Generative AI in HR: How to Use It for Better People Processes

We don't have any fancy stats about how many People Operations professionals currently use generative AI in HR.

That's because, most of the time, generative AI is undetectable. In fact, within the HR space, most people assume it's all about generating text or images you can add to a job description or Careers page. And our talks with People Ops professionals revealed that's the most common use case.

But generative AI is much more than that.

We will show how generative AI in HR extends beyond recruitment into employee onboarding, training, retention, and engagement. 

This article will: 

• Show how you can use generative AI in HR for all valid use cases. 
• Dig deeper and look at the risks of relying on generative AI for specific people processes and how to overcome these risks.

🕵️‍♀️ What is generative AI in HR?

Generative AI refers to using tools or systems that rely on artificial intelligence to create new text, images, videos, audio, and other forms of content. 

These models are trained on massive amounts of existing data and then use that knowledge to produce novel outputs that resemble the training data.

In HR, generative AI is already used in areas like writing job descriptions, screening resumes, or conducting interviews.

👀 There are already dozens of applications for AI in HR, so drop an eye over our examples to learn how you can apply AI in your own people processes.

🤖 How does generative AI affect HR?

Generative AI has the potential to significantly impact your HR department's efforts and transform the way they operate by:

• Improving the efficiency of your People Ops team: Generative AI tools can quickly generate text and content like job descriptions, offer letters, training materials, and employee handbooks. This saves People teams time and allows them to focus on higher-value tasks requiring their creativity or face-to-face presence. 
• Personalizing employee experiences: With the right data, generative AI models can produce personalized communications, onboarding plans, and career roadmaps tailored to each employee's needs and goals. This level of customization improves engagement and retention for your employees as you'll be able to dedicate time to every single person in your organization. 
• Providing more insights: When trained on relevant datasets, AI-based solutions can surface new insights into areas like compensation trends, skills gaps, and succession planning. HR leaders can then leverage these insights to make more informed strategic decisions about every step of the employee life cycle.
• Speeding up content creation: Feeling the burden of starting from a blank page? People Ops professionals can instead turn to generative AI to quickly generate the initial content (or just the ideas) that they can refine and adapt to their employer brand. This dramatically speeds up routine content production and can even help your team be more creative. 
• Fast-tracking processes: Automate time-consuming multi-step HR processes like defining career progression frameworks. By automating data collection, analysis, and initial content creation, you're speeding up processes that used to involve many stakeholders and iterations. All this while still keeping their feedback in mind.

🦾 How can generative AI be used for HR? 

Sure, there are hundreds of ways in which you can use generative AI in HR. But let's look at real-world examples of how generative AI has been successfully implemented in HR. 

Creating personalized training content 

AI lets you adapt to the requirements of every learner, creating materials that align with their skills, competencies, and prior completion of training. 

As a result, all employees can enjoy a customized learning experience, receiving the relevant content they need when they need it.

Zavvy's team leader Vanessa Otto also uses Zavvy's AI assistant to create micro courses to help her team's productivity and collaboration. 

With Zavvy's Slack-based AI coach, you can request specific criteria you want the AI to take into account when providing suggestions, such as user ratings, course level, training medium, duration, and other factors:

Making course recommendations based on user ratings with the Zavvy AI Slack Coach

Zavvy AI-based LMS also lets you generate micro courses in 15 seconds or take advantage of a library of over 1,000 courses:

Instant translations in multiple languages 

AI-powered content translation technology empowers organizations to swiftly and efficiently disseminate educational materials in various languages. This feature is convenient for global or dispersed teams, enabling them to access learning content in their preferred or native language. 

💡 Zavvy offers an AI translation tool that supports the following languages:

• English
• German
• French
• Italian
• Polish
• Spanish

Defining company-wide career models and competency frameworks

You can use generative AI to analyze how employees progress between organizational roles. 

For instance, you can use it to create logical career paths and progression models for different job families:

AI can also generate a comprehensive competency model that outlines the skills, knowledge, and abilities needed for each role at different proficiency levels. This provides a standardized framework for recruitment, performance management, and training. 

Singular Design is a specialized software development company based in Miami, Florida. They use a very intricate leveling system for their employees' roles. They rely on 5 levels and 15 sublevels as follows:

• (0) Junior (level) A, B, or C (sublevel);
• (1) Advanced A, B, or C;
• (2) Specialist A, B, or C;
• (3) Expert A, B, or C;
• (4) Senior Expert A, B, or C.

With Zavvy's Career Frameworks, they can assign these levels to their employees. To speed up the process, they turned to Zavvy's AI to create the descriptions for these roles in Spanish.

Rewriting feedback in a more constructive way 

Feedback can sometimes come across as critical or hurtful. And sometimes, we simply don't know how to put our feedback on paper (or the keyboard).

Generative AI tools can help make feedback more constructive and actionable instead. 

The right solution will help you with both the best practices you need to effectively share feedback and the actual snippets for properly rewriting the feedback you want to share:

Performance and feedback analysis 

Performance reviews or simply analyzing feedback an employee has received will always require a human's full judgment and empathy. That's because they're closely connected within an employee's development journey. And employees undeniably depend on their leaders to assess their performance and offer precise feedback that aids in their skill development. 

Partner at McKinsey and Company, Bryan Hancock, observes that he doesn't fully rely on generative AI to run an employee's performance review.

However, as a McKinsey evaluator, he takes individual long-form feedback and adds it into a digital tool. This is where AI comes in to help him correctly (and swiftly) analyze the text and score it based on pre-existing criteria. 

Generative AI helps evaluators like Bryan get an initial draft for the performance review much faster. Tools provide an accurate summary that gives evaluators everything they need to analyze a person's evolution and spot potential growth opportunities.

