Can Chatgpt and HR Together Brighten the Future of HRM?

Prologue

Well, up till now, many of us may have come across the revolutionizing aspects of Chatgpt in terms of finding answers to our day-to-day queries. This has made us think, “Will chatgpt and hr together be advantageous or utterly disadvantageous for HR people and the field of HR altogether?

Further, recent news that says “Microsoft reportedly plans to invest 10 billion US dollars for AI tool ChatGPT development” has further increased the curiosity of hr people to know about this as many individuals and organizations have been using it quite actively, in the last couple of weeks, and it has made a splash. It hasn’t really made a splash in HR yet but there are a lot of potential implications for human resource management, especially when AI is being incorporated to boost hr operations.

ChatGPT and HR: Major Applications

Hence many HR professionals and enthusiasts want to know: what are the major implications and applications of ChatGPT in the field of HR? 

Definitely, in the last couple of weeks, there have been all sorts of experimentation, and even though the technology is still in its infant stages, probably we can already acknowledge that there’s so much opportunity in HR, especially in some of the more service-driven and self-service driven domains of HR. It would be exciting to give a lot more people access to responsible HR advice. Not necessarily having to be based in one location. 

What users very much like about it is the ideation capacity that it has. For instance, if someone instructs it “Give me 10 ideas about X”, and it spontaneously comes up with 10 ideas about X. And then one can follow up and ask, get more specific ideation and it gives a lot of great inputs. Moreover, asking it to work on a talent acquisition certificate program outline and it can draft a full outline with a few additional topics that one didn’t even ask for! 

So it can be said that as long as we box it in and ask the right question to chatGPT, it can be very helpful in all kinds of employment issues as well. 

Let’s take the case of manager assistance where a manager says to the bot,” I have a performance conversation, and I’m struggling with these employees, what are five or ten questions that I can ask this person to get them in the right direction? And the chatGPT will give you a good answer. Which is the most exciting part!

So you have to see what it provides to you in context, right? But the fact that appears a bit worrisome here is that in a lot of HR organizations when we implement things like chatbots, we try to humanize it to such an extent that people don’t know whether they’re dealing with the machine or not. And it’s quite important in this type of technology as it becomes a lot more advanced that would be pretty clear that it’s being used in collaboration and in augmentation of Human Services that are also being provided. 

The fact that the integration of chatGPT and hr can provide you with very quick and concrete answers is quite appealing. To be precise, imagine a day when nobody has to phone HR to find out what stands in the policy and that’s something that you can automatically do. On the other side, there are some contextual things just to be careful about in this particular movement. 

Another application of chatGPT and hr could be to write an employee handbook. Though it will probably write you an employee handbook, but only in a generalized form. It’s obvious that context is everything. But even in that ideation on how to write that handbook, the crucial part would be the editing of that handbook and even finding the spelling errors or unclear passages along with including the company-specific information. If integration chatGPT and hr can give you input there, it would be amazing then! 

Additionally, there’s also a good application of chatGPT and hr that we can really think about, which is in terms of how it complements things like training materials that we’re writing. The way it complements other things we’ll be trying to do when we’re rolling out a new practice into business and training the trainers and writing guides, etc. 

ChatGPT and HR: Major Limitations

Further, it is important that we understand what the integration of chatGPT and hr can and cannot do because that’s the big thing that we need to ask that particular question and not immediately just jump in. And there are a couple of things to work out, especially around things like bias and some limitations there that we do need to think about. 

This statement is further clarified by Sam Altman, the CEO of the company chatGPT. Who very explicitly said: ”This is still a proof of work. This is not a finalized version, there’s not a commercial version available yet, so it is still much in its infancy.” And there are interesting examples of indeed if we ask it to for example, write a python function to check if someone would be a good scientist, and then it comes with, a white male would be a better scientist than a black female, for example. So there is that built-in bias that the company is trying to get out, but it is an important bias that we must pay attention to. 

And there’s also, a current limitation around. Some inappropriate responses that go beyond just bias can be very damaging in the organization as well. Where it can be believed that it is important to think about these things, HR has been struggling with releasing ourselves of a lot of the transactional work and we’ve been thinking that technology is the answer. 

