By Ranjini Chakraborty
AI is no longer a distant discussion – it’s a reality. It’s simplified so many functions and for HR, AI algorithms have become increasingly common. Its effective use can be felt across processes like recruitment, interviewing applicants, managing workers’ roles, evaluating performance, and aligning skill sets with appropriate coaching. It has significantly helped in simplifying the recruitment process by increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
However, it’s still not perfect and is created by humans to help and unfortunately isn’t risk free. It may create unconscious bias – yes, a machine, system generated option can lead to that too.
Issues in AI: Believe it or not.
- Discrimination: Since the system is created by humans, we may not be devoid of our personal biases. The gender discrimination is still very real, and we don’t know how the system is being fed to filter out applications based on gender, caste, religion etc by using keywords.
- Data Protection & Security: AI-generated recruitment process may hamper an employee’s privacy by collating personal information, performance report, background information, communications etc. There needs to be a conscious effort to safeguard this information in case it’s used inappropriately in any regard; for pay parity, unfit behaviour, personal bias etc.
- Hiring & Termination: Relying solely on AI processes for hiring & termination decisions is a serious oversight and unfortunately, a reality too in some cases.
The long & short of it is that humans cannot work in silos with the system and needs proper reviewing. It’s imperative to understand that it’s put in place to aid humans, not replace them.
How can we be ethical with the use of AI?
- Cut the Ambiguity: The least we can do to eradicate the fear of this bias is to be transparent with our people. Transparency & explainability might be the first step to being ‘ethical’ and we must strive to offer clear answers & justification during talent acquisition.
- Risk Analysis & Assessment: Another vital step to understanding the gaps is to be conducting a thorough risk assessment programs to understanding how AI affects its people & their performance & approach.
- Accept, Acknowledge, Address: The 3 golden ‘As’ of achieving trust. This goes across sectors & companies. The first step to earning employee trust is to address that the system might be flawed. This includes testing AI system to detect any biases, that it ensures diversity, inclusion and equality and having the correct training to correct it.
- Not a one-time affair: We cannot stop at addressing flaws at the beginning and not re-evaluate it timely. This needs to be a timely & a regular exercise to eradicate any risks of biases erupting.
Effective Use of AI?
The goal of AI is to better the existing performance & functions. We need to know, especially after the Great Resignation era that employee & talent retention is the key to company’s growth. This is how AI should be employed instead to achieve it:
- First and foremost: Speak the same language. We need to ensure that everyone who’s using AI is doing it correctly. It’s important to educate and train the personnel to avoid any basic mistakes.
- Understand the sentiment: AI can be used in aligning career objectives, personal goals with appropriate training & development workshops & activities. The company that understands its employees’ preferences & needs, will always be preferred over any other.
- Increase in Speed: Let’s admit it, if used correctly, it can significantly help in getting the work done faster, helping people to somewhat escape the grunt work and being more at ease.
- Learn, develop: With many AI-powered tools at disposal, HR professionals can use them to identify gaps and help with personalized coaching & sessions. It can be used for investing in learning and development of employees’ overall growth. Encourage learning & reward good performance.
In nutshell
We need to know that AI-powered tools exist to augment the productivity & efficiency of the HR teams, not to replace them. We need to realize the impact of AI and exercise caution for maintaining fairness.
Further, encourage inclusivity, diversity & equality. We learnt that humans would have to control the features and AI-powered tools & technologies. Therefore, we need to work on eradicating any biases in humans who make the call end of day. We need to educate them and have them unlearn biases: to accept inclusivity and knowing healthy boundaries. To being more accepting of the diversity around and keeping away from trigger words, we need to invest in bringing them on the same page first because the goal ultimately is to be a company that’s reliable, inclusive and growth oriented.
The author is director HR, Giesecke & Devrient MS India Pvt Ltd