What HR Needs to Know About Generative AI

Human resources leaders face the same question that most managers are grappling with these days: How can AI help us do better work, more efficiently? In a January 2024 survey of 2,366 US HR professionals conducted by the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM), only about a quarter of respondents said they were using AI. Of that number, most just started using it in the past year.

But generative AI is already proving itself to be useful for HR in several ways—particularly around writing text and summarizing information. These applications of generative AI can help save HR professionals time by affording HR professionals the opportunity to focus less on administrative tasks and more on helping employees and doing strategic work such as hiring forecasts and talent-skill analysis. With its ability to boost efficiency, generate content, and deliver new insights, generative AI can be applied to help HR professionals lead their workforce.

What Is Generative AI?

Generative AI, also known as GenAI, is a type of artificial intelligence that can be applied to produce new text, image, video, and audio content. GenAI creates content in response to the prompts that people provide. Unlike other forms of machine learning and artificial intelligence that focus on analyzing data, GenAI produces new media. In the context of human resources, for example, GenAI might be used to write a first draft of a job description or to produce a summary of feedback from an employee survey.

How Does GenAI Impact HR?

HR teams are learning that GenAI, with its ability to produce different forms of content, can help human resources teams in numerous ways, such as improving departmental productivity and helping employees access employment information. When productivity gains free HR pros from more routine, conventional tasks, these professionals can help the company in more strategic areas such as talent development and recruiting process improvement. Likewise, if a GenAI-powered chatbot can quickly answer an employee’s question on tuition reimbursement, that employee can get back to their main job duties. Here are ways that GenAI may impact HR:

• Higher productivity. As an example, HR experts expect one of the first big benefits of GenAI will be reducing the manual work involved in recruiting. The technology can help draft job descriptions for open roles and craft communications to candidates about interview scheduling. Taking these tedious recruiting tasks off the plates of HR professionals can provide such HR professionals more time to do high-impact recruiting work such as developing strategies and initiatives that attract today’s best talent.
• Content creation. With GenAI, HR pros and managers performing HR tasks can generate text and images to support processes such as recruiting, talent acquisition, and drafting employee reviews. With employee reviews, a manager could apply GenAI to facilitate drafting a summary of all the peer feedback provided for an employee over the year, for example, and to facilitate crafting a paragraph of prose from the manager’s bullet points of key feedback.
• Better employee experience. GenAI can help HR deliver employee-facing tools to improve the overall employee experience. For instance, AI-powered chatbots can be applied to assist with routine questions about benefits, vacation time, and expense policies, and assist with tasks such as onboarding protocols. GenAI can even be applied to help employees track their career goals and create customized development plans by recommending training that would be most valuable to them and to the company.
• Extract insights. GenAI can be applied to help HR teams parse through and gain insights from unstructured data sources. For example, GenAI can be applied to analyze and summarize comments from a companywide employee feedback survey by combing through thousands of comments—or even tens of thousands of comments at large companies.

8 Generative AI HR Use Cases

From creating draft job descriptions to helping managers better understand employee performance, there’s a plethora of ways GenAI can be applied to assist with HR activities. Some companies that are already taking advantage of these capabilities have seen gains in hiring, onboarding, and retaining talent for their workforce.

1. Recruitment and talent acquisition

Organizations that use AI for HR processes most commonly apply it to talent acquisition, according to the 2024 SHRM survey. The study finds that 65% of HR professionals are using AI to help generate job descriptions. GenAI can help analyze industry trends and a company’s preferred skill set and experience, to assist with producing job descriptions to catch the attention of qualified candidates. Recruiting teams can even point GenAI to company webpages that highlight an organization’s mission and values, then have GenAI create a summary to include in job descriptions. The recruiting team remains responsible for reviewing and refining a final version of any job description, but GenAI can help save time on creating the initial content.

2. Employee onboarding

HR departments can use artificial intelligence to improve the onboarding experience by delivering key information to new employees regarding benefits enrollment, policies for taking time off, and other workplace essentials. Chatbots can provide immediate responses to the kinds of questions that new employees generally ask. GenAI can serve as something like a personal assistant, helping new employees find the right information and answering common questions.