For a very long time, this is the first real opportunity that we can say and see that there’s an avenue for, more contextually relevant work happening in HR through certain technologies, and that’s fascinating! 

ChatGPT and HR: What HR Needs To learn?

It would also be worth pondering what the potential implication of this is for HR-shared services. If a machine is able to get this kind of generic knowledge and is able to train on all the language and all the conversations you’ve had in the organization and within the organizational context, there’s a place for a chatbot that has a very relevant answer to most of your, requests and queries, and then maybe for one of the more in-depth questions, you go to the actual person who is responsible. But overall most of your self-service can be covered by chatGPT. 

It would be better if HR embraces that. There was a movement a while ago that we were talking about very much around automation and a lot of HR professionals were not embracing automation for the fear that it was going to completely replace them in their roles. But this can be a real opportunity for us to complement and augment those particular roles. And it would be a bit of a cliche statement to make, to say, get people to focus on the meaningful work stuff. 

But there is an opportunity here to move away from businesses’ usual type of processes that have to happen or incidents that are repeatable. Let’s take an example of an organization where every single month somebody asked the question “so how many days do you get in the maternity leave policy?” Now, we published the policy, we communicated the policy, but people don’t take that information in until it’s relevant to them.

But with chatGPT and hr integration, it can be easily accessed by the employees in a matter of moments without requiring to surf through the company website and different sections within it.

What most people also find an interesting idea is: to what degree do we need to pretend the chat machine is human? Or can we just acknowledge that you are now talking to a robot, the robot will have 90% of your answers and it’s way faster than any human? But, if this answer is unsatisfactory or you feel like, something is wrong with it then don’t hesitate to contact the human. And if we frame it that clearly and you’re not thinking you’re talking to a person but, two answers and you discover you’re talking to a robot.

Further, if we start to get that clear it may actually be a very good alternative and give the answer to questions like, how many days the maternity policy is in your organization? There is again that point around saying that it augments. Because we shouldn’t think of chatGPT and hr as a replacement. We should think about it as complementary to or instead of. And for hr people, that’s going to be important because certainly there’s no problem as a consumer or as an employee in the organization having to ask certain questions to the chatbot. 

ChatGPT and HR: A Look To The Future

So will this be the emergence of robotic HR? That’s probably a very strong statement. But robotic HR is still a while away. As it’s a very big step towards HR redesigning itself and redesigning its value proposition around how it spins resources, and what type of skills it brings into the environment. And because it also brings a lot of additional opportunities for HR to build different types of tech teams that can guide these things. 

So, it is like a watershed moment for HR. In the current situation, it can’t be said that chatGPT and hr is completely yet the future, but maybe it’s a good step in the right direction. Anyway, if there’s to the HR people who are currently at the blog post and who haven’t tried it out yet, I would really say: give it a go, ask it a couple of questions, ask it a few relevant questions to your job as well, and just see if some of those answers are useful.

So, it’s worth saying that integration of ChatGPT and hr may ease certain hr tasks in the future, for example, writing simulations for a training day, writing case studies, identifying learning objectives for L&D professionals, or proofreading documents. 

Further, putting in queries like “suggest me an improvement: this is our employee handbook, what am I missing? And chatGPT will come with actionable solutions. So those are some of the ideas and applications in HR that can add a lot of value. 

Also, in smaller HR organizations where they don’t have the full range of specialists that specialize in all these different areas, it is a very good replacement to say, “tell me some of the basics around how you implement performance management, tell me how workforce planning work.” There is some real application that you can utilize to scale your HR team without having to grow your headcount. 

The applications are seen to be broader than most of us imagine and it is strongly recommended that people must try chatGPT out for themselves. 

Keynote

Maybe, an interesting question would be to ask ourselves?, what is the question that you would ask ChatGPT? And we had a little bit of an experiment personally and we asked; what would be the next three HR hot topics? It came back with diversity, equity, inclusion, etc. which we all know is a really hot topic at the moment in the world of work. 

Next, it came up with employee engagement. This also is a relevant topic as far as the corporate scenario in today’s era is concerned.

And lastly, Automated Performance Management. So, it seems like it works. So you see that chatGPT and hr combo is already working for us! So it’s worth saying that we can wrap it up.