Simply put, it frees up their time to analyze the real meaning behind an employee's behavior and results. This can save you hours you can instead dedicate to meeting up with the employees or coaching them.

💡Zavvy allows managers to condense feedback for each employee at a time. These feedback summaries provide comprehensive insights into employee strengths and weaknesses and propose suggestions for improvement and further growth. 

👉 For similar use cases, check out a complete guide to implementing AI in performance management.

Generating job descriptions or interview questions

Perhaps the most common use case for generative AI in the People Ops space is generating job ads and interview questions. 

With everyone using generative AI for this, you're risking a lack of creativity and authenticity. To prevent this, stick to three best practices:

• Start with your own values and best practices: The best way to get started is by feeding the AI model with examples of relevant content like existing job descriptions and interview questions. However, you'll also want to mention your tone, style, and desired structure to ensure the final result aligns with your employer brand. 
• Be VERY specific: A prompt like "Write a job description for a Senior Web Developer" will not cut it. Provide the AI model with the exact context, like the skills or requirements you're looking for. You can even specify what you don't want in the final output.
• Test on sample candidates: The beauty of AI is that it gives you the resources you need much faster. This means you'll end up with many different variants you can test to finally find the one that will move the needle for most candidates in a fraction of the time. 

👉 For specific prompts, check out eight practical ChatGPT hacks HR teams can safely rely on.

The Arc team goes beyond the basics by using AI to generate outbound messages for sourcing candidates on LinkedIn. Cynthia Bolasina, Lead Talent Partner at Arc, frequently turns to ChatGPT to source qualified candidates on LinkedIn based on existing job descriptions. 

Here's a ChaptGPT prompt she uses to source top talent that she's shared with us:

"I want you to act as a recruiter who works for Arc.dev. I will provide some information about job openings, and it will be your job to generate email templates or sequences for sourcing qualified applicants through LinkedIn.

My first request is to generate a 3-step sequence template for a new {type of position} role with {Company and a one-line description}.

I'm looking for a {Job information}. Highlight that this opportunity is 100% remote, Salary between {range}."

Next is what one of the emails used by Cynthia looks like:

Amanda Halle, the founder of Mindful Growth Partners, also shared with us a prompt she recommends using if you need to give feedback to a direct report:

"Create a scripted dialogue of a conversation that a manager needs to have with their direct report. The direct report is a <insert role>. They have <insert behavior, situation, impact.> Use the situation, behavior, and impact model."

Chatbots answering questions

AI chatbots are a great solution for answering your people's FAQs, the same ones that come every time new hires join your company.

Chatbots are best used during the recruitment and onboarding stages to get new team members up to speed a lot faster:

You shouldn't eliminate the human factor from the onboarding process. Pairing new recruits with an onboarding buddy is a best practice many companies still omit. 

But while your managers won't have time to sit with a new employee through every stage of an onboarding training process or checklist, you'll need them to talk to a real person. This gets them accustomed to the team environment, provides unique insights, and keeps them generally more confident about their future work and relations.

🚨 Beware of the perils of generative AI in HR

Generative AI does come with its fair share of challenges. To help you prevent potential issues, we're covering three core perils of using generative AI and how to avoid them.

Too much reliance on pre-existing content

One of the most common complaints about generative AI is that it mostly re-uses already created content. That means that if you're looking to generate a job description for a specific role, the AI-based tool will mostly pull responsibilities, skills, and expectations from the huge pool of millions of other past job descriptions. As a result, the final job description won't include any new duties or competencies.

So how do you fix this?

You can't fully rely on generative AI if you want to stand out. Need a job description that will catch candidates' attention? 

Start from an AI-generated one and then add your own touch to it. This means any unique responsibilities the role might require within your organization, new or emerging skills that other companies might not mention, and your own unique set of perks.

Biased job ads

Job ads written by ChatGPT are 40% more biased than those humans write. For this research, Jihane Kamil, Head of Data Science at Develop Diverse, notes:

"We randomly selected job adverts written by humans for different types of roles, some of which are stereotypically associated with specific societal groups, such as software engineers and nurses. Our one-to-one analysis compared with job adverts generated by AI showed that ChatGPT was far more likely to choose biased words and expressions for the same role than a human would. In short, ChatGPT reinforces existing biases and stereotypes."

Jihane further notes that while AI performs well for automation, we should be a bit more cautious when using it for writing job descriptions:

"AI is a tool that you have to train with the right data and expertise. You have to question every outcome it gives you. You have to use it to guide and assist you, to give you the information — but ultimately, it's the humans that play the ultimate role in using that information to make a decision."

Legal issues 

When fully relying on generative AI for HR processes, you should always get legal advice first. That's because you'll be held responsible for any outcomes yourself, even if you've used AI tools to generate content or run other processes that might impact your employees, organization, customers, or other stakeholders. 

Having a legal advisor is the best course of action as you can always adapt the AI-based tools and processes based on factually incorrect information.

🤖 If you're choosing an AI tool for HR, we recommend testing a few options on our recommended AI platforms. You'll also find an implementation checklist and a tool comparison table to help you pick the right solution for your team.

➡️ Run amazing people processes 10x faster with Zavvy AI

Avoid all potential risks of using AI in HR by relying on a tool that keeps people at the forefront of your business. 

Zavvy's AI suite helps HR managers run worthwhile people processes by:

• Speeding up content production for training and onboarding.
• Helping employees provide better feedback to their colleagues. Plus get feedback summaries at the end of each cycle, highlighting key strengths and deevelopment areas.
• Implementing career frameworks without spending weeks.
• Helping your people design their development journeys with AI guidance.
• Getting the AI Learning Assistant in Slack to help employees get help writing feedback, find learning resources, and receive coaching advice.

📅 Book a free Zavvy demo to see how you can successfully use AI for your People Operations.