3. Training and development

According to LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report, 93% of organizations are concerned about employee retention. The most effective way to address this concern, per the report, is to provide learning opportunities, as 94% of workers say development opportunities would help keep them in their role. GenAI can be applied to assist in supporting HR’s training and development efforts by recommending customized development tracks, helping HR create training simulations, and adjusting learning paths based on each individual’s progress.

4. Performance management

With AI’s ability to continuously collect information, it can be used to gather employee performance data throughout the year, which GenAI can be applied to assist in summarizing such information in preparation for individual performance reviews. This approach can help prevent recency bias, or the tendency to overemphasize the importance of the most recent events, in the review process. GenAI can be applied to take managers’ notes or bulleted lists detailing an employee’s performance throughout the year, along with 360 reviews from their colleagues, and assist in turning that information into drafted prose for a performance review, which the manager can review and refine. This can help reduce the time managers spend drafting performance reviews so they can focus their time and attention on more in-depth conversations with employees about their work, goals, and achievements. Managers and employees can work together to create performance goals and personalized development plans, using GenAI to help draft the language of those plans.

5. Employee engagement and retention

GenAI can be applied to support employee engagement and retention by assisting in personalizing the employee experience in several ways. It can be applied to assist in recommending customized learning programs based on an employee’s goals and the company’s needs. GenAI’s natural language processing capabilities can be applied to help analyze employee feedback and communications in company channels to summarize employee sentiment about the workplace, much like ecommerce sites summarize thousands of product reviews to provide an overview. This can help leadership identify and address workplace issues to ultimately improve employee satisfaction. Additionally, AI can be applied to assist in monitoring patterns in employee data, such as high or low employee participation in performance evaluations or company activities. This can help HR teams predict potential disengagement and implement proactive strategies to try to increase employee engagement.

6. Workforce planning and analytics

Effective workforce planning requires analyzing, forecasting, and budgeting for staffing and hiring to help a company get the right number of people with the right skills in place to meet its goals. GenAI can be applied to help organizations address their workforce needs by assisting in gathering and summarizing historical data and market trends. For example, HR teams typically conduct skills audits periodically, perhaps as a big annual project or even less often. With GenAI, a human capital management system can be applied to assist in comparing a company’s existing skills based on employee profiles to the skills it needs based on job requisitions and descriptions. Through this process, it can help identify possible skill gaps and recommend workforce adjustments. HR teams can then prompt GenAI tools to refine and apply that initial analysis to be most relevant to their company’s business objectives. So, if a company wants to increase sales staff to support growth in a certain product area, they can ask for narrative summaries about the number and experience level of that product group’s sales team, retention and attrition rate trends in that group, and their performance against sales quotas.

7. HR administration and policy management

Policy management involves a company’s broader efforts around workplace health and safety, time and attendance, and regulatory compliance. GenAI can be applied to assist in reviewing new employee-related regulations and flagging them for the HR team. Further, GenAI can be applied to help support policy management by digesting and summarizing relevant content for HR teams to review and consider.

8. Diversity and inclusion

GenAI can be applied to assist in tracking workforce metrics and provide data-driven insights and summaries to help HR teams adjust recruitment strategies that impact diversity and inclusion. If HR uses GenAI to provide personalized training programs for all employees, for example, GenAI can be applied to help facilitate equal access to learning opportunities and aid in the increase of inclusion in education and training. By offering training focused on what the company values most and what will most help a given individual, this access can help to create opportunities for more employees.

The ROI of Generative AI in HR

GenAI’s ability to automate certain manual and repetitive content-creation and summarization tasks can lead to time and cost savings for your organization. To assess the potential ROI of incorporating GenAI into your HR processes, it’s important to zero in on specific areas where GenAI can improve a process for your organization

Think about what problems you would like GenAI to address. It has vast capabilities that can assist with common tasks, especially for recruiting duties, according to HR product experts. GenAI’s ability to help generate job descriptions, communications to job candidates, and quickly respond to employee queries can assist in creating significant time savings for your HR department. These time savings and efficiency gains may mean that you can support a growing employee base without adding HR staff, or that you can take on new HR initiatives without adding staff. Using technology to contain HR staffing costs over time can yield a tangible, measurable benefit.

