AI is being used to streamline several HR functions like talent sourcing and acquisition, employee onboarding, career development, succession planning, compensation planning, learning and Development, and several routine HR functions in an organization.

Organizations are realizing the true potential of AI and its power of predictive analysis to attract the right talent, deliver personalized onboarding experiences, build employee-specific career development plans, and predict high performers. In today’s world, AI can help companies build advanced models to predict if a candidate is likely to accept the job offer, how long a potential candidate will stay, or when employees could quit.

With such advanced capabilities, AI helps HR executives consolidate enormous amounts of disparate data and build meaningful insights which help create right environment for their employees to communicate, collaborate and contribute. Let’s look at some of the real-life examples of how AI is changing the landscape of HR.

The Impact of AI on HCM

1. Talent Acquisition

Effective recruitment is extremely important to create the right pool of resources for the organization. However, recruiters often struggle to find the right match for the job simply because they must manually screen through several hundreds of resumes for a single post. This is not only time-consuming but can lead to mental fatigue, causing subjective decisions to be made.

By leveraging AI for talent acquisition processes, recruiters can use simple keyword searches to find prospective matches between the job profile and the candidate’s profile. Machine Learning algorithms can crawl through resumes, searching for specific words related to skills and experience. Then, they will filter these for the recruiters, thereby considerably reducing the screening time.

Usage of these algorithms also eliminates the risk of subjective interpretation of candidate profiles, often seen during manual screening processes. For candidates who are applying for a vacant position, AI can suggest the right openings based on skill matching, thereby enhancing the chances of having the right fit for the job. It can also build mathematical models to evaluate the likelihood of a candidate accepting a job offer for a particular vacancy.

2. Building the Right Offer

Once a candidate is selected, AI models can use benchmarking data to forecast the possible performance outcome of the candidate. By comparing it with similar employees, hiring managers will be able to make informed decisions on the position being offered. AI can also help in building personalized offers to the candidate, moving away from the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. This would also increase the likelihood of the candidate accepting the offer.

3. Onboarding

Onboarding is often regarded as the most vital step of an employee’s organizational journey, and it sets the tone for their tenure. AI can allow employees to be self-sufficient during the onboarding process by automating the paperwork completion process. Digital assistants and chatbots prove to be valuable partners for HR personnel by automatically guiding the new hires throughout the onboarding process. These digital assistants can give real-time and round-the-clock assistance to new joiners, thereby eliminating the need for HR personnel to cater to such requests.

4. Career Development

AI plays a very important role in managing the career development and growth of employees. AI-powered HCM platforms have the potential to curate personalized career programs for employees based on their skill set, past experiences, and performance ratings. AI delivers employee-specific learning programs to help them choose their career progression path. It allows them to explore their potential skills and stay invested in the organization.

AI also collects the various data points along employees’ career paths and builds models based on employee survey responses, tenures in their current role, duration of their current hierarchy, their last pay raise cycle, and performance appraisal ratings to evaluate the likelihood of employees leaving the organization. Such models allow leaders to be proactive rather than being reactive in devising retention strategies to retain and nurture key talent.

5. Learning and Development

Another area where AI is transforming the landscape of HR business processes is Learning and development. AI can deliver personalized training and learning programs for employees based on their role, experiences, work styles, and career interests. Employees would be more engaged in personalized and relevant learning paths that align with their areas of interest and fulfill their career aspirations.

AI-enabled platforms can also suggest learning paths for employees who are recently promoted or shifted to a different department. It enables them to acquire the necessary skills relevant to the nature of the job. Personalized recommendations allow for employees to be empowered with the right set of skills required to progress forward in their roles, improving employee sentiment and engagement.

6. Performance Management

Performance Management, as a process, relies heavily on data. Therefore, it is important that leaders drive this process objectively and derive meaningful insights from the data collected for each employee. AI helps managers overcome subjectivity by highlighting strengths and areas of improvement for their employees and improving the decision-making process at various stages of the performance management cycle.

Leveraging AI has been known to reduce decision-making bias by highlighting data points on various evaluation parameters like employee utilization, employee achievements, training, organization level contributions to suggest ratings, which can be used by managers to build rating models.

7. Business Intelligence and Analytics

Reporting and analytics is an area that leverages the capabilities of AI and Machine Learning to a large extent. AI-powered BI dashboards provide quick and actionable insights to managers and leaders, enhancing their strategic decision-making capabilities. It can also be used to predict the likelihood of employees taking time off during holiday seasons based on their past behaviors.

AI can help managers be proactive in managing their workforce by providing them sufficient time to reshuffle their employee shifts to keep their day-to-day activities up and running. Based on employee time reporting history, AI models can also predict things like seasonality or periods where departments are likely to experience peaks and valleys of resource effort.  For example, when trying to forecast overtime, , AI reporting allows managers to request additional budgets beforehand, limiting impacts on last-minute budgeting provisions.

AI reporting tools can build heat maps to track employee training progress across the organization, allowing leaders to take strategic workforce planning measures to reskill or upskill employees. Leadership teams can also track compliance on various parameters and automate follow-ups needed to close gaps in compliance adherence.

As a leading service provider of HCM offerings, Oracle HCM Cloud is leading this transformation. It provides a vast offering of AI-powered services, such as recruitment, onboarding, career development, succession planning, compensation benchmarking, performance management, and many others.

Oracle’s digital assistant uses Machine learning and Artificial intelligence to understand user behavior and intent and offers personalized recommendations. This offers a customized experience for users interacting with the app and provides an instant way of resolving employee issues and addressing queries. With advanced data mining capabilities and predictive analysis, the digital assistant brings a human touch in personalizing responses and helps employees get an immediate response to any kind of HR business process assistance.

The influence of AI in organizations has been growing rapidly over the years. Employee-centric organizations must leverage AI-powered solutions to build, enrich and empower employee engagement and experience along every step of the way. AI gives them the ability to tap into vast amounts of data combined with predictive analysis.

It is a powerful tool that organizations should use to enhance their Human Resource strategies and build better talent pools and better workplaces. The future certainly looks very promising for such employee-centric organizations who adopt such AI-powered practices, as an ally in the war to remain ahead of the curve.

With decades of rich experience in areas of HCM implementation, migrations, and upgrades, CherryRoad is enabling customers to streamline their critical HR business functions by the adoption of modern HCM cloud practices. By leveraging the latest technology advancements in Oracle HCM Cloud, we accelerate the value of Oracle’s continuous innovation by building human-centered, industry-best solutions, which helps our customers seamlessly move to the cloud.

Working with a certified Oracle partner like CherryRoad can help you migrate to a Cloud HCM Platform quickly, efficiently, and with minimal disruption. To request a proposal for our services, email us at info@cherryroad.com.