AI: What Every HR Dept Needs to Know

PODCAST & TRANSCRIPT (excerpts)

Weisenfeld: There’s no question artificial intelligence is poised to change the workplace at a level not seen since the Industrial Revolution, and is already doing so in many cases. But what do these changes mean on the job front and how are they affecting the hiring process?

On this podcast we’ll take an in-depth look at AI with a man at the forefront of this trending area, Garry Mathiason. Garry spearheaded a first-of-its-kind practice area in forming the Robotics Practice Group at Littler Mendelson, the nation’s largest employment law firm, to address the many compliance issues arising with these technological advances.

Weisenfeld: Well Garry, so much is being written about AI these days, as we were just talking about off the air. How are companies using it on the employment front? 

Mathiason: David, there’s a tremendous expansion in the way AI is currently being used, and in the near future will be more intensively used, in dealing with companies on the HR and employment front. Obviously you’ve got a tremendous number of factors going on in the recruiting process. Aspects of that that are expanding is the ability to reach into potential candidates that aren’t necessarily on the job market but are likely to be interested in potential job offers.

There’s also just the ability to work through hundreds of thousands, or sometimes millions, of applications that are on websites, something that you couldn’t do physically but can do with AI.

Then on a more sophisticated level, AI is actually breaking down the job requirements and looking at résumés and breaking those down into their elements, and doing a much better job of connecting the necessary skills with the available positions.

That’s just in recruiting. You have then cybersecurity, you have AI working in the back office of HR from payroll to a number of routine functions that are especially well-suited for that technology. It’s advancing in the area of training. It’s actually entering the field of interviewing, and I’ll be talking a little bit about video interviewing and how AI relates to that. It’s reaching into the performance areas during the work day.

And it’s also looking at the potential that an employee is considering resigning or likely to take another position. AI can give you an indication of how likely that is. You also have some surprise analysis where you’ll find people that are kind of hidden within the structure of an organization but are excellent performers, and AI can sort them out.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I think the entire HR function is being reviewed from this perspective of AI, and that in no way pushes against the value and importance of human beings, especially in HR. But it really augments, facilitates and expedites, and I think in many cases improves the processes that we deal with.

Weisenfeld: I definitely want to get to some of those recruiting and hiring points that you mentioned, but before I do, I was interested to hear you say recently that HR has been slower to adopt AI tools than the rest of organizations, including even at the C-suite level, and that they can sometimes be mired in the past. So tell us a little bit about what you meant by that and what HR can do better. 

Mathiason: Well I think if you look at the C-suite there’s hardly a major company on the horizon that doesn’t have an AI plan. And even in the C-suite there’s a lot of consideration about how technology, advanced technology, is going to transform whatever process or product or system that the company is working with.

Back in 2017 there was a survey done that showed that 52% of HR professionals looking at their company didn’t think there was going to be the use of AI and weren’t anticipating it, which is really stunning because at the same time in the C-suite that percentage was probably down to less than 25%.

But to give you an indication of the change, we estimate that about 10-20% of HR organizations within companies are approaching something called the ‘mature use of the technology.’ That leaves a lot of room to develop. In sales that number is over 50%.

I do predict in the next five years we will make up the gap in HR because there’s such an awareness going on right now of how AI can be used and there’s a demand from the C-suite that this occur and occur rapidly, and I see the transformation coming day by day.

Weisenfeld: Well Garry, with recruiting and hiring, robots have been able to do some of these functions certainly for a while, but can they simulate a human interviewer’s ability to read candidates and their cues, such as considering the benefits, for instance, of a diverse workforce? [0:06:13.1]

Mathiason: Remarkably, AI working with human interviewers can be even more effective than what the human can do themselves. There’s a very, very interesting development, very recent development, where there’s a lot of technology coming out that will take a video interview and AI will look at a variety of characteristics that occur during the video interview – not just the content of the words expressed but the facial expressions, the pauses, the gestures – and will actually give you an assessment of how they view the candidate.

There are some legal considerations to be looked at but this is maturing, and is increasingly being recognized as something that is a valuable tool. And with that you can actually help expand the diverse workforce by taking away with the technology some of the indicators that might cause unintentional or unconscious bias on the part of a human interviewer, and I think that’s a plus.

But all of it needs to be balanced because there still are many factors that the human being brings into bear that AI can’t simulate. So it’s a combination of the two.

What I urge, however, is to be very careful to look at making sure under existing laws, that were written really before the technology was developed, whether you are reasonably in compliance. And that’s one of the initiatives we’re undertaking is to really give compliance solutions to companies so that they can move forward and use the technology more effectively and more extensively to accomplish the goals of the organization.