GenAI’s role in HR can assist in creating an impact to your organization that goes beyond hard ROI—benefits such as getting more employees to engage in HR programs. For example, if employees are not participating in peer-to-peer feedback and GenAI can help simplify that process by helping draft peer reviews, that can benefit employee growth that helps the company through performance and retention.

If you understand what specific processes you want to improve, your organization can make the right technology choice to address the necessary improvements. Think about the kind of improvements that will increase your HR department’s productivity, such as through generating content or using chatbots to assist employees, and then how you can measure that improvement.

Future of GenAI in Human Resources

GenAI can be applied to help reshape what human resources teams do in important ways. Within the recruiting process, it can be applied to help HR professionals save time on tasks such as writing job descriptions and communicating with candidates. Once an organization has acquired talent, GenAI can continue to help by offering tools that support onboarding and professional growth. These include GenAI-authored answers to common questions that new employees may have, gathering information to draft performance reviews, and recommending customized learning plans for individual employees. These capabilities can lead to a lot of time saved for HR professionals while delivering positive experiences for employees.

HR professionals looking to stay relevant and effective in the age of GenAI can work toward such goal by making sure most of their time is spent performing functions that technology can’t. This could mean initiating discussions with business leaders about potential skills gaps within their workforce and setting up upskilling and reskilling programs to address organizational needs. Or perhaps it could mean focusing on creative strategies for targeting and attracting new talent to an organization, such as identifying new pools of potential workers and crafting training and professional development programs for them. This could also involve playing a more advisory role for managers and helping them facilitate more valuable work performance conversations with their direct reports.

HR leaders should also consider how they can get involved in the governance and deployment of GenAI within their organization. HR professionals can contribute meaningful input regarding the rollout of this new technology and how it can augment workforce skill development and career progression.

Get the Power of Generative AI with Oracle

The process of introducing generative AI to your HR organization can seem daunting at first, as your HR teams adapt to the ways in which it changes their work, and your employees at large learn what it can do for them. But with the right GenAI capabilities built into existing workflows, your team of HR professionals can become more efficient in acquiring talent for your organization, developing and engaging those employees in the workplace, and quickly addressing their needs and questions.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) is a complete cloud solution that can help you effectively manage your workforce, with tools that can personalize employee experiences via journeys, capture employee sentiment, offer skills and development opportunities, and utilize analytics to yield vital workforce insights. Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM also includes generative AI capabilities to help you automate HR processes and improve the employee experience. By providing a single user experience and data model across the company, plus embedded AI capabilities, Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM can help you plan, manage, and optimize global people processes. The AI-supported benefits include helping you create job postings, career pages, and company summaries in less time, and providing employees with contextual support through natural language conversation.

Generative AI in HR FAQs

How can generative AI be used in HR?
Generative AI can be applied to help automate human resources tasks such as drafting job postings for recruitment, answering questions throughout onboarding, aggregating content for performance management, and extracting insights for workforce planning.

How can AI be used for HR?
Talent acquisition is the most common use for AI in HR thanks to the technology’s ability to facilitate generating job descriptions, drafting communications with applicants, and identifying ideal candidates.

What are some of the main use cases for generative AI?
Some of the main use cases for generative AI in human resources are assisting with job descriptions and candidate communications for recruiting, supporting self-service applications for more a personalized employee experience, and summarizing content for performance management.

What is generative AI for HCM?
Generative AI for HCM can help human resources professionals complete more tasks in less time by embedding AI content creation tools in HR applications. These tools can assist HR teams by facilitating the creation of performance review summaries, drafting feedback comments to help improve employee performance, and providing contextual content to help guide employees with workflows.