15+ Innovative Ways to Use AI in HR

AI is the buzzword of the moment, but it’s not just noise. Business executives have invested more than $1 trillion into generative AI; most HR leaders (76%) believe integrating AI into their workflows is key to keeping up with other companies.

Savvy orgs recognize this. But it’s not enough to add AI to your to-do list—the AI era marks a moment of radical change in the workplace, meaning it might be time to reimagine your workforce. AI is changing the way we work, socialize, shop, and interact with the world around us, and it’s clear that AI literacy isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s essential. In fact, 71% of employers prefer AI skills over experience when hiring a candidate.

There’s no doubt about it: the age of AI is here. We’ve gathered our top four innovative tips to make the most of AI in HR, so you can focus less on paperwork and more on peoplework.

Artificial intelligence in HR

You may be surprised to learn that AI is already everywhere in HR, including human capital management (HCM) solutions, tackling key tasks like payroll, onboarding, hiring, analytics, and more. AI can help make your HR tasks faster and easier, but you have to know what kinds of AI tools to use and how to use them efficiently.

What is generative AI (gen AI)?

Generative AI—or gen AI for short—is all the rage these days. But what exactly is it? While traditional AI is task-oriented, gen AI is more—well, generative—cooking up fresh and imaginative ideas.

In other words, traditional artificial intelligence is all about crunching numbers and analyzing data with a set of rules, while gen AI takes it up a notch by creating original, creative content based on its “training”—the “conversations” it has with users. Platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude boast human-like conversation; Dall-E generates images from written prompts.

The meteoric rise of gen AI might seem sudden, but it’s been evolving for decades. From filtering spam to curating relevant search results, recommending shows, movies, and products to helping refine medical imaging and diagnostics, AI’s been part of our lives (and workplaces) for quite some time now. Gen AI takes all of that a step further.

Because of its ability to process and learn from human input, gen AI tools have a number of capabilities that make them great for work, including:

• Translating between two or more languages
• Learning or conversing in new languages
• Summarizing, analyzing, and composing text
• Researching and creating content from that knowledge
• Referencing content from earlier sessions
• Using follow-up prompts to better refine generated content

What is ChatGPT for HR?

Created and owned by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a chat-based large language model or LLM—an AI tool that processes, analyzes, and generates language.

ChatGPT’s claim to fame is that it does this in a conversational, interactive way. ChatGPT surpassed one million users in its first five days and garnered 100 million users just two months later, but the rapid expansion of other tools (like Gemini and Claude) means there are more tools in your AI toolbox.

The best ways to use AI for HR

Consider which HR tasks take you the most time, are the most draining, or need the least human touch. If you’re not sure where to start, check out our top innovative ways to use AI in HR today.

5 ways to use AI in recruiting

Hiring was the most common (44%) and most difficult (22%) challenge facing HR in 2024. Why not leverage the power of AI for talent acquisition?

A Resume Builder survey found that more than half (51%) of companies use AI in their hiring process, whether to review resumes (82%) or stay in touch with applicants via AI chatbots (42%). And while it may seem shocking to hear that many HR pros (65%) expect to reject candidates without ever laying human eyes on their applications, it shouldn’t be. AI also enables job seekers to apply to thousands of job postings a day, meaning AI might be the only way to tackle all those resumes, especially for small HR teams.

Here are five ways AI recruiting tools can improve your recruitment process:

1. Job descriptions: Share general information about qualifications and responsibilities, and watch AI craft a detailed job description for job sites and recruiting events.
2. Resume screening. Sort through resumes faster by asking AI to highlight key skills and relevant experience.
3. Candidate communication. Craft a great candidate experience with AI chatbots and communication tools that do things like answer candidate questions and send automatic updates.
4. Skills assessments. Use AI to help you create tests that evaluate relevant skills and competencies.
5. Workforce analytics. Analyze hiring data to identify trends in recruitment and employee performance, improve retention, and make better hiring decisions.

While you’re at it, try using LLMs like ChatGPT for interview questions.

4 ways to use AI in employee engagement

AI can’t replace the human in human resources, but it sure can help you speed things up and work more efficiently. Leverage AI for employee engagement tasks that can be automated or that require very little oversight.

Here are four ways AI can improve employee engagement:

1. Surveys: Ensure that employees feel heard by crafting well-written surveys according to trending topics or identified employee concerns.
2. Employee development plans: Pull information from your own databases to find training gaps and ensure employees are educated on the latest best practices.
3. Policy questions: Use common information found online or your own index of sample policies to automatically create detailed documents for your company. Better yet, built-in HRIS AI assistants can do that for you.
4. Announcements: Tell AI the “what,” “where,” and “why” and allow it to generate engaging language to announce events, policy changes, new hires, and more.

Other great ways to use AI in HR

Brainstorming, drafting, and refining written content

To generate the best AI output, be as specific as possible in your prompting. Automatically generating content from a detailed prompt is one of AI’s specialties, and it has many applications for HR professionals, including your most routine tasks.

• Emails: AI can craft anything from candidate rejection letters to emails aimed at generating interest for a job opening.
• Offer letters: Try starting with a job offer letter template, and use AI to help you refine and personalize it from there.
• Internal communications: Get AI’s help drafting internal announcements, whether it’s to tell employees about open enrollment or an upcoming performance cycle.

Conducting competitive analysis and industry research

Collecting and analyzing data can be a time-consuming process. AI can pull data from various sources, synthesize it, and communicate insights.

• Time off policies: Make sure your vacation, personal, and sick time policies are in line with industry standards.
• Compensation planning: Gather and analyze data on average compensation packages to ensure your offers are competitive for your industry.
• Laws around HR challenges: Ask AI for the most updated information on regulatory compliance issues such as firing and parental leave. Better yet, ask for links to official sources to confirm its findings.
• Create pros and cons lists: Make informed, data-driven decisions with the help of AI-generated analysis.

You should always fact-check legal, regulatory, compliance, and labor law topics with official sources, as these can have costly legal consequences for your business. AI is a great tool to help you get started, but it should never replace official sources.

Data analysis

From employee satisfaction to performance tracking, AI can help you make more strategic decisions based on concrete data.

• Trends in eNPS^® Results: Analyze employee Net Promoter Scores to determine where your organization can improve and how you can boost morale.
• Performance Metrics: Analyze an employee’s strengths and weaknesses, set and track KPIs, and generate actionable steps for coaching and improvement.

7 AI prompts for HR

AI can help HR pros save time and boost productivity by automatically generating content, analyzing data, and ensuring employees are happy, engaged, and productive.

However, the quality of AI output relies heavily on the prompts you give it. Here’s a list of seven prompts HR professionals can try out to start automating processes today:

• Write a rejection letter for a candidate. Let them know we’ll keep their resume on file if they choose to apply in the future.
• Summarize the responses to the second survey question, and show the most common issues employees mention.
• Provide five of the top metrics for measuring performance for a product development specialist.
• I am interviewing a candidate for a business consultant role. Draft 10 interview questions and one interview exercise for them to complete.
• Suggest three influential pieces of research all HR professionals should read, and summarize four critical points for each.
• Suggest five ways a sales employee can gain competency in setting sales appointments.
• Write 10 engaging email subject lines for a new product announcement.

What are the limitations of AI?

While AI can help you work faster, it can't replace your human brain or face-to-face interactions with your employees. Here are a few AI examples of the software’s limitations in the workplace.

Shallow understanding of your company

AI is trained using large amounts of public data and any private data you feed it. It doesn’t understand the nuances or culture of your organization, so you’ll still have to review outputs for accuracy, cultural appropriateness, and brand voice.

Missing context

To protect sensitive employee data, you should never use it in public AI tools like ChatGPT. Without that context, though, AI can’t make the kinds of strategic, informed decisions you need to make—for hiring, firing, conducting an HR investigation, making important HR policy changes, and everything in between.

Can’t replace human interaction

You don’t want a bot to replace you, and the good news is it can’t—not really. AI may use natural language processing, but it isn’t capable of true social-emotional learning (SEL), and can’t replace human interaction.

These skills aren’t just useful in HR, they’re critical. In fact, top tech giants are urging schools to focus on SEL skills as AI usage rises.

Bias

AI doesn’t differentiate between biased and unbiased input when it’s being trained. And because it’s trained using public information and user input, it’s vulnerable to adopting biases.

AI has been known to assume employee gender based on role, fail to accurately identify people of color, and extend lower credit limits to women. There are currently very few controls for identifying and eliminating bias in AI tools, so take care when using them.

Fortunately, AI researchers are actively working to improve AI safety. For example, New York City recently enacted a law that requires employers and employment agencies to complete a bias audit and provide required notices—otherwise, automated employment decision tools are prohibited.

Help your employees use AI responsibly

As the HR manager, you have a responsibility to use this new technology wisely and protect your employees’ personal information. It’s also your job to set the tone for how employees use AI and other large language models in the workplace.

Educate your employees on the benefits and risks, especially with regard to how AI stores information. For example, if an individual at your company poses a question or feeds a prompt to ChatGPT, it may store that data and later use it to refine answers and update its language model. While this trains ChatGPT to become more accurate over time, it also means the information is available to OpenAI, which has come under fire for its data privacy practices.

To mitigate risks, consider crafting a corporate AI policy for your workplace that addresses the specifics of what employees can and can’t use to prompt AI. This helps protect data and ensure your company and employees remain safe.

There are also opt-outs available to ensure that AI platforms don't train on your data. This is typically the default for API and enterprise versions of popular tools—and these opt-outs are one of the key reasons businesses choose to enroll in paid or upgraded plans, rather than allowing individual employees to use free versions of the tools.

Net Promoter, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered U.S. trademarks, and NetPromoter Score and Net Promoter System are service marks, of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc. and Fred Reichheld.