One of the biggest changes in the digital environment and in business happened at the end of last year, when the new AI tool, ChatGPT, reached over one million users just 5 days after its public launch, on November 30, 2022.
Over the past five years, Artificial Intelligence in HR has evolved, being used to assess candidates to see if they fit the job profile they’ve applied for or to answer basic questions from candidates and employees. But ChatGPT comes with a novelty – it can answer complex questions with instant, easy-to-understand answers. Because it is based on natural language processing (NLP).
Let’s get to know it better and find out what role it can play in the HR department, what advantages it brings and what are the perspectives regarding this tool. Is there a concern about replacing certain functions in the HR department with ChatGPT?
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an “Artificial Intelligence Chatbot” developed by OpenAI, a research lab conducting AI research.
The name comes from “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”, its role being to provide detailed answers to users’ questions. Although the answers may not be factually correct every time, they provide in-depth explanations and can even remember what they said previously and correct themselves if necessary. Basically, it uses the previous questions and answers to determine the following answers. In many ways, it works like a more sophisticated, interactive search engine.
The main way it differs from mainstream AI tools is that it can, in a supervised manner, adapt to solve your problems.
ChatGPT also has a moderation API that helps filter queries, helping to avoid racist and other offensive questions. In its current form, it does not have access to the Internet, and the knowledge it has acquired is based solely on the data it received in training. He only has knowledge of events up to 2021.
What relevance does ChatGPT have for HR?
Due to its interactive nature, it can provide excellent support to employees by handling their questions and providing solutions to the situations they encounter. It also helps reduce the cost, time, and effort required to keep employees engaged.
ChatGPT can also work as an analytics tool as it makes meaningful correlations across your employee database. Thus it identifies the significant problems in a company and can suggest practical solutions to increase the employee engagement rate.
Due to its versatile nature, ChatGPT can develop advanced and customized employee engagement strategies tailored to them.
What ChatGPT can actually do in HR
Here are some of the answers ChatGPT provided to this question:
- Recruitment – can be used to scan candidate CVs and answer HR’s important questions about applicants’ qualifications and experience
- ChatGPT can develop your entire recruitment strategy with very specific examples and give you a step-by-step guide to follow.
- ChapGPT can write HR policies.
- ChapGPT can write job ads and job descriptions.
- Contributes to increasing employee engagement – can answer frequently asked questions of employees about benefits, and company policies, thus giving the opportunity for HR specialists to deal with more complex aspects of their work.
- Onboarding – answers new colleagues’ questions and provides them with information about company policies and procedures.
- Employee training – create interactive training modules and answer questions from participants during training.
But it’s much more creative than that:
- Imagine you want to change something in your HR software that includes employee data. All you have to do is tell ChatGPT what you want to change and you’ll see the change instantly. It will let you know if there are any problems created by those changes and how to fix them.
- Imagine a tool that analyzes in real-time every conversation that takes place in the company via email, Slack, Teams, etc.; and it ensures that all parties are on the same wavelength and that no one is left out.
- Imagine a tool that can ensure that there is no pay inequity in the company for the same jobs and the same level of experience, and if someone tries to do something that is unfair, it immediately alerts the right people to fix it.
- Imagine a tool that can consistently measure performance (against set goals) for all workers, regardless of their work environment (remote or hybrid).
- Imagine a tool that can alert a manager about an employee who might be going through a mental health problem before the problem becomes bigger, and then helps the manager deal with the problem.
THE ADVANTAGES THAT CHAT GPT CAN BRING TO YOUR BUSINESS
QUICK SOLUTIONS TO COLLEAGUES’ QUESTIONS
ChatGPT can be used as a chatbot to provide quick answers to employee questions.
Additionally, ChatGPT requires absolutely zero training as a query management tool. It can also be used to conduct anonymous surveys that help employees provide honest responses and gather valuable feedback.
IMPROVING EMPLOYER BRANDING STRATEGIES
The support provided by ChatGPT helps improve the employee experience in the company. It ensures that employees remain satisfied with their work and are engaged. Therefore, the quality of the products or services provided by the company improves considerably, thus contributing to the creation of a strong employer brand.
ANALYTICS BASED ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
ChatGPT can be used to analyze your employee database and reach meaningful conclusions. The AI chatbot can also provide useful insights to better understand your employees, perform predictive analytics and propose actions to avoid unwanted scenarios.
AI-based analytics can also help us understand the details that contribute to people’s well-being. For example, it will help you understand people’s behavior towards holidays, their presence or absence from the office, and colleagues’ breaks. You will find out who is reluctant to take vacations or breaks, and who works long overtime. Such in-depth information will help you act on time and according to the expectations of the people on your team, creating a good mood in the team.
COST-EFFECTIVE SOLUTION
ChatGPT automates multiple tasks and improves employee engagement. Engaged employees produce better results, thus reducing the time and costs needed to develop products and services.
In addition, the OpenAI team will continue to update their chatbot, ensuring that it remains ready for any questions from peers.
ChatGPT can be found here. It’s free (for now) to anyone who wants to try it. And it’s worth testing it to see how it can make your work easier, how it can write a job ad, and how cooperative it is in improving it according to your requirements or expectations.
HOWEVER, THERE ARE DISADVANTAGES
While ChatGPT can help you with paperwork, it can’t replace relationships. In recruiting talent, it’s also important to create a degree of trust between job candidates and hiring managers. Sure, a bot can read cover letters, screen candidates, and schedule interviews, but it can’t take a company’s desired candidate to dinner and convince them to make a career change. “The only thing an HR person should do is get the candidate to trust them,” says Tim Sackett, CEO of HRU Tech.
ChatGPT also has another critical flaw: it only has information up to 2021, meaning it doesn’t know current events, recent labor laws, or the labor market over the past year.
In addition, it lacks high-quality security. In fact, when logging in for the first time, users are greeted with a message advising them not to send confidential information through the chatbot. This is a major problem for HR managers who manage sensitive information.
WILL CHATGPT REPLACE PEOPLE WHO WORK IN HR NOW?
Will chatbots take our jobs? It is perhaps the most pressing question that we can answer by analyzing the situation objectively. It is natural for some jobs to disappear and new ones to appear.
If your only responsibilities are basic HR duties, then yes, you should be concerned. AI tools created for HR will be able to take over these basic tasks. In the near future, there will be no need to write an HR strategy or job postings. Instead, you can tell ChatGPT what you want and it will instantly create a draft, and then ask it to make revisions until you think it’s perfect. If now it takes two or three HR professionals to handle resume scanning, recruiting, strategy, and employer branding, in the future the work can be handled by one HR professional and an AI assistant. Chat GPT’s function is to support, to reduce redundant tasks so that people can deal with the tasks that fulfill them.
The right way to talk about ChatGPT is as a trusted colleague or counterpart in the organization,” says Julia Dhar, partner and founder of Behavioral Science Lab.
What a tool like ChatGPT can’t do is make decisions based on the results it creates, says Rafee Tarafdar, chief technology officer at IT consultancy Infosys. HR professionals must use their critical thinking and expertise to make decisions.
It will require people to tell ChatGPT what they want to create. We will continue to need smart, agile HR professionals who know what they are doing. You simply won’t be the one working on redundant tasks, which will allow you to do much more in the direction you want to develop in your career. ChatGPT will tell you what you want. And it’s important to know what